What role does fan reaction and critical reaction play in your creative process and should they have a role?
MB- I think as an artist, critical and fan reaction should have no role but that’s an idealist view that can never be really achieved. When you play these songs you feel the reaction of the crowd live and with our fan base that can be a very intense experience. So in a lot of ways your fans enjoying what you do is the most important thing. From a more pragmatic standpoint this is a business and those are our customers and consumer satisfaction is the most important thing. So there is a dichotomy. There is the pragmatic approach and then there’s the artistic approach and I think that we’re trying to become a lot more disciplined than we used to be.
We used to read Phantasy Tour and that would pollute your brain, it poisons your opinion of something because you start to see other’s opinions. As soon as you know somebody else’s opinion of a show, it’s hard to have a very crystal clear solid opinion for yourself. The second other people’s opinions start to get thrown into the mix, it’s like my mom says, “Once you sling mud into a clear pond you can never get it clean again.”
We’re trying to be more disciplined about it. We don’t read the message boards and it’s great. I just went on my first real tour where I didn’t know what anybody thought about anything other than the reaction of the fans at the shows. And that way you can just go with what you think, you can make a decision for yourself based on your own true feelings, not feelings warped by other people’s perceptions.
A few people had that specific question, how often do you read PT?
MB- Never. I used to read it occasionally and there were times when I read it all the time and I think everybody in the band has read it before. But at the beginning of this tour, we decided as an organization that the band, crew and everybody who works with the Disco Biscuits could not go there. It’s a trade off because a lot of band managers I know have people combing those boards so that they can know how things are going over in their fan base. Even ?uestlove says at the top of the Okayplayer message boards, that he uses them to gauge fan reactions to things. So it is not heard unheard of for band to use it a litmus test to see how their fan base thinks of things.
It reminds me of the time I went out to dinner with Phil Lesh and he asked me if I read the message boards on the Biscuits and I said, “Don’t do it, Phil,” and he said, “Well, I made the mistake of doing it and it’s rough.” Boy, they were so lucky their band started in the 60’s when there was no message boards. But what’s that old quote- “The Grateful Dead pissing off a small group of people since 1965.” This is what Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back was about. It’s so prevalent in our society. Why did Time make the Person of the Year You with a computer screen with a mirror on the front cover? Because the individual person as they say controls the information age.
”What did you learn from that tour with Phil?” Rob S
MB- That’s a hard question to answer. I’m not really sure that I learned anything. I took things away from the tour but I’m not sure I learned anything profound on the tour. We gained experience playing in front of larger crowds. We gained experience playing in front of crowds that a lot of times weren’t that accepting of what we were trying to do with the music. But I learned from Phil specifically that’s not what’s about. It’s about you liking it yourself.
Phil liked it a lot which is why he had us there, because he thought the Disco biscuits were in in his estimation doing true improv. He told me that he thought a lot of bands were out there just playing with the changes and he could see when we were playing that we were ditching the changes and really improving together. What gets to me about Phil is it kind of puts your whole experience of being in a band into perspective. He’s someone who has achieved the dream and is still out there doing it. Not because he needs the money, I’ve seen Phil’s house, he doesn’t need the money. He’s doing it for the love of music. That’s kind of what you take away from an experience like that, you have to be doing this for the love of music or else there’s no point in doing it.
“What’s the most challenging aspect of being a member of the Biscuits, both on stage and off stage?” Punch P
MB- I’d say on stage for me, the most challenging aspect of being a member of the Biscuits is listening. Since we’re not a Type I band, we’re a Type II band where most every jam is an open jam where we’re composing a song on the spot. So listening is the hardest thing- trying to identify what notes the other guys are playing and what chords the notes that they’re playing are inferring. Because a lot of times I’ll lay out in A or something and then chord changes will develop out of the melodies and the harmonies that people are putting down on top of me. And you have to figure it out right there on the spot in front of people without guessing. Guessing is not an option because that leads to wrong notes 66 percent of the time. At any time you can guess and 4 notes of the 12 notes on your fret board are going to be good but you need to use deductive reasoning and everything you’ve learned in music school and otherwise to figure out what the intervals are, what they’re playing.
Oftentimes in the Disco Biscuits I’ll be playing a D chord and they’ll just started playing all the notes in the C sharp chord and it sounds really awkward and weird at first and I’ll have to figure out what makes it awkward and weird and maybe that means dissonance and maybe dissonance means half-steps, that kind of reasoning.
That’s my job. My job is to play a groove, keep a groove and frame what everybody else does harmonically with bottom notes. And being a bass player in an improv band that doesn’t rely heavily on pre-existing chord changes is a really hard job, it can be quite stressful at times.
Off stage I think just travel is so difficult. Being away from your family for five weeks at a time is trying. It’s a hard life. Being in a band is very glamorous at times and at other times it’s just sitting in a hotel room by yourself waiting to fall asleep so you can wake up and go on the next city. That’s what it is, being a traveling musician. I’m not the first and not the last to say that it’s a very difficult job. It’s hard on your psyche and that’s why you see so many people in the entertainment industry falling victim to drug abuse. It’s not an easy path to go down, you’ve got to really love it to want to do it because you’re making all these sacrifices and the pay-off is the great jam you play every night or the five great jams you play if you’re playing really well.
