DB: Jumping back, it’s interesting you mention James Brown. I would bet that for a number of other bands, their big heroes, their James Brown or Phil Lesh would be the Meters. But being I suppose that living in New Orleans you’ve been really fortunate to play with them.

RM: Yeah, we’ve played with them a bunch. We’re become friends with them. I mean I still love them and if you’d asked me four or five years ago I would have said them but we have opportunities to see them all the time.

DB: Along those lines, many of the bands in this scene have been somewhat relentlessly compared to the Grateful Dead. I would imagine that Galactic has been compared to the Meters quite a bit. How have you responded to that?

RM: At first we were we were Like “yeah, that’s cool. We’re definitely influenced by them and we definitely learned a lot of their material.“But over the years we’ve just moved further and further away from them although we still pay in that same vein. They do a lot of things that we don’t do and we do some things that they don’t do. I don’t think they’d ever really ever get into a heavy metal moment or a hard rock moment but we might. We kind of experiment a little more than they do now, which just comes from playing 150 dates a year. We just have to do that.

DB: How has Galactic’s sound evolved, let’s say from Coolin Off to Crazyhorse Mongoose?

RM: Well to me Coolin’ Off just had this one vibe, this one funk vibe throughout it. Some people really liked that aspect of the record. When we got to Crazyhorse Mongoose we really wanted to show some of the different moods and styles that we had gotten into over that two year break in between the records. So to me it has a lot more quieter moments, and a lot more different feels to it. That was just through touring, all the CDs we had listened to in those two years, and all the shows and the things that happened at the shows.

DB: Has your music continued to transform since you recorded Crazyhorse Mongoose?

RM: We’re about to go back into the studio, and right now Stanton has a live sampler and five or six effects pedals, and everybody is experimenting with tones and effects, and sampling a lot more than we ever had. In the last few months the shows have definitely gone in another direction with a lot of crazier shit going on than there ever was. That was influenced in part because we did this tour with Skerik on saxophone, the sax player from Critters Buggin’ and he is just this total experimental freak. He takes the sax and makes it sound like you’ve never heard it before- like a screaming Hendrix guitar or he’ll have some crazy digital delay. So we all were influenced by that and wanted to make ourselves even further limitless in terms of tones and directions. I think it’s like that with any band that plays so many shows, and here is a parallel with the Grateful Dead- you just want to be limitless, to enable the music to go into any direction that it can go. And if that is with samples, or drum loops or crazy effects on my bass then that is what I want to do.

DB: I’m curious, how have you balanced the number of songs with vocals both on a given night and also on the albums?

RM: It’s pretty much set each night. We usually do between three and four a set. Sometimes Houseman will come out at the beginning of the set, sometimes the middle, sometimes he’ll come out at the end. Where he comes out is just decided every night. In terms of recordings, that’s really been all the Houseman tunes we’ve had to record that we liked and came out good enough to put on a record. Writingwise, we’ll intentionally write a tune and say all right, let’s write it for singing because there’s a little different style you write when you’re dealing with a singer. You don’t want to make the rhythms quite as complex, and it’s set up a little differently. We write a little more with thought towards vocals than just taking an instrumental and saying okay, let’s put vocals on top.

DB: Have you experienced any pressure to have him sing either more or less?

RM: It’s funny. Both ways, but there’s not an overwhelming amount of it. For instance we’ve never heard anything from the record label about it, either way, which is cool. From among the fans, maybe once or twice a tour somebody will, say to me, I wish Houseman would sing more or less, it’s not like every night.

DB: You’re signed with Capricorn. Has that met your expectations?

RM: Well we really didn’t know what to expect. We had been working with Fog City Records which was a one man ship. So we went there and they introduced us to the publicity department, and there were four people, and the art department, there were three people, and the radio department, and there were seven people. So to have a team was pretty interesting to us. Then again it’s not like we’ve been on MTV and our songs are all over the radio but they’ve been really supportive and they all come out to the shows, and they all seem really into the project, unlike say moe.‘s nightmare with Sony. I was talking with them about that. They got so much less done for them than we did for us by a considerably smaller label. That was one of the reasons we went with Capricorn.

DB: Are you surprised by the nationwide support for Galactic, which has occurred in a relatively short period of time?

RM: In part that’s one thing we set out to do. We toured the west coast before we had even played Baton Rouge, Memphis or Atlanta. When we set out we decided we didn’t just want to be a regional act. So on our first tour we played Vancouver, British Columbia, we played Colorado, and then we did the east coast all before we even played in the southeast. We just wanted to play every single region equally.

People ask me about this a quite a bit. I think in part this was due to the fact that our booking agency Madison House was really in touch with kids and we played a number of key festivals at key times. You also have to be real strategic in terms of when you come back and how soon you come back. Of course it important to get the mailing list out. The first day of the first tour we had a mailing list- just to keep in touch with our fans that way. I mean always at the end of the show we’d go out at the end of the show and talk to the crowd to make sure they got on the mailing list, just to add the personal touch. It was fun for us and I think it was fun for a lot of the people who came out as well. We’re still in touch with quite a few of those people.

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