And what’s Hollygrove, the R&B vocal group you have that sang back up on ‘Late for the Future?’
That’s my wife (laughs) because I started out in that. Hollygrove’s been instrumental since the beginning all the way to singing backgrounds for ‘Late for the Future.’
Comment on how your vocals can be as improvisational as the rest of the band’s music during a show.
When we write songs, we kind of structure them with an outline. What I do is just take whatever verses I come up with and try them out on the people live so a lot of things change from night to night. I guess it’s improvisation. I’m doing different verses every night just trying to work the song into a groove where we can get it to a place where the people can digest it because we come pretty hard sometimes. We’re always uptempo. It’s not like with my band where we break down and go slow and do the ballads for the ladies. Galactic is an improvisation thing for the Houseman most every night because we form the songs at sound check while we’re on the road. They say, ‘Houseman, whatever you got for the songs, just come with it.’ I stick a verse somewhere where it might work. A lot of nights it don’t work so we just try to keep it as free form. That’s why we got together. I wanted to get away from the constant singing (with Hollygrove) and work on my tones and stuff like that. So I figured I worked with some guys who weren’t spoiled by the music business and were just getting into the music business.
It’s just a good thing, man. I can’t say enough about Galactic. I get mad at them. I curse them out because we got this generation gap. They run off sometimes like children. Good children though. They’re neophytes in the business. They’re young and very impressionable and very deep dudes. On a whole, these cats … I don’t know, I must have weaned them right. They always say I taught them right. It’s just a good thing I met Galactic. I’m saying that every day, every night. I pray that it can stay together and I think it will because they’re very level-headed dudes. It’s a tough, tough business and you gotta be for real. So hey man, it’s Galactic all the way. We’re going to try to conquer a lot of things.
Did any improvisational vocals make their way onto the records?
The first one was ‘Everybody Wants Some’ on the first record. Everybody requests that song so we’re going to start doing it more live.
As you become a musician and you start to grow, you want to structure your shit in song form. Everybody in the band writes. We’re just trying to experiment more with the song form to write a great, solid song. The improv has been more for the live thing. The record company wants less improv and more so the people can get to it. What we’re trying to do now is show people that we can write decent things, good, solid songs. But we’ve been talking about the next record being a live thing, more free form like we do it live. So I don’t know.
I think ‘Late for the Future’ is a better record than the first two because the jams and grooves are a little more focused, yet there’s still the funky free form jazz of the closing ‘Two Clowns’ and the tasty jam of ‘Hit the Wall.’
Yeah, we went to Japan and everybody was like, ‘Jam bands, jam bands.’ Everybody was getting headbutted with, ‘What is a jam band?’ with the interviewers. I think we wanted to show that we’re not just a jam band. We can write songs and we can jam too. When we have meetings, that’s what comes out, ‘Houseman, we want to show people that we can do what it takes in the business. We can write great songs and do some good funk.’ It’s just a matter of development.
You contributed the souladelic ‘Century City,’ the jazzy philosophy of ‘Running Man,’ the southern-fried funk of ‘Vilified’ and the spirited love song ‘Thrill,’ but what’s ‘Actions Speak Louder’?’
That’s a cover of Chocolate Milk. They were a ’70s, ’80s band in New Orleans that was really popular. They were produced by Allen Toussaint. They were the band that took over the house band role with Allen Toussaint when The Meters left his studio. They’re friends of mine. That’s one of the first songs Galactic learned. And the other was ‘Mind Is Hazy.’ We did that too but it didn’t make it to the record.
But ‘Black Eyed Pea’ made it, which was the first song Galactic wrote, but it didn’t appear on ‘Coolin’ Off’ and ‘Crazyhorse Mongoose.’ Why?
They always told them ‘Two Clowns’ and ‘Black Eyed Pea’ couldn’t be captured on record. So when we got with the producer, Nick Sansano, it was different, more detailed and straight to the point. Dan (Prothero) was really great for a starting band because he would let you find your own voice. But this time what we really wanted to show with Nick was better sonic quality. He wanted us to play all the songs we wanted to do for this record, and we let him pick what he thought would be good. He picked that one. That was just the result of him trimming the fat off the arrangement and just really going in and trying to nail the songs. Nick’s a great guy. I think we’re going to be working with him again on our next record.
Nick’s a musician from New York who’s worked with Sonic Youth and rappers. So he brings all this experience, plus he’s a great piano player. He comes with that ear and looking at it from a musician’s pit. It was like he was in the band.
This is the shit we’re going to concentrate on and this is where the people are going to really get what you’re doing. He was like, ‘Get this out of here. It’s just fat sitting in the middle of some good food. We’re going to trim this fat and bang, the people will get to this a lot faster.’ We learned how to do that with Nick. Nick was invaluable at this stage of the game. We needed a Nick Sansano, somebody to put a little interest in the game still for these boys. Show them how to shape it a different way. It was a big album for us, and we got the right guy in Nick Sansano to come in and do the right album at the right time. I think we did capture the band right this time. Sonically the mix is right. It was just a joy working with Nick.
We’ve had one or two naysayers here because they love us live. This is a live town so everybody wants you to sound like you sound live. They had a review in Offbeat, the local music magazine. The chick must have been a Galactic fan. She said, ‘Well, you can’t put one-hour sets into a CD’ and all this kind of shit. She was like, ‘We want to know when we can get a live record.’ So that was how she summed up, ‘We want a live record.’ I know her. She comes to all the gigs when we we’re here. It’s kind of a little backlash, but we love it because we love New Orleans and the people. The people have been so great to us as a band that we overlook it, but some people don’t get what we’re doing. And that’s cool. But they all come out because they know we’re going to have a party and we going to play all night when we play here. So they be waitin’ on us.
We’ve seen it go from 20 people to 2,000. In four years, that’s pretty good I think. We started out at the Elbo Room in San Francisco and now we can’t play no place but the Warfield. We sold the Fillmore out so many times, they bought us jackets. The jacket was a tradition of Bill Graham’s. Four sellouts and you get the jackets. So we had like five, six in a row. We did the Warfield and they quit buying us jackets. They bought us traveling bags engraved with Galactic 2000 on them. So we had to move to the Warfield, which is a great thing.
It’s just good right now. We’re seeing everybody come out and get with Galactic. It’s just one of those good things. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now
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