Interview
Stuck In A Lift
Creed Bratton wouldn’t be here without Frank Sinatra
Shooting the breeze with the unlikely star of The Office, singer, comedian and inventor of rare serial killer names
“Sometimes you’ve just got to let the cosmic algorithm take over”. As 81-year-old Creed Bratton looks back on his life he sees a tough childhood, a freewheeling folk rock career, a few decades in the wilderness, then fame again as a fan-favourite actor on all nine seasons of The Office. There are memories of hitchhiking around the Sahara in the 60s. Touring with The Doors. Hopping freighters in Venice. T-shirts and Funko Pops with his face on them. If some of it sounds made up, some of it might be – there’s even some kind of odd mystery surrounding his real name – but Bratton also feels more genuine than most.
“I’m a lucky guy, Stuart,” Bratton says over Zoom, getting my name wrong consistently for the next half an hour. “I’d struggled for years after being successful in my 20s. And then I got a second life. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have goals. I’ve always wanted to just be a successful working character actor – I didn’t want to be a star. I just wanted to be able to walk on a stage and have my peers say, ‘oh, he delivered the goods’. I used to think the be-all and end-all was to be a guitar player – to be able to jump on stage with any band and just fit in. But the camera and the audience is basically the same thing, and so is everything else in life I guess.”
Which brings us back to that cosmic algorithm. Now touring his tenth studio album, Tao Pop, Bratton found inspiration in a meditative vision he had after reading The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil.
“I saw Creed – I talk about myself in the third person – as the last human being left on the planet,” he explains, talking through an album cover that shows an illustration of himself being handed a metal baby by two robot parents. “He’s worked out some kind of a long con with the artificial intelligence. So he’s going to take that baby and he’s going to plug that little USB umbilical cord into his head and the baby’s going to blink, a little siren is going to go off, and he’s going to go, ‘thank you, grandpa’.”
From there we somehow get an album full of jazz, folk, pop, lounge, bluegrass and psychedelia – part Randy Newman, part James Taylor, all Creed Bratton. “I listen to jazz and classical, East African and West African music, rudimentary rock, marching band music…”, he says. “I have no style. I’m a musician without a country. A potpourri. A musical stew.”
If you’re looking for something more focussed on Tao Pop, you’ll find the closest thing to it on lead single ‘Corner Of The Universe’ – a sunny sing-a-long anthem about us all learning to beat the climate crisis, and a testament to Bratton’s enduring power of optimism.
“There’s a chance we’re doing something right isn’t there?” he laughs. “People are going to get together and there’s going to be a paradigm shift in the consciousness of the world, and we’ll heal ourselves, right? Yeah, I know, the cheque’s in the mail! But we have to think like that. At least I do, Stuart.”
Before Bratton brings Tao Pop to UK stages next month – in a tour mixing music, comedy and a fair few odd anecdotes – we sat down to ask him the big questions.
Who would you most like to be stuck in a lift with?
Ricky Gervais. I’d like to ask him, ‘how the hell did you do this to me?’. Hopefully he’s in the lift with a dog too. I’d like to pet his dog.
Who would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?
They say you should know your enemies, so it could be a good thing to be stuck with someone you don’t like. So I’d probably say… Hitler. I’d like to pick his brain on all that mind control stuff.
What’s the weirdest interaction you’ve ever had with a famous person?
I was on a movie called Cast A Giant Shadow in 1964, in Israel, and I was playing a British soldier. I was there with the folk troupe I was in at the time called The Young Californians, and Frank Sinatra was there getting ready to shoot a scene. This is surreal, but Sinatra looks over, he sees me, and he gets this little scowl. What’s going on? He starts walking towards me, really slowly, just staring at me. What the hell? This is Ol’ Blue Eyes. He comes up to me in the nicest, calmest way and he goes, ‘Hey, kid. That board you’re leaning on is about to explode and you might lose a hand or a head… So maybe you want to take a few steps this way…” It turns out I’m leaning against this wooden board full of explosive squibs – the special effects they use to show gunshots in the movies. So now when I hear Sinatra sing ‘That’s Life’, I think he’s singing about mine.
That was a Kirk Douglas movie wasn’t it?
Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson. Mel Shavelson was the director on that film and I fell in love with his daughter. When the movie was over, we went off to the Greek islands and had this wonderful romantic affair. It was one of those summers spent basking in the Mediterranean, riding around on Vespas, eating calamari and drinking wine. Life was good!
What was the last gig or show that you went to?
Last night I went up to Herb Alpert’s club in Bel Air, the Vibrato. And I saw my dear friend Tim Hockenberry, who I play with about every month down at The Baked Potato. And of course, Tim played on ‘Chip In My Brain’ and ‘Corner Of The Universe’. He first saw my show at the San Juan Capistrano and we just hit it off. He liked my music. I think he’s a genius. He played on one of my past albums, Temptation Eyes, and he played trombone on a Grass Roots song. So anyway he was up there last night and it was just a wonderful night of music. I sat there and I had a lovely halibut and a beat salad and listened to some amazing music and I thought, ‘life is good’, you know?
