OMC: Some of your best shows have been those where you've played James Brown's "Ants in My Pants" for 20 minutes. When you first came up, I don't imagine you were really into the idea of 20-minute songs.

PC: You go with the audience, you go with the band. You go with the groove and follow it down. You listen to a live James Brown album, a certain one, he'll go forever on something. At the same time, you got the anti-Grateful Dead police in your head saying, "Don't be self-indulgent. Don't stretch out with nothing to say." Part of that is an experimental attitude toward performance. You're bound to have some chaff if you let the old flag fly for a long time.

OMC: The experimentally inclined Violent Femmes are contemporaries of yours.

PC: I actually used to give them opening gigs. I was playing before they were playing.

OMC: What, if anything, do you have in common?

PC: We've walked on some of the same sidewalk squares, I think. I think that Gordon's writing is awake, his mind is pretty alive and all over the material in a particularly pleasant manner. He's got a playful mind, and that grabbed me right away when I saw him the first time.

OMC: What's so great about Milwaukee? Why on earth would you call your band the Milwaukeeans?

PC: It was chosen in a playful spirit. I was going to New York. John Zorn had set me up in a little performance place in SoHo and I had to have a name. It was either going to be Paul Cebar and Friends or I was going to try and think of something that was suitably exotic. I started thinking that one of the first things people do when they go from the Midwest to New York, is to try to say, "I'm, of course, a Gothamite, not a Midwesterner."

Zorn was like, "You got a half hour. Tell me what you want me to call you." So I told him, "Oh, call me the Milwaukeeans." And the idea of owning up to it! The Indian word [Milwaukee] means "where the waters meet" or it means "suck hole." So you can take it either way: it's the guys from the suck hole or it's the people from the place where the waters meet. I think that in my little liberal arts-educational mind, that the place where the waters meet is not a bad metaphor for what we're doing musically.

OMC: You're a word fiend, noticeably so when one looks at your lyric sheets. In live shows, your ideas are more dispersed amidst the din.

PC: It's a challenge to communicate clearly. Part of it is that I have a respect for spoken language and then also for sung language and melodramatic expression that leaves sense behind occasionally. And it is at war with the kind of sense I'm trying to make sometimes. I think, in the live context, it's a challenge to communicate the lingo.

OMC: You have been know to exhibit humor.

PC: In terms of music, I'm an anti-joke, pro-humor guy. I'm not a big fan of joking music or of parody or things of that sort. I can respect it and I'll listen to it once, but something that has actual humor, that actually has some sort of displacement of sense, can captivate me and be something that I'll live with for a while. It's what I admire about Nick Lowe's work or John Hiatt's work.

OMC: If you had unlimited money to spend in the studio, would you do anything differently?

PC: I would like to be able to explore a full horn section, three horns á la New Orleans or Stax or Motown, for that matter.

OMC: Do you look at your music as like a stew or a gumbo, or like a discipline or school?

PC: I'm trying to be both Gerry Goffin and the Shirelles. That's what I'm aiming at. And there are some conflicts there. I'm a male and I'm not the Shirelles. I'm not trying to simply go through the same motions and achieve a similar product. I'm trying to put some kind of twist on traditions that I admire, and certain kind of groove families, if you want to talk about that.

At the same time, I'm trying to be that emotional interpreter of that stuff, so that I can bring it to life to people and maybe be part of somebody's lovemaking at some point.

OMC: A while back I interviewed the great novelist Nathan Heard. I asked him if he was optimistic about the future of male-female relationships. He said, "What else is there?" Can you say he's wrong?

PC: Sun Ra had the rather indelicate way of talking about "p*ssy-and-d*ck music," and that he didn't do that, although he had his share of I'll-wait-for-yous and If-not-for-mes and But-not-for-mes. He had a sense that there were other things to write about.

And there's always been a tradition in music to say that music's not about anything. There are a lot of people who are doctrinaire: "Music is music, and I'll continue dealing with music under music's terms."

I obviously buy into pop music in some way, shape or form. I've spent enough hours with Smokey Robinson and Lee Dorsey and Allen Toussaint and Calypso Rose that I have a respect for that. I think what most music is about is the character of lovers and the situation of very particular lovers and what that says about those people and other people that are standing outside looking over the fence.

OMC: So can a spiritual song be a political song be a love song?

PC: Well, of course. Bob Marley! Of course.

OMC: What do you gravitate to in your listening?

PC: My view of things has exploded at this point. There are so many things. If I start saying I like to listen to very, very honest, emotional music, I could also tell you that I listen to very contrived, commercialized, ironic activities.

I would say in my own work I aspire to that kind of plain-spoken thing that Arthur Alexander had or that even Ry Cooder, in his reinterpretation of Arthur Alexander, had, or that Joni Mitchell achieves, that sounds offhand, sounds matter-of-fact, sounds spoken, and sounds honest and straightforward. Yet, by twisting language and communicating in an indirect manner or in a metaphoric manner you might suggest other dimensions to that speaker. That speaker might be me; it might be somebody I'm conjuring up.

When I talk about music of lovers, letting one describe one's love in the way one describes it lets you know who that lover is. It's insight into human character that I'm interested in.

OMC: In "Staying Up Late," you describe in poignant detail a fellow who's helpless after the woman is gone: "He's down to his last t-shirt." "He's eaten his way through the cupboard." It reminds me of a Larry Brown story. It must have been strange territory for you, as you've been a pretty stable guy. You're more than just a Sixty-Minute Man.

PC: Well, I've seen enough of it. I've seen people live through that kind of stuff, and I've lived through my share of it. I admire people like Larry Brown, I admire Charlie Smith, I admire Michael Ondaatje and Zora Hurston. I'm reading a lot and pretty widely.

I get different things from different writers, and a lot of that just has to do with keeping language going through. I had one friend of mine that advised me to just keep language, run language through your head -- you know, almost a computer metaphor of "keep your screen busy."

OMC: Keep language alive, like Bootsy keeps the funk.

PC: You'll play with it then. Your play will be that much freer and that much more encompassing or involving. The height of Chuck Berry's achievement is detail and telling detail and suggesting a whole picture by detail. {With] "Staying Up Late" I was just going at [that]. I had one friend who literally started staying up late after his wife left him. And I just tried to imagine what that was about, what would fill those hours and what would fill that time, what that would mean.