“Miami Virtue” – The Tabernacle – 1/1/15

All of this brings us to Reel to Real, which you guys will present in Denver. No one is entirely sure what to expect, so what can you tell us about it and is it loosely based on the True Hollywood Stories event you put on in Los Angeles?

Yeah, as far as the music portion of it. And the other twist on this is that we’re working on a ballot of songs now because the fans are going to vote for whatever it is that we get to play and the songs that we play and tell stories about. We’re trying to come up with about a 30-35 song ballot for people to vote on. I think that’s kind of a nice twist in trying to engage the fan base a little bit more and we get up there and play things that they want to hear and that they want to hear stories about.

That’s the musical part of it, and then the film part of it is probably going to be about a 60 minute compilation of some of the cooler home video stuff that we had starting from about 2000 or 2001 through probably about 2006 or 07. I’d say that’s where most of the stuff was happening. It’s not necessarily having a distinct storyline to it, but Jefferson Waful is the guy who’s producing this more or less for us, and he knows our story and understands us better than most filmmakers, so I think he’s going to come through and create something pretty entertaining for us.

Give people a glimpse into the footage you’ve collected so far. What’s your take on it?

Oh my god. Well first of all, personally, I just literally did not give a fuck about how I looked, what I was doing. I mean, it’s so funny looking back. Not a lot of good decisions on attire, various comments to the camera. I think I pretty much look like a huge asshole. A lot of people might say, “What’s changed?”

Anyway, it’s certainly funny to just look back and see where we were and what we were doing. A lot of this stuff I don’t even remember, and a lot of the footage the band isn’t necessarily going to see, at least before a couple of weeks, when it’s going to happen. I’ve only seen a few portions of it, so it could be a surprise for me too. I think it will be a really fun thing to do.

We were just trying to come up with something that would be different for January 1st. Last year, while that show turned out to be pretty good, I think, overall, it was certainly one of the most difficult for us as a band, feeling like we were being probed about it. We kind of wanted to redo the vibe a little bit for the January 1st event this year, and do something that was fun and different and that was a little more laid back. I mean, obviously we have the open bar, so those who will continue partying are encouraged to do that. I think in general it will be a little bit more of a laid back thing, it will probably be over by 11 o’clock, so it gives people a little bit of a recovery period, and then we come back January 2nd with one final rock show there.

Moving into 2016, you guys will play a pretty special show with Josh Redman where you’ll do an all-improv set. How did the idea come about and how did he receive it?

It was very funny—when I brought this up to Josh after we kind of talked about it as a band and said, “Okay, let’s try something, and we’ll give this a shot. We have so many fans that are always saying, ‘You should do more improv, or have a night where you guys go off…’” We figured, number one, it would be cool to do in Madison because it’s a Midwest town that we’ve played for years and years and a lot of our diehard fans are within driving distance of it and the fact that it’s a two-night stand gives us the opportunity to do plenty of other things throughout the two nights.

When I wrote Josh, he was like, “Yeah, in theory this sounds like a cool idea, but you guys are so in tune with each other with the improv thing, I wonder if I might just feel left out.” And I told him, “Dude, you are the one person that gets what we do up there more than anyone else, so don’t even start with that.” And I told him as well, “Really, you can come out and play as much as you want, but if you just want to come out for like fifteen or twenty minutes of it, that’s totally perfect. We’ll play a couple of other songs throughout the night, don’t feel pressure that you have to insert yourself for all of it.” But I definitely think having him as a voice to kind of break up the—you know, we’re probably shooting for about an hour of improv total to make this up—I think it would be really great to have him somewhere there in the middle and break it up a little bit.

Speaking of collaborations, you guys have a bit of a bromance with TAUK these days. What do you like about those guys?

There’s a lot of things with support bands. And one of them is, do they get how to work with our crew, and making that process very seamless, and they definitely do. Number two, are they cool people to hang out with, just hardworking, and kind of in our vein of taking the music seriously, but not taking yourself too seriously? And the third thing would be, do our fans like it, and do their fans like us? So when you have all of those things kind of mixing in, then we get a great response from our fan base, and our fans are really into their sets. Our fans have been known to be kind of picky about support acts that we bring out with us, so whenever we find somebody that really checks all those boxes, it’s like, okay, let’s keep a good thing going. In doing a couple of after-shows with different people from each band, it’s just another one of those fun, low-pressure things that we can do and have some fun with each other after the main event.

Jumping back briefly to the Redman idea—someone checked you on Twitter about ripping off Phish’s Drive-In Jam idea with this all-improv set. You said you listened to the band’s set at Magnaball. From a musician’s perspective, what’d you think?

There was a video, too, which I didn’t see, but it seemed like a very cool artistic statement. Maybe the connection here is that, I feel like our band—we’ve kind of struggled with that line of some nights it’s more of a party and some nights it’s more of an art thing, and some nights it’s a mix of both, and that sort of vibe. So I think, just as far as it being just a good challenge for us as musicians, I think it’s just as much of an exercise as us working on this stuff just as much as it is like, “Let’s go out and put a performance on.” Kind of how I felt about Stew Art when we did those, except those were a little more fan-driven and now this is all coming from us. I think that you saw how well the fan-base responded to that set. And maybe that just gave us a little more confidence, like, “Okay, this is something that could work.”

We’ve talked about various ideas like this for a few years, so it’s not like this was something that was brand new. But we finally got to the point where it was like, “Okay, I think this is the time to pull the trigger on this.” And the fact that another band like Phish out there did something pretty cool like that on a car—and they’ve done stuff like this before that too, where they’ll like cruise around on a flatbed at their event, so it’s not like this concept is totally new for them either. But the fact that it’s fresh in people’s minds and was really well-received I think only bodes well for us to try something like this. And obviously the music will be completely different from what they’re doing, but I certainly think the concept is a great thing and a good way to keep things fresh for a band that’s played over two thousand shows together.

Last question: Your thoughts on the Ween reunion?

I’m so happy. I’m glad that those guys are getting back together and making music again, I think that their fans will appreciate them even more now. And also—this is kind of a really cool, little footnote–but hopefully Umphrey’s McGee played a little bit of a role in opening that possibility back up to Aaron. The first night when we got together and we were practicing stuff together, we worked on things to make sure we were like airtight going into it, we wanted to be really solid as a backing band, and just to be in a little rehearsal trailer and to see him light up and just be so happy singing these songs with us, it kind of gave me a little glimmer of hope, like, “Okay, maybe this will be one of the little steps that will lead him back to going back to making music with Ween.” I hope the best for those guys, Mickey’s been really cool to us over the years, too, and we obviously know Dave Dreiwitz, and a couple of other people that are part of that crew and the band. There are a lot of different connections now. The music is so great and you just hope that they’ll be able find some common ground. I mean those guys were obviously best friends for a long time, and everybody changes, and that happens, but now hopefully they’re back on this path and they can play their music for more people.

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