Contributed by Mike Guzaski (@312mrg)
Chicago experienced a typically loaded Spring weekend over the 4/20 "holiday". Highlights included Greyboy All Stars and Funky Meters holding court on Friday, and Jim James bringing his show to the Vic. But the clubs had some worthwhile shows as well, and Animal Liberation Orchestra gave Double Door denizens a little taste of what's happening in the West Coast jam scene. Prior to the show, I got a chance to sit down with keyboardist / vocalist / ukeleke player and all-around stage performer Zach Gill. The band is currently touring to support their 7th album Sounds Like This. Zach's accessible and welcoming personality comes through quite clear in this far-ranging and thoughtful conversation that touches on their most representative recording effort to date, the science of setlists, segues and influences like Phish, Grateful Dead and the late great James Brown.
MG: On Sounds Like This, it feels like you guys went in with the specific intent to stretch it out a little bit.
ZG: We have a side of the band that is pretty poppy and accessible and then we have a side of the band that likes to invent musical adventures, and so it’s always a tricky a blend. When the radio people say we need a 3 minute hook, we can kind of go that way... we were kind of chasing that a little. But with this last one, we asked ourselves "what if we made whatever we made and didn’t worry about that aspect of it at all?"
MG: And did that come from confidence?
ZG: Yeah a little bit from confidence, a little bit from seeing the pop music industry tank anyway….and why chase? Music is a powerful thing for me. I come from a musical family. Like a lot of things, I believe music has become a commodity. It’s traded, so it’s such an easy thing for people to say "I like this... I don’t like that", and its easy for the magic to be taken out of it. But this thing is amazing, certain rhythms can make people dance…certain chords can make people sad -- that’s fully magical. Over time, you can get used to it and the spell gets broken, so with Sounds Like This, we wanted to get back to the stuff that feels good and natural to us, and not worry so much about the commodity aspect of it. We'd figure that out on the back end. Let’s just make something that feels really good.
I listened to the new Justin Timberlake album, but the only review I read of it was that there was a 7 minute song on there and in parentheses is said "TOO LONG! "and I was like: why? In a Silent Way, one of my favorite albums by Miles Davis has 2 songs on it, and they are both like 20 minutes long! So with this album, it can be so much more than digestible 3 minute songs. Though I love that too…the pop song format is a wonderful way to unify people…
MG: Setlists are a huge attraction for me and the "science" behind them appeals to me. What’s the creative process for coming up with the night's set? Do you use data or memory to come up with it?
ZG: We have a huge Google Doc with every show that we’ve ever played in Chicago, so we know what we played the last time we were here, we also try to keep tabs with how many people are coming from other cities….you want to create a unique show every night. It's a tricky situation we’re in because we don’t tour that much, so there’s always the songs you feel you might have to play, just because there’s the people that come once a year, wanting those. Maybe there’s the newest songs on the album you’re really excited about, so we’re always trying to balance that. Tonight we’re only playing one long set because Ryan’s (Montbleau) doing a full set too, so that changes things. It’d be great to get every guy in the band to sing 1 or 2 songs, and then it would be great to do some requests, and then there's what we feel like playing -- so it’s a whole balancing act. Then there’s technical aspects of it -- finding songs that really work nicely together and getting a nice flow going…and this one goes into that one…
MG: So do you go into it with a loose idea of what you want and during the course of a jam or a show you change directions?
ZG: Do you mean every night?
MG: Maybe in the midst of a show?
ZG: Yeah, you know sometimes… we went through our beginnings of being anti-setlist, that we’d wing it, and that led to some amazing stuff. It’s funny... I was just reading that Grateful Dead Rolling Stone Issue and it's got all their articles and there’s an interview where it’s talking about “You guys flopped last night at the Benefit", and Jerry’s owning up to it, “Yeah you know it just never came together we just went out there and couldn’t get it going, I stand behind it, it’s what we did”, and you know those guys were courageous like that…and I think Phish is courageous like that, but seem a little more like they’ve actually worked it out.
