RT- Do you listen to much of current techno stuff?

JG- I don’t listen to that much music right now. It has to do with two things. First, I am trying to put in a lot of music so I want to keep my concentration on the music we’re inventing. The other thing is I have two stereo systems and then we have one in the van so those are the only three stereo systems I ever listen to and they all sound like shit. The van one sounds like crap and the two in my room sound like crap, and if you up them together in all the combinations, and I’ve tried them all, they all sound like crap.

RT- It seems like the band is just starting to move into some nicer rooms, how have you responded from a musical standpoint?

JG- I don’t like to move into a bigger club until we can play bigger than that club consistently. So now we’re just going to search out the nice sound systems around the country and move to them. Of course those rooms don’t want you to come until you can bring people in, but lately more and more people having been coming out to see us which is great because my job becomes twice as much fun as it was before. The people get to hear a better show as well so it works out for everybody.

RT- As you move into larger rooms how do you strike the balance between those fans familiar with your materials who want the big jam songs and the newer listeners who might be interested in hearing a few more shorter songs?

JG- I’ll tell you, even the biggest jam freaks can suffer from overjam, and even the band can suffer from overjam. It’s sort of like being on a football team and the jam is the running back. The jam is really what’s going to plow people and you know that and it’s good. But there are other songs that you write and there are melodies and grooves in those songs and these are also things that we’ve created and we’re proud of. You just don’t want to play “Basis” at every gig and jam it for 45 minutes, although we did that for a year. What we learned was that sometimes people want to take a breather and have a beer and talk to a friend. Also, if for some reason they reject the jam like a heart implant then they’re going to leave. Also, the band can’t jam at that intensity all night long or else it levels off. The right thing to do is to design the sets so that when the band is going to hit a point of big intensity there happens to be a really hard jam song there and it works out. So I subscribe to the hump theory of set design, which is like an opera where they’ll give you a huge climax song and then you’ll get an aria and then maybe a comedic tune and then maybe a serious song and then you’ll get a climax again. The set has to work the same way. Of course there are lots of hump theories- recently we’ve been doing big hump in the middle and then a very long taper at the end.

At the same time, we don’t approach the jam in an “I’ll follow you, you follow me” theory. We don’t approach it in an “I’ll play this, you play these chords.” There’s no set chord progressions or anything. We don’t approach any of the jams from any perspective where anybody can just lay back and maybe tune out. Each of us becomes an active participant. When we play the places we do now we can hear reach other perfectly. In fact the sound is bouncing off the walls so I hear Magner now and I hear him five seconds later as well. A lot of bands jam over chord progressions. We like to save them and drop them in and use them to direct the vibe, change the mood, adjust Magner’s melody line into something different. But the jam is not about the changes and it’s not about setting anything up to restrict anyone’s playing.

RT- Let’s move on to your role as a songwriter. When you bring a new song to the band, to what extent are everyone’s parts written and to what extent does everyone work out their own parts individually?

JG- It differs but it’s always collaborative. Give me a song…

RT- “Mindless Dribble.”

JG- Okay, “Mindless Dribble” was a song where I wrote the lines and they weren’t as good as the lines the other guys came up with. So when we rehearsed it they just changed it as we went along. I didn’t notice, I was just trying to remember the lyrics. So after six or seven run throughs, it was a totally different song.. But I don’t play bass, I don’t play drums, I don’t play keyboards. Usually when Marc and I write a song, maybe there’s one beat out of eight where it’s very important to have this one note on that one beat and then everything else usually gets adjusted over time, and a lot of the songs, the lines are always changing. The songs sort of grow.

There’s a color behind the music depending on what key you put it in and what the lyrics are and how they’re sung. Those are the ways I can decide if a line is working with another line, it depends on the color of a song. Some songs are very dull and sort of sad and others are bright and really happy. “Mr. Don” is green and “Mindless Dribble” is red. Me and Sammy had this test because I was telling him this color theory and I usually get blown off as a crazy person in this type of situation, but he went through seven songs and we had the same colors for them, with different hue variations. I don’t think there’s a single song in our repertoire that every single member hasn’t had creative input in.

It’s an ongoing process. The guitar line in “Shem ra Boo” came at the Vernon Reid gig in July last summer and we’d been playing it for five months. The guitar line I was playing before that was atrocious, and Brownie keep telling me “I hate your guitar line.” I’m just “Why, I love it.” He was like “It’s terrible” But I didn’t know because I was playing it, I thought of it myself, it was my guitar line. And you have tendency to do that stuff and other people have to break your attachment to get you to stop playing it. Sometimes it’s hard until you find something cooler.

I remember when we recorded “Vasillios” for Uncivilized Area. We did it once and it ended up that Jonny came into the studio just after Magner and I made a preliminary mix of it just to see what we had on tape. We had been up for hours and we looked like crap and felt terrible and at that point we were in no position to assess what we had. He came in and said ‘I love this song, it flies like some kind of weird computer bird.” He flipped so we threw the vocals on. Originally we had this idea of having the jam after “Vasillios” jam into the part of “Basis” that isn’t on Encephalous Crime because that song has evolved. We thought that would be so neat and tidy but when we tried it that ended being a twenty-five minute jam and we ran out of tape. It was a big disaster.

When you write songs you try to collect a wealth of material. I have melodies, lyrics just waiting for use. Stuff that didn’t work in one song that I’m just waiting to use again. “Magellan” was a song where I took all of the pieces of music I had that sounded like water and I slapped them together in a hump theory. Some of those things were written when I was a kid. Some of “Vasillios” I wrote when I was twelve. That’s why part of it sounds retarded because that’s the way a twelve year old writes (laughs). But I never forgot it. You archive stuff with yourself for a while and then you put it out to everybody when you find a way to make it work. So there are times you can’t write a lot of songs because you’re archiving.

RT-One final question. A big part of the Disco Biscuit experience is seeing you live. Do you expect that you’ll put out a live disc anytime soon?

JG- We would if we could find a tape that we’re all happy with. From our hypercritical, ridiculously unsatisfied musical heads, if we’re going to listen to a tape, it had better be the best tape of all time or we really don’t want to put it down. I feel like it’s just so much fun to go to the studio. Any excuse to go to the studio and trickle around on your guitar is good enough for me. Driving around and playing for people is really what we do. That’s the day in and day out of it but the studio is a little bit of gold you get to deal with. It costs money and you only have a certain amount of time and it’s hectic but it’s the most fun thing you could do with a week. We used to do it when we were kids, set up little studios and make up songs, it was very enjoyable. It still is.

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