Switching gears a bit, you’re making a record out there in Colorado, right?
Yeah, I’m out here for two weeks, and I’m mixing a record right now for the band Great American Taxi, their new record. And it’s really great, actually totally off-the-hook. It’s gonna be an unbelievable record. And if I do say so myself, as an Americana record, I’m gonna say it’s Grammy-worthy, even just on the basis of the songwriting. But the playing and the arrangements and everything—it’s really stellar. And then I’m starting right away, as soon as we’re done with that next week, I’m starting another record out here in Denver with this young band out here who’s really, really great. I predict great things for them. For a young band, they’re like ten miles ahead of the curve. This band called Gipsy Moon. They sent me the demos, and they were maybe one or two degrees away from being realized. As a producer, a lot of times I’ll get involved with bands that are producing their first or second record, and they have an EP, but this’ll be their first full-length record. But most bands doing their first full-length record need a lot of arrangement help and little song doctoring and that kind of stuff. Not a whole lot of that with this band. These guys are fully-realized and pretty fucking amazing. So I’m super psyched to get to start working on them.
And then I’m gonna go home for a week and then come back out here—I’m kind of ensconced in the studio out here, Silo Sound—and I’m gonna track the last three songs for my side project, The Contribution, with Keith Moseley from the String Cheese Incident and Duane Trucks from Hard Working Americans and Widespread. We’ll track all those and then we’ll finish them up probably some time in June out in California where I usually work over at TRI, Bob Weir’s studio. And then I go home for a week then come back here to start another record with a singer/songwriter named Chris Thompson. So, pretty busy.
And you also have some summer plans with Railroad Earth, right?
Yeah, we just finished the record with Warren Haynes, and we’re gonna be doing some touring to promote that. And then we’re gonna be going down to Maryland to participate in that Jerry Garcia tribute, which looks like it’s gonna be super fun.
How was it working with Warren Haynes?
Working with Warren was fantastic—and this is not just some guy trying to blow smoke up Warren’s ass, it’s not that at all. The guy is brilliant. He’s obviously a fantastic guitar player, but he’s also a great songwriter. What was really cool about the project was that we went in, and he never sent any demos or anything. He’d show up and we’d all get around him with his acoustic guitar, and he’d play the song for us in the control room of the studio, and we’d chart it out. Then we’d go play it. And that was it—that was the song. And he allowed all of us to have our input, artistically, and John [Skehan] and I arranged some strings on a couple of songs. The structures of our solos were all left up to us—pretty much what we brought to the song was what he was looking for. Which is really great, because as a producer—I’ve been producing records since 1986, once I’m done with this group of records, I’ll have produced 50 albums in my career—working with an artist, they’re either gonna know exactly what they want, and that’s not quite as enjoyable all the time, or you can get an artist that knows what he wants, but he knows it when he hears it and allows that to blossom in front of him. And that’s exactly what Warren Haynes did with this record, and it was really super cool. He’s great to work with, one of the nicest people on the planet. So, overall, super positive. [Laughs]
Railroad Earth is also doing a couple Chicago shows during Fare Thee well, some late-night shows?
Yeah. To be honest with you, I’m not usually a fan of doing “after-show” parties, but obviously this is a pretty special event.
What’s your connection to the Grateful Dead, you and the other guys in the band?
Some of the band members are big Deadheads, some not so much. Myself, I kind of fell off the Grateful Dead bandwagon after American Beauty. I’m the oldest guy in the band, so I’ve been around awhile. I’m one of those people—when I say this, Deadheads usually go, “what, really?”—I saw the Dead with Pigpen twice. I first saw them—actually you can go to archives and hear this show, and I almost had a flashback when I listened to it—the first time I saw the Grateful Dead was Halloween 1970 at Stony Brook University in New York. And there’s a board mix of that concert, and it’s actually pretty fucking amazing. I don’t [usually] go to archives and listen to whole shows, but I grabbed that show and listened to the whole thing, and it was kind of a revelation for me, because I was there. Then I went and found the other iconic show I saw in that same year or the following year, but also at Stony Brook—The Allman Brothers. And that’s the same year they did the Live at The Fillmore. It’s funny, because I’m doing this Great American Taxi record, and Duane Trucks plays the drums. And he was talking about his uncle, telling some Allman Brothers stories, because, you know, hell yeah, we might as well listen to somebody that’s one of the family. And I told him the fist time I saw the Allman Brothers was at Stony Brook University in 1970, and he goes, “Shut up! That show is famous!” That’s supposed to be one of their best live performances ever, even better than the Fillmore show. So there’s a really cool board recording of that show that you can get. That’s the only other live show I ever listened to front to back.
Any upcoming new projects that you’re particularly excited about?
The new Contribution record is gonna be released as singles. At first, we will release a song every two months online as a digital download, and 100% of the money will go to a nonprofit—a different one every two months.
When does that start?
I wanna get at least the record mixed before I start committing to doing it, so I’m gonna say probably September. And we’ll go for a period of ten months or a year. And the reason why I’m doing that is because I can’t really tour with the band, only one or two gigs per year because everybody’s schedule is so crazy. Generally speaking, the only real reason to make a CD anymore is to provide promotion for your tours. That’s a big part of it. Since we don’t tour, that doesn’t make any sense. Then you have to ask yourself, why exactly am I making a record? So I came up with the idea—since the name of the band is The Contribution—let’s just give it away. We’re gonna spread the love, and hopefully that’s gonna help us in a way, to keep the band visible, because every two month’s there’s a new story to talk about.
What kind of organizations will you be donating to?
Some of the usual suspects, like Conscious Alliance and Rock the Earth, those kinds of things. And yet to be seen. The band members have different pet projects, different ones they want to promote, so we haven’t finalized the list. And how it helps the band is that at the end I’ll [say], look, we wanna do this all the time, because we’re writing new material all the time. So at the end, I’ll hold off two songs, and I’ll say, okay, you have these ten songs, and we’ve given any money that you put out—it’ll probably be name your own price—to nonprofits. We’ll make an LP, CD, digital download of the twelve songs, with these extra two songs, and we’ll use that money to make the next record, then we’ll start it all over again. And we’ll just give it all away again, and this is something that we hope will just perpetuate itself. That’s my latest thing, and I’m super excited about it. And obviously there’s a million other things going on, so it’s just yet another project to work on, but it’s a good one.
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