”What venue have you always wanted the Disco Biscuits to play?” David R
MB- Wetlands. Ever since then it’s all cherry on top.
I don’t know. At this point we’d like to keep our goals attainable. I don’t think anybody’s talking about Giants Stadium or Madison Square Garden. We’re talking about, “Can we play Radio City Music Hall?” That’s a venue that we’ve never played that I think we’d really like to play. Can we play the Spectrum? That’s another venue we’ve never played that’s a very attainable goal and in the league of Madison Square Garden but it’s a different city. It’s the kind of thing where in Phili we may be able to do that and we were very close to playing the Spectrum this New Year’s and decided that it would be more prudent to do the Theater at Tweeter which is a little more reasonable and that’s going really well so it looks like we made the right decision.
”Any hints on what you guys would like to do with the Quadrophonic Sound on New Year’s Eve?” Mike W
MB- No hints.
”Will there be 3 sets on NYE ?” Josh R
MB- No there will not be. Well, there will be seven sets but different bands. The Biscuits will play two sets on New Year’s Eve. We would do three sets but we thought it would be a better party to bring in Younger Brother and Shpongle and Keller and really make an event out of it. When we have an event built around the Biscuits shows we find that everybody has a really good time, including the band. So for New Year’s it’s really nice for us to be able to end. Whereas in New York City we’d end at 3 in the morning and then everybody dissipates and by the time we get of the backstage we’re like, “Okay now what do we do?” Well this year we’re going to do. We’re going to take acidNo, just kidding.
”Do you still take ecstasy or other drugs during your performances, or is that a thing of the past?” Larry S
MB- That’s a thing of the past.
”Since Allen joined the band, what spontaneous changes to the Disco Biscuits live sound that have emerged on stage surprise you the most?” Michael P
MB- What’s surprised me the most is how much it sounds like the Disco Biscuits, that’s what’s surprised me the most. I thought there were going to be many more changes but Allen is such a dynamic drummer that he allows us to retain our core sound without jarring the system too much. But at the same time bringing his own flavor and that flavor is starting to emerge. Technically what he can accomplish during a drum n bass jam is absolutely mind-boggling insane, with all due respect to our original drummer who was fantastic and forged the scene and this style of the scene. Allen just practices so fucking much it’s unbelievable.
Has he learned the entire catalog of Biscuits songs?
MB- He hasn’t learned the entire catalog. Some of it we’re just burying. Not a huge amount but probably about 20, 25 songs we’ve dropped out of the rotation. Some of them are going to seep back in over the next few weeks but a lot of them we’re going to take nice deep long breaks from until it’s such a long time that we’re dying to play them. That’s when playing them will be a super positive enlightening experience.
Here’s another popular one. Folks wanted to know if and when the Biscuits might play “Floes” again?
MB- “We’d like to thank you for Onamae Wa’ and Floes,’ we plan on playing them for years.” That was a sentence that we put into the Sammy Song [performed at Camp Bisco IV, as a tribute to their departing drummer, Sam Altman].. Now I’m not sure if we used that sentence kind of just for a joke and to get the big cheer that it got right at that moment or if we actually plan on playing “Onamae Wa” and “Floes” for years but it flowed really well syllabically in the song and the rhyme scheme worked really well. I have to imagine we’ll play “Onamae Wa” and “Floes” and “Sound 1” at some point.
Sam wrote some fantastic songs and they’re three of our best live songs and I don’t see why we would bury them forever. Certainly I think we want to reestablish ourselves with an identity and have it be a really strong identity of the new Disco Biscuits: Allen, Aron, Jon and Marc. I think that when we’ve really established ourselves and we’re the best we’ve ever been and there’s no question that the new Disco Biscuits are better than the old Disco Biscuits, we can put that whole vibe behind us, then busting out “Onamae Wa” and “Floes” would be a nostalgic type of thing that I could see us doing. But it hasn’t been discussed yet. We haven’t really talked about that.
