On the H.O.R.D.E. tour in the ‘90s you were on the road with Aquarium Rescue Unit, so I have to ask about the late, great Col. Bruce Hampton. Do you have any memorable experiences with him? Did he do that trick where he guesses your birthday?

He never did. I never asked him to, because I was afraid of how creepy it would have been if he actually did it. I know a lot of people that he did that to. For some reason, the memory I have that sticks out in my mind of Col. Bruce is sitting backstage with him—I don’t even know where—but he was just on an all day rant about Wolf Blitzer. You know the guy from CNN? And Bruce was just going on and on. He was stopping everybody backstage saying, “Can you believe this guy Wolf Blitzer?”

So I stopped him, and I was like, “Bruce, what’s the deal with the Wolf Blitzer thing? What are your thoughts on Wolf Blitzer?” And he was like, “I just think he’s the most mediocre human being.” Like, okay? I mean, he was just so passionate about it. In that day, he was just feeling a very strong feeling about Wolf Blitzer. Bruce was a nice guy. He was a warm person, and he liked to find these amazing young musicians and put them together and see what they could do, basically. He brought happiness into the world.

That’s such a nice way to sum him up. Moving on, Jason Crosby has drifted in and out of GSW’s reunion shows in the past. Is he going to be be a part of this run in August?

I don’t think so. I think he’s out on the West Coast during this run. So I think it’s just the 5 of us. Actually, Pete Levin, who has also played keyboards with us a lot, is going to sit in with us at Peach Fest, I hope. I don’t think Jason is going to be with us.

I know in the last few years you’ve shared the stage with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, so I was curious what that was like. Did you get any pearls of wisdom from them?

What really was thrilling to me about working with Phil is how much he likes to rehearse. I don’t think the Dead rehearsed that much, and maybe the fact that he likes to rehearse a lot now is a reaction to the Dead not having rehearsed enough. But we played at Terrapin Station, which is his club. We played three nights there and so obviously it went without saying that every night was going to be a wholly original setlist and it was going to include Grateful Dead songs and covers, and it was going to possibly include covers that he had never played because he wanted to always be throwing in his new music. And we were going to rehearse all day, we were going to spend a lot of time working on our vocal arrangements because Phil was very excited about the fact that God Street Wine had a lot of harmony singing, just like the Dead.

So we basically rearranged all the harmonies on every song we did. And on the third day, I woke up with this idea that I wanted to do “I Am The Walrus,” and I called Phil in the morning, and I was like, “What would you think of doing ‘I Am The Walrus?’” And there was about 10 seconds of silence on the phone, and I was like “Oh my god, this is a terrible idea, I should’ve never said anything” and he was like “Yes! Let’s do it!”

He still has that spontaneity.

It was such a good feeling…For an encore, we played Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue,” which Phil said he’d never played before. And he was like, “Yeah, it’s a simple song. I can do it.” He’s just all about having fun. He’s Phil Lesh, so what more do you have to prove, really? He does certainly play loud, that’s another thing. Nobody’s telling Phil to turn down.

And what about Bob Weir?

We’ve done a bunch of things with Bob at this point. We played with Bob on Jam Cruise, we did his TRI studio thing, which is awesome. So many bands did that and unfortunately I think because of money they had to shut it down. But we had this album that we did for Geffen Records in 1994, it’s always been our fans’ favorite album. When Geffen got sold to Universal at the end of the 1990s, a lot of the Geffen catalogue went out of print and is not being released, and that includes that album, so we can’t legally distribute it. So we figured we’ll do the next best thing and just recreate it live…

$1.99 Romances.

That’s $1.99 Romances, right. We performed it live at Bob’s studio, and then Bob came out and joined us, and we did four Grateful Dead songs with Bob, and he gave us the rights to release the whole thing as $1.99 Romances (Live at TRI Studios