MG: Speaking of setlists, segues are another another draw of the typical fan, and you guys blend and get into one song from another quite well. I love the little segue on a setlist and understanding the journey of getting there... how it developed, how it began to crystallize and then the landing point is like this enthusiastic exclamation point. Do you try to define a loose segue structure like out a song like "Barbecue"? I was listening to a "Barbecue" where "1999" appeared organically out of nowhere…
ZG: That’s interesting because "Barbecue" is one that has lots of points where we have went to so many different songs from it. Usually the first time it happens, we just accidentally get there and it’s pretty exciting! I remember, one time out of "Barbecue" we got into "Eye of the Tiger", and we were in Philly, so maybe it was part of that, and somehow it was awesome and it's happening and for a long time we just kept putting it in and it was so fun. Then at some point we stopped because we don’t want to make it a gimmick because then the magic starts to leave it if it feels too much like schtick. Then on New Year’s Eve "1999" just found its way in accidentally…and then recently you know the one that keeps coming into Barbecue is "Baba O’Riley" and it came in for an second in Chico, and we were like this could be really cool, but there’s some parts we needed to learn.
With that kind of stuff, it’s how loose do you feel comfortable with? In certain contexts -- like Las Tortugas, a small intimate mountain festival where you know you could do no wrong -- people aren’t driving anywhere and there are two full days where we can get as creative as we want to get. I really like that, especially because that can be an exploratory time. Sometimes in a club they put you on a tight timeline -- you gotta be out of there by this time, and it really stops the energy, it’s nice when you have a plethora of time. I think especially for the jam scene.
We can do the sweat set thing. I was just reading where Bob Weir said he's been able to curve their jams. It is understanding where you need to curtail and restrain.
MG: Sitting down with you, I feel I can now stake claim to two degrees of separation with James Brown…
ZG: YEAH!
MG: …I find it really remarkable that a life of a musician and following their craft forces them to take a lot of risk, either musically on stage, with musical styles, and in your case leaving California for Augusta, GA in order to meet James Brown.
ZG: It was easy because it was such a fun adventure at the time. You know Dave’s old girlfriend was a back up singer in James Brown's band at the time, and she was like “You all oughta come out to Georgia, they’d love you out here”, that was like the big summer: 1996. My whole world sort of turned upside down, and I sorta became the guy I am today, the musician. I shed a lot of stuff from high school, like even ideas about music. My hair grew long, my beard grew out…and the thing that was interesting about that time was that the jam band scene was really becoming a thing. We had seen Phish come play the small place on campus (UCSB) and then a year and a half later they were playing the Thunderdome, and Jerry had recently died…and I got Phish, and they were music students and in the same way I was... just lovers of music, and they were making their own brand of it and open to all sorts of things.
We were in school learning about all these different styles, and taking them all really seriously…and in this place of digesting all this music. So in that summer of '96, which was a very hands on time, we didn’t have a large following and we booked that tour, we did it all ourselves. We were still called Django, but Dave had joined the band. We didn’t have a large following in California, we had just moved out there. We wrote a ton of the songs that are in the set today.
We lived in Georgia. We took mushrooms. We played in this bar called the Highlander where we’d start at midnight and we played til dawn. All the other bars would close down and people would like swim in and out and all sorts of trippy characters showed up. We just had a great time.
Simultaneously, we started getting our little jamband immersion, developing relationships with young bands and people in the scene. We were also going to see James Brown all the time and he’s got this sweat set aesthethic. At that time we definitely had the aesthetic of the Grateful Dead. Where we were from, Isla Vista, we’d stop between songs and just started talking... endless banter, no setlist. The scene we were coming from in Isla Vista was such a party, we played long 4 hour sets.
Once we got to Georgia we were playing at bars with the same mentality, and we were seeing James Brown. He’s got everything on cues, nothing is left to chance. So his lawyer came to see us one night, because there was this buzz starting to build in Augusta. He walks up, and we were in this bar and was like "you guys are good, but what is going on?… you just take so long between songs, you gotta do what Mr. Brown does, he does the sweat set!"
So he lectured us about the sweat set and we took it to heart, to try to become more like James. Interestingly, simultaneously the jam scene changed, developing a funky sound. Phish was doing their proggy thing in that time before they got really funky. We were building a style that was like “let's get funky” before that ever really hit the jam scene. We were close with Galactic and they were all on the same page, the Greyboy All-Stars were a little bit older than us, but they were on the same path before the jam scene developed that funk angle.
MG: I love this collection of bands in this scene. From small conversations on the side of the stage after a show, seeing a band member walking through the crowd before or after they play…the thing about this scene that you are very much a part of is the community…the welcoming nature of the musicians and fans. Its accessible in so many different aspects. It’s like it’s a ritual…a wedding…
ZG: It is a ritual, a conversation… its like the old communion. Music has always been the ceremonial thing…it’s not album sales. It’s about the party. It’s an adventure. That’s what gets me excited about this…it's not getting stuck in any frozen thing.