”How is the progress on the new album and will any of the new songs be debuted before the release of the album in a show?” Ian B
MB- I’m sure the songs are going to be debuted in that three month period before the album comes out once the songs are all done but it’s so raw right now. Honestly, a lot of the songs that we have right now aren’t even going to make the album. We have 14 songs, and maybe four of them are going to make the album. It’s great because we have these new songs that we could play live and we’ve been working on it for a really long time but we haven’t really started cutting the album. We’re more in the composing and writing territory.
We do have a demo of the album but we’re going to continue to write songs over the next 2 months and hopefully we’ll have 25 new songs that we can cut down to the best 10 songs. It’s going really well. We could have played a lot of it on this last tour if we wanted but we think the best thing is to hold the material back to figure out what’s going to go on the album and just do it the way that it was meant to be done. Don’t force ourselves to put new music into the setlists to satiate that yearning for it at the live show at the expense of doing some sort of damage to the album. I would like people to have heard the album without being able to compare the songs on the album to their five favorite versions of that song. I want people to hear it and say, “I like this song,” or “I don’t like this song,” not this song isn’t as good as itself.
Do you have a timetable in place?
MB- We’d like to be done in 2007 but things are going really well as a band right now, and we’re not going to rush the album out just because people really want it. I look at is if people really want to hear it that’s good but not enough of a reason to cut corners.
“What’s your favorite Disco Biscuits studio release and why?” Submitted by multiple readers
MB- I think Perfume is my favorite and I think that’s because it’s so different from what we do live. To me that’s what’s so special about the studio. It’s almost a clichthe studio is a different medium and you can do different things than you can do live. That’s almost the clichnswer, the football answer, that we’re going to continue to work hard and continue to do our best and listen to the coach but that’s the truth. Things become clichbecause they’re true.
I like the fact that we composed songs in the studio for Perfume and then ended up bringing them live to the table afterwards. I thought was a really unique approach and we ended up with songs that were different than if we sat down and composed them the regular way that we compose. I just think it sounds the most interesting and has some really interesting sonic textures.
I would like the new album to be somewhere between Perfume and Uncivilized Area, where it has many elements of the electronic side of things but also retains a live feel to it, almost like “Float Like A Butterfly” started to touch on, on the Senor Boombox album.
I like all of the albums, we wouldn’t have releasd them if we didn’t like them, we would have kept working on them until we liked them. Every album we got to the end of it and said, “This is the best.” Obviously our fans have had different reactions to different albums. But much as in the PH scene, am I allowed to use that word? Much as in the Phish scene, people have a reaction to something when they first hear it that is often different to how they end up feeling about it down the line. I read an article where Trey was talking about Bar 17 and how people are panning the compositions and he was remembering how everyone hated Hoist when it come out. And I thought back to the first time I heard Hoist and I was sitting in a car with my friend on Fourth Street and South Street, listening to “Down With Disease” and we were almost mocking it. That’s almost an absurdity to me now, mocking “Down With Disease.” But it was new and it was weird to hear it when it was new. Something about it sounded cheesy at first but it turned out to be one of the greatest songs in their repertoire. It’s one of my favorites, to the point where it can almost bring a tear to my eye.
So I was reading that and thought, “Isn’t that just the way it always is?” When Perfume came out, it was the same thing, everyone hated it. Why did they hate it? Because they were expecting us to put out Uncivilized Area Part II. They wanted to hear all these explosive version of songs we were already playing live like we had done with “I-Man” and “Aceetobee.” People had expectations of what they missed the perfume was going to be and the way we wrote the album blew out all of those expectations. When they first heard it, people’s reactions were negative and ultimately I think if you poll everyone in the fan base, at least 30 or 40 percept would say they’d say they missed the perfume is their favorite album. Many would say they Uncivilized Area is their favorite album. I’m sure those are the two albums that would get most of the votes and it’s just funny that something that was so hated can be looked back on a something that was visionary, which is what many people called they missed the perfume. Nothing like that had been done in our scene at that time. It’s just so different from what people do in the jamband scene. It’s like comedy equals tragedy plus time.
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