Leading off your last comment, the core of Lettuce came together over the summer in 1992, and you have remained friends and collaborators for almost 25 years. What are your memories of that initial summer?
EC: When we came together at Berklee it was almost magical. It is this extreme coincidence that we even ran into each other when we were 16— it was basically a camp, a five-week summer program—you go check out if you want to go to college. We were naturally attracted to each other and found out that we were all into the same type of music, which was part of it.
AS: One of the most beautiful things about that time in our lives and that program and environment is that everyone is so hungry to expand their horizons as musicians and as human beings. You’re grown, you’re turning into a real human being when you’re 16 years old—your frontal lobe is developing.
EC: You hear this different music, this stuff you’ve never heard before. You’re eating it up like, “Oh my god, let me hear more of that.” Just devouring music all the time. We listened to all this different music together—Jimi Hendrix, psychedelic stuff, classic and jazz. We all realized that we were all really deep into the funk, and it was some serious, rare group funk stuff. We just started going from there. After that program, we kept in touch on the phone and were constantly asking each other what we were listening to. I was in California and most of these guys were in New York—Adam and Adam were living pretty close to each other so they kept in really close touch.
AS: I met Adam Deitch on the very first evening that I got to the five-week program. He lived right down the hall from me on the seventh floor. Then, when Berklee was over, he was about 20-25 minutes from me, and it was right at the age when we were all starting to drive. I’d go over to his house in Nyack, NY, and make beats with CX, one of the greatest rappers to ever live. Then I actually decided to go with another school instead of Berklee. I was a year ahead of them in high school because I’m born in October, so I started there. But Adam convinced me to transfer to Berklee—which I did—and I met them all there. There was definitely, one hundred percent a connection, especially for Jesus and Deitch when they first met.
EC: I was in Cali. I was supposed to do three more years of high school, but I knew you were all going to go back in two years because I was a freshman when I was in that program and you were all sophomores. I knew I had to get out of high school. I was like, “If I let them go a year, they’re going to find someone for bass. I’m not going out like that, I’m finishing high school in two years.” I did two years of my high school in one year and I was back in Cali plotting this— “I’m going to meet up with those guys, we’re playing music!” We all worked toward it and figured it out and somehow magically made it back there.
Aside from your horn section, the only instrument that has changed hands in the band’s evolution is your keyboard chair. How has that role changed as the band has progressed?
EC: We had Jeff Bhasker for the first 10 years of the band and then Neal joined after that.
AS: Nick Kasper was around at first and helped come up with our name. Then we had Mike Butler for our first few gigs. But really Jeff was our first keyboardist.
EC: There was a decade of keyboard player number one who is a genius friend of ours that produces all kinds of music and works with Kanye West and just about everybody. He produced the new Mark Ronson album, which is incredibly funky [In our recent interview with Bhasker he describes the project as a callback to his time with Lettuce]. Neal coming in was sort of a gradual process—Neal was hawking the gig the whole time. He was always around and it was just kind of natural that, when Jeff left the band, Neal jumped right in. He’s added a great deal of awesomeness to the band—he’s a phenomenal bass mind and a bass player on the keyboards. Ever since he joined the band, I’ve been constantly forcing bass lessons out of him every day. He teaches me all kinds of cool bass stuff all the time. We work together and then to work out parts between organ and bass is really cool. Neal adds tons and tons of elements to the band—I can’t even tell what he’s doing over there. He’s a phenomenal musician in every way. We love him so much and he’s our brother. We all get along really well and what he adds to the band is texturally so amazing. I’m listening onstage to what Shmeeans and Neal and quite a few of them, what they are doing with their effects and textures. It makes it so deep—I really, really appreciate the deepness of it. One thing that has not been stated that much is that we’ve always been a psychedelic band, even though we’ve been funky and we keep that really straight a lot of times. A lot of times we’re just a straight-shooting psychedelic band that’s giving you the straight stuff. We all enjoy letting the music take your mind and continuing the work that Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia and all these great experimentalists have done in the field. We all appreciate it so much.
More than many bands in the psychedelic-rock scene, Lettuce has always been able to move in and out of the jamband world and into the hip-hop, funk and even pop scenes.
AS: Some of my other musician friends have said, “How do I play jamband music?” I’ve always told them that I don’t really believe there is such a thing, you just play the music you were meant to play and kind of a jamband steam will gravitate towards you if you’re playing something honest and something beautiful and something spiritual where everyone is starting to play together. I really think that the jamband scene is almost defined by the audience and not necessarily by the music, because these people who are in the jamband scene are the music. If you pick a random jamband fan, they might love rock and roll, they might love jazz, they might love hip-hop, they might love funk, they might love songwriting. They are generally extremely open people and I think that we kind of parallel that because we’re very open people and, really, just musicians.
In terms of your worlds colliding, the 2014 Bonnaroo SuperJam feels like the moment where you had your collaborations from both the jam and hip-hop sections of your resume onstage together.
EC: That was really an awesome moment for me, and it was actually my birthday. I was standing on stage with Method Man, Redman and all my friends, like Shmeeans and Deitch. We had three keys that night including Nigel Hall which was really nice texturally. At one point I was standing next to Ghostface and he’s doing his little thing during the song that was just incredible and playing it all live with the band. To me, getting a hip-hop track to sound right with a live band is one of the more difficult things to accomplish—to really make it sound like the DJ just went up and pressed play on the actual track that that dude is used to rapping on top of and being a band and not having many samples. In order to make the drums and the rhythm tracks sound right, you have to use your ears really well—you have to listen really close. We spent a few hours trying to get those things as dialed in as we could. I really had fun. I thought we did a good job, and everyone had fun at that thing.
Though Kraz is still involved with Lettuce, he’s taken a backseat on the road recently. How has his absence changed the band’s direction?
EL: Basically it’s been a double-guitar band for years and years, since we’ve started. When Shmeean started playing his and Kraz’s parts together, I was like, “wait a minute.” My ears were like, “what’s happening?” And I look over and he’s playing both parts. It’s pretty awesome because we adapt to whatever situation we’re faced with.
AS: Kraz has been playing with us for years and years, but he has all these other aspirations and things he wants to do that he can’t do on the road. It became a decision for us that either we don’t really play or we figure out how to do this. We kind of came to the decision that we want to play. People in the Lettuce world aren’t familiar with me as a soloist because I’ve been playing all the rhythm stuff for so many years, but on other gigs I’ve played solo with Robert Randolph and Lady Gaga, and I had to take solos in stadiums. So maybe people just weren’t really familiar. I hope that they’re getting a little more familiar and they’re enjoying it, because I certainly am. Getting to go back and forth between the two roads, flipping back between rhythm and leads and playing two different parts, it’s very hard for my brain. As a unit I will just say that Deitch, Jesus and myself, just as a trio of the bass player, guitar player and drummer, have probably been in like ten trillion, billion, hundred thousand gig situations aside from Lettuce—from being a house band at [the Berklee music haunt] Wally’s Café to backing DJs to recording with The Game. We’re so comfortable playing with each other. I just think in any format, if you put us three together, no matter what, something special is going to happen.
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