BR: You mentioned seeing Scratch perform at Wetlands with the Mad Professor running the faders; now your band came into the picture with your live dub approach.
DH: I think of myself as being the chief dub organizer on stage, which requires a couple different things: you can’t “ride the faders” like you can in a studio, so I mimic that by cueing instrumentalists to come in and out – lay out for a few measures here; come back for a few measures here; and so on. Plus, all the instruments are wired through a mixing board that I have on stage, so I can add the dub effects that way, as well.
When we backed Lee, I just added another channel for him with his vocals going through my mixer and I’d dub him out and cue in the band like I would with my music. Lee had things he wanted us to do, but a lot of times I was trying to feed off what I was seeing in the crowd and feeling from the music … manipulating the band, so to speak, to complement what he was doing.
BR: I’m guessing you had to be on your toes with Lee.
DH: Oh, yeah – there was one night when Lee just decided he wanted the bass line to be different so he turned around, grabbed the neck of the bass, and started singing the bass line to my bass player. (laughs) Lee’s kind of a diminutive guy in stature – he’s like 5’-something – and Big Dan, our bass player, was 6’4” and weighed maybe 250, 260 lbs. It was pretty comical to watch.
BR: And the band line-up at that time?
DH: By then it was myself, Larry, Dan Jeselsohn on bass, and Ben on guitar – plus, we’d added Maria Eisen on tenor saxophone. David Butler was on drums – that was before Madhu Siddappa joined us. We also had a keyboard player who isn’t with us any more – a guy named Dave Wake, who’s playing with a couple of other cool groups in the Milwaukee area these days.
BR: Now that we have the core band established, let’s talk about the process of what you do. Recently, when I was writing a review of Vaporized, I described the art of creating a dub mix of a given song as deconstructing and then reconstructing an already-recorded piece of music. Is that a good way to put it?
DH: I think that’s exactly what it is. I don’t think enough people focus on the deconstruction/reconstruction part. They think more about the sound effects, you know what I’m saying?
BR: Yeah, I do. So I’m wondering if you write your songs specifically for the dub process – or do you come up with a good, solid song and then work out a dub arrangement?
DH: The dub arrangement is never worked out ahead of time at all; that’s totally off the cuff. I mean, there are some patterns that we follow with a certain amount of regularity, but the arrangement of the songs – when the elements are deconstructed and reconstructed, as you said – are something that I’m coming up with off the tip of my head. I’m feeling like the bass should be brought up here or the drums should drop out or we should have the rhythm guitar lay out – I’m just hearing these things in my head. It’s just like I’m in the studio and doing it with a mixing board. The songs are composed of a melodic statement, a chord progression, and a bass line.
BR: So the basic arrangement is a constant – and as far as the dub process goes, what goes down in any given performance is totally improvised?
DH: Exactly: the composed portions of it are the elements we just talked about – but the dub treatment is something that we’ll do differently every night of the week. I would hate to say it’s pure improvisation, because I don’t think that actually happens. When someone takes a solo, there are certain licks that they like to play, right? There are certain things that they go for – they have a repertoire of things they use.
And I think I have a repertoire of things that I use to orchestrate the deconstruction/reconstruction process … but it’s not pre-planned – it’s just done.
What’s cool is, when we first started playing, we really didn’t know how to do it – it was uncharted territory for everyone. But now that we’ve had an existing core lineup for a while, everyone kind of knows when to lay out and when to come back in. All the musicians have started to participate in that process because they’ve been in the band long enough. I’m still, like, the main arbiter of what happens … every now and then, I’ll turn and tell somebody to lay out, because that’s what I’m hearing right then and that’s what I want it to sound like.
It’s an improvisational thing. The way we drop in and out and the way the effects are added – that’s all done live. We recorded the album it like an old jazz record: we went in and did maybe three live takes for each tune and chose the one we liked the best.
No Comments comments associated with this post