What’s on your rider?
Don’t look me in the eye. Once we’ve got the mix – I bring my own vocal processor and my guitar thing – once I give you my sound, don’t f*ck with it. You know, sound engineers want to keep their fingers looking busy, but LEAVE IT ALONE. But that’s it. No brown M&Ms or fluffers or anything, I don’t need any of that stuff. Although I guess the occasional fluffer before a show will be okay.
What happens if someone does look you in the eye before a show?
I’ll chastise them. I’m 81, how rough can I get?
What did the 12-year-old you imagine you’d be doing now?
I thought I might be still up in the mountains by Yosemite, or maybe if I was lucky I’d move to the big city of Fresno and be a veterinarian.
You wanted to be a vet?
Yeah but I left that dream behind soon enough once I started doing plays in school and onece I started playing the trumpet and the guitar. Basically as soon as I had girls come up to me and say, ‘We really like the part you played in that play’.
Rockstars get more girls than vets, right?
Come on, let’s be honest – it’s all about the birds.
What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?
I could tell you right now, it was from my sister-in-law, my wife’s sister. We were sitting out on Sunset Strip, and this is before the music took off, and I told her that I had this vision that I was going to be very successful in Europe. I saw it very clearly, like a Gestalt thing. Boom. I saw it. And told her this is what I was going to do. And she starts telling me the percentage of people that make it… she’s telling me to have a Plan B, to forget about it. And all of sudden – I can remember this clearly – her voice is fading out and it just goes, “blah blah blah”. I just put a gauze over her mouth, in my mind. People will always try and talk you out of your dreams. But if you have something that you love, something that puts the light in your eye, then you stick with it.
Which film have you rewatched the most times?
I’ve watched The Propostion, an Australian Western, over and over again. Also Big Night, with Stanley Tucci.
Those two films couldn’t really be more different…
Absolutely. Big Night is very low key the movie that just touches my heart. It’s a perfect film. There are so many wonderful performances. There’s no bloodshed. That movie just gets me Stuart.
Right, and The Proposition is one of the bleakest, most violent films around.
I have a very dark side to me. That’ll happen when you’re waterboarded at age five… [laughs] But it’s a beautiful film. It’s a movie about genocide and that’s a tough, tough subject. But I think, as humans, we can’t forget this stuff. It’s a good question though – one of my most watched films is this sweet, wonderful, light, serendipitous movie, and the other is this dark thing full of rape and murder and savagery. I’m gonna have to start thinking this through with my therapist.
What’s your most controversial food opinion?
Well, I had to eat lima beans as a child. My stepdad would literally force me to eat them with a strap. So I guess you can get into something there about why I write songs the way I do, but I hated lima beans. And then, a while back, I hadn’t eaten them for years and I was at a nice restaurant and the lady I was with asked me what my deal was with them, and asked me to try one. They were delicious. Top notch. I jumped from there to fava beans and… oh boy, Hannibal Lecter was right!
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I’d left The Grass Roots and I needed money, so I answered a call to play lead guitar with an Elvis impersonator. We met in Bakersfield, California, and already it’s the worst. You have an equivalent of Bakersfield in the UK I’m sure, but Bakersfield is like… the dredges. We went to The Holiday Inn to play and I’m getting ready. I had my little Guild Bluesbird and I had my hands on a Fender Tweed, so I had a really nice, sweet, dirty sound. It was warm, fuzzy, broken up; just enough – and I was ready. We started out the set with ‘Burning Love’. Well now, I hadn’t seen the entertainer in his regalia, and he suddenly comes out in a tight white Las Vegas suit with a cape, and he’s got the microphone stuffed down in his pants like a codpiece. He’s dancing his hips around, and then he slowly pulls the mic out of his pants, and he licks his lips lasciviously, slowly looking at the old women the audience… and then he and he starts singing “hunka, hunka, hunka burning love”, and I just lose it. I start laughing uncontrollable. He looks at me and I’m just in hysterics. It was the funniest and the most horrific thing ever – just sleazy, depraved and just everything that I hate in music. I got fired.
What’s the skill that no one else knows that you’re great at?
I invent serial killer names.
Okay.
[Takes out his phone and starts scrolling through his Notes app] This might take a little time here… Okay, here we go. Packer Yugoni. Bobby Bellatto. Fred Zeppelin.
I’m confused.
I take it back, they’re not serial killers, they’re hitmen. For some reason I like to walk around and think of good hitman names and then I write them down. Menard Supposi… Derek Slab… I’ve got hundreds of them. Who do we call to kill the guy? Keegan Bishop!
An Evening Of Music & Comedy With Creed Bratton tours the UK this October. Find tickets here