As a musician who has done work with various organizations, do you feel musicians and other artists have a responsibility to exploit the inherent leverage they’ve obtained in their popularity to bring about positive social change? And what lessons, if any, have you learned from your work with HeadCount that might help others be more effective?” Chris P
MB- Well I definitely don’t think it’s a responsibility of musicians to give back to the community any more than I think it’s a responsibility of everybody to do things to give back to the community. It’s no more my responsibility than it is your responsibility than it is anyone’s responsibility. The thing is certain people are just prone to doing philanthropic work and giving back to the community because it makes them feel good and makes them feel like they can continue to live in a society where so much of what the society does on a day to day basis is destructive of the culture and to the earth. So I do think it’s a responsibility of mine personally because in the thirty-three years I’ve been alive, I’ve done many things that have been destructive and I want to start to erase that ecological footprint that I may have left.
HeadCount has been a very interesting experience to me because it’s a thing that’s really difficult to manage on top of another thing that’s really difficult to mange, only you don’t get paid for this one. The payback is all feeling that you have when you’ve accomplished something.
What I’ve learned from HeadCount is anything can be accomplished by a random group of people who come together with a common goal or common idea or common wishes. I think that seeing this group of volunteers come and lay their entire lives on the line in order to try to increase the involvement of youth voters has been nothing short of awe inspiring.
To see what HeadCount accomplished this year has made me so proud. The youth vote was at an all time high at the midterm elections this year and that was after an excessively apathetic youth vote in 2004, after we had spent a year and a half working our tails off to get the youth vote out. So we did all this work and we got to the end of the first election and it didn’t happen. But then as the next year went on, we realized we had laid a foundation for something very important and when Dave Matthews came back to us and said, “Hey, are you going to do this again for the midterm election? We want to do something for the midterm election,” and the guys from The Dead came to me and said, “We still want to do this,” and Topper from moe. said, “What are you guys planning?” that all kind of reinforced that there is a need for what we’re doing. A very important need and even though the youth vote hadn’t come out the first time, we had laid important groundwork.
For us it’s not did the Democrats win or did the Republicans win as much as did HeadCount accomplish their goal and did young people go to the polls? Can we account for all the young people in the country? Obviously not. But seeing that the youth vote went up so much for this election was very encouraging. The message is getting out there and the message was huge. We hit millions and millions of people with emails right before the election through all of the different websites, organizations and fans that gave us access to their email lists. That can have an effect. My father, who was a politician, said to me, “Don’t think you can’t change the world, one person can, I’ve done it myself. So can you.” So can every individual kid out there, every kid who’s reading this interview right now can take a step back and say, “I can be involved in something that can change our country and change the future of the world.”
I’ve had days where I thought is this working? Is this worth it to be spending 15 hours a day working for free for a cause? Am I crazy? I’m glad to say that now I know I’m not crazy. Well
I told Andy [Bernstein, HeadCount co-chair] this year that with the Biscuits being back on I have to take a huge step backwards in terms of how much I put forth to HeadCount. It is so much work and what he did for the organization this year was just unbelievable because he took on a new job with this company in Canada and has been completely 100% overwhelmed by his new job and still managed to manage the organization for all the right reasons. It’s really hats off to Andy who single-handedly kept the candle lit.
Final question. A lot of people also wanted to hear your opinion of your favorite all-time show or the your favorite from the past tour.
MB- Let me stick with the current tour because it’s fresh in my head. It’s hard because this current tour had so many moments where I thought to myself, “This is it, this is what we are, this is the Biscuits at their best,” that it’s hard to single one out But certainly the Fox Theater show, both sets. A couple of weeks ago we played out at the Fox on a Sunday [11/19] and it was truly magical. There’s no other way to describe it, it was just on from the first second to the last second, there wasn’t moment of the show where I thought, “Oh this is weird,” or “This isn’t working out,” or “We’ve got to get out of here, change this or do something different.” It was just there the whole time, it was pure Bisco right from the first note.
That happened so much on this last tour but mainly the second sets were the hot sets. Cincinnati, I felt the same way, the second set Buffalo I felt the same way. The second set of Illinois I felt the same. Certainly the Hammerstein, the second set both nights I felt the same way.
I just felt like, “We’re doing it, we’re back. We’re finally back.” And there were moments throughout the whole year that were like that. Certainly the “I-Man” from the Stone Pony this summer [6/23]. It was a first set daytime “I-Man” and it was over 30 minutes and it was just perfect. The first jam was amazing, the second jam was amazing and I walked out of there thinking, “That was it, that’s what we do best, that was us at our best.” Getting that feeling now with Allen is what we were praying and hoping for in those two years when we didn’t know what the future was going to be like.
You had those years where Sammy was leaving and we didn't know how it was going to play itself out. I still don’t know how it’s going to play itself out because we’re the Disco Biscuits and the Disco Biscuits never know what the future is going to hold. Part of why we’re creative and exciting is because we’re volatile. We’ve mellowed out but we’re still volatile. There’s still a fire in us and that’s where those shows come from, from that fire inside that burns heavy, hot and bright.
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