Vincent Gallo is not out to become a rock star. Actually, if it ever looked like that was gonna happen, he’d probably kill himself. Being a rock god is just not on his agenda, which is a conspicuous absence given what’s already on his CV — giving intense performances in films by Emir Kusturica, Claire Denis and Abel Ferrara, making two utterly idiosyncratic features with Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny, and offering his sexual services to female admirers for the fee of $50,000. (It’s a bargain if you consider he tried to sell his sperm for $1,000,000 before eBay cancelled the auction.)

Whether you love him for being one of the most iconoclastic talents of our age or loathe him for being a showboating scuzzbag whose only true claim to fame is convincing Chloë Sevigny to fellate him onscreen, you gotta admit that Gallo is a man of many passions. Music has always been one of them — he owns over 15,000 albums and has played in bands since he was an 11-year-old Beatles and prog-rock nut living in deepest, darkest Buffalo.

Nevertheless, the news that the 45-year-old New Yorker has hit the road with RRIICCEE, an improv-based musical project featuring ex-Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, could be interpreted as the latest bid by a thespian to extend his renown into the music world, a very dodgy tradition that includes Keanu Reeves’ role as bassist in Dogstar, Jared Leto’s preening antics in 30 Seconds to Mars and Jada Pinkett Smith’s curiously little-known turn as a metal queen in Wicked Wisdom.
But in a conversation over the phone from Atlanta — where RRIICCEE was to perform its third-ever show — Gallo is emphatic and eloquent on the topic of what he doesn’t want to do, a lot of which stems from the nights he spent seeing shows with his friend Rick Rubin. “Rick has a lot of pull in the music business for reasons I don’t completely understand,” says Gallo. “He’s a really lazy person — he likes to be able to walk right in. He doesn’t like to be confronted, he doesn’t want to go to will call — he just wants to go to the side of the stage, see one song and then we would leave. Even when we went to Coachella, we would get a private plane and fly in to see one band.

“So I spent all this time watching bands from the side of the stage. And when you see bands like that, you can see something transparent in them. You can see the part of them that’s sincere and the part that’s not sincere. You see the part of them that’s really connected with one another and the part that’s just a put-on. From the audience’s point of view, you can be fooled, but from the side of the stage, you can see how ridiculous it is to play your same song the same way, night after night after night. And the only thing that the band gets off on is this microcosmic minutiae that they’ve decided is the difference between a great show and a shitty show. Watching shows like this made it all seem ridiculous and really embarrassing.”

In Gallo’s view, the emphasis that the music business places on repetition and replication is anathema not just to artistic development but to the possibility of beauty and transcendence. A musician has to go out and perform his or her music in much the same way every time without fail in a variety of often-trying contexts. If they’re lucky, they may get a hit record for their troubles, and then they have to do it all over again on a bigger scale. Gallo describes this interminable cycle with a palpable agony. “I never wanted to become part of something like that,” he says. “I once saw Paul McCartney play two shows in San Francisco and he did the same joke both nights. It was so painful.”

Though the movie biz is where Gallo has achieved the most recognition, his music career is nothing if not varied. After running away to New York City as a teenager, he played in several No Wave bands (including Gray, alongside soon-to-be famous artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) and did rap shows under the moniker Prince Vince. In 2001, he released When, the first of two releases for Warp that showcased his surprisingly delicate musical compositions and tender, Chet Baker–like vocals. In recent years, he’s played live with his friends John Frusciante and Sean Lennon (he and Lennon also recorded an unreleased album called At Home).

But as Gallo admits, “I’ve never done a tour in my life.” Even back in the days of Gray, he viewed performances as one-off events. RRIICCEE is a whole other bag. For one thing, the project does entail a tour, though Gallo doesn’t mind the long drives. “I drive cross-country five times a year for no reason,” he says cryptically. For another, Gallo — who sings and plays guitar, bass, melodica and Mellotron — and his three collaborators aim to “pick compositions out of the sky, organize them and play them,” with the results never to be repeated. (He dislikes the term “improvisation” because he believes it connotes “solos and self-glorification” rather than collective creation.)

“What’s motivated me to take the group on the road,” he says, “was to see if we can play multiple shows in places where we had to rethink the sound, rethink the environment and play to an audience with zero familiarity with what we were doing. To do it night after night was part of what appealed to me. To do a one-off show was pretty easy.”

Moreover, he believes that the musicians’ occasional moments of struggle are essential to the whole. “There were a couple of awkward moments in the second show, maybe 5 or 10 minutes when things were not coming together. And we were on stage in front of a few hundred people watching us intently and it was not happening at all. Then it started to happen in a way that was so unexpected and so much further connected than we’d ever gone before. That was pretty spectacular.”

As for what it sounds like, he promises “more of a dynamic range” than was heard on When. As for whether this tour will result in an album, he’s still waiting to see whether recording becomes part of RRIICCEE’s still-­developing artistic process. Whether all this is the most egregious wankery is for you to decide.

What matters to Gallo now, and what’s always mattered, is how best to serve his creative impulses. And though it’s surprising hearing this from a guy whose work sometimes smacks of narcissism — a charge he often heard upon the release of The Brown Bunny, a film that was remarkable for reasons other than the blow job — he expresses a longing to obliterate his ego in his quest to add some beauty to the world. He wants it so badly, he even looks forward to his own demise.

“This’ll happen soon,” he says. “I’m already 45 — I could drop at any minute. And I have no family, no kids, no foundation — there’s nothing. So when people see some of the work that I did soon after my death, they won’t associate it with me. They’ll be able to get past whatever it is I bring out of them, whatever hate they have for me or suspicion they have about why I make things — that won’t mean anything any more. If whatever I did is better than me, better than my ego and my intelligence, then it’ll continue to be part of a vocabulary that will help people to understand things. It’ll go on. If not, it’ll just go away. The portion of it that’s attached to me is meaningless.” 

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