What was it like listening to music you had not played in over a decade?
It was interesting revisiting a lot of those old tapes and kind of not as pleasant, perhaps, as I thought. We hear probably far more of the bad stuff then anyone else does—or our youth, I should say. All I heard was our exuberant youth in regard to tempos, tuning and all that kind of stuff that musicians’ ears hear. We’re going to do our best to not repeat songs over the four shows, though I am sure there will be a few repeats. But we are going to do different versions of those songs if they are repeated.
It is going to be a big reunion, not just for the band but for the fans. There are going to be people at the shows there that haven’t seen each other in the same audience for many years and that we haven’t seen from the stage for many years. It’s going to be amazing, and we hope to hang with some of those people after the gigs. I think there was obviously a calling for this—I mean the way the first two shows sold ticket-wise was not something we were expecting. We thought there was going to be a little buzz but it was mind-blowing to what this thing happen with the help of technology. The little viral way that things are done these days really lets the sparks fly.
Of all the members of God Street Wine, you are the only member of the band currently playing music professionally. Can you tell us a bit about your current projects and also what some of your GSW associates are currently up to?
I’ve kept busy. I moved to Ireland in 1999, about a year after I left the band, and immediately found that there was a lack of drummers over here and found work pretty quickly doing a lot of different gigs. I met up with a singer/songwriter named Damien Rice. He was just getting started, and I ended up working with him for about as long as I played with God Street Wine. I made a few records with him, and we toured the world.
He had a singer he worked with the whole time named Lisa Hannigan. When it was time for her to make her solo things happen, I started working with her as well. We’d done some stuff together in the past outside of Damien—some work with Herbie Hancock and some other sessions in more of a jazz setting. We were just waiting for the right time when she had the songs ready to do her own record—and the confidence to go out there on her own. When that time came there was no question that I was going to work on that project. We had a great time making her record and toured that for a year-and-a-half. That’s been my life since the end of God Street Wine.
As for the other guys, Aaron works at a school around New Paltz, New York where he does some music teaching and also, if I’m not mistaken, does some computer work there [ed note: Aaron also plays in a gypsy jazz group]. Dan is an executive at a digital media distribution company and Jon works as a software engineer—the very corporate world of IT.
Lo’s put together a couple of solo bands over the years and has done a couple of CDs. He’s just now moving back from New Orleans where he’s lived for the past nine months working on his doctoral degree in American History.
Lately they’ve all been practicing their butts off getting ready for this. That’s been their night gig.
You and Jon actually left God Street Wine a year before the band broke up in 1999. Do you feel the band has moved on from that tension-filled period?
They carried on for another year and a half or so and then it was time to get a day job and face reality that it was kind of done. I think we’ve had enough time off that all the things that may have made it not work there towards the end don’t matter now at all. For me, it’s always been really important that you’re having fun, hopefully with whatever you do, but especially if it is something that is so enjoyable for both the listener and the player as making music. If that stops then, well, you need to change. Now, doing this, we’re looking forward to it…it should be all about fun and the reunion feel for everyone. There will be a lot of people there that never saw the band probably back in the day. There will be kids of what used to be the kids coming to shows. I’ve already seen people talking about that on the Facebook page. They’re all getting briefed on what to expect.
As you mentioned earlier, GSW came together in 2001 to help close the Wetlands. What was that experience like?
It’s always strange for me because it’s always a bit of a blur with jetlag—kind of arriving in and playing. I know we got together and there were tapes to listen to and kind of refresh ourselves with. I wouldn’t have done a lot of preparation coming in to that as I recall. You know, I was kind of busy with the stuff I was doing here and so it was kind of “Yeah, let’s do that” I don’t know whether the shows were any good. I think there was probably an energy there but I’ve done far more work on these shows than I have on anything since probably the band, as far as in regards to God Street Wine.
In fact, I’ve done far more work on these shows than anything since we all lived together in the house in Ossining, New York, and we would get up in the morning, have our vocal rehearsals, have our breakfast, have bass and drum rehearsal, have our lunch, have full band rehearsal, have our dinner, play poker and get up and do it again the next day or go off and do a gig. It was truly full-time.
While there are a lot of other things going on in my life right now, I’ve tried to get an hour or two every day to go out to the barn, sit down with either the drum machine or old tapes. The music I’ve done for the past ten years has not been ROCK with a capital “R” music, it’s been a lot of delicate stuff, a lot of brush work, a lot of textures and colors. While interesting, you’re not breaking a full body sweat.
Aside from how hot it’s probably going to be in New York in a week’s time, these are going to be three hour-plus shows of good, old-fashioned God Street Wine music. I’ve had to build up some calluses and work on endurance and stuff like that that an old man needs at this point to do that sort of thing. Muscle memory will only get you so far. There are a lot of intricate changes and things like that that even songs I wouldn’t have thought of as being tricky are now that I am listening back.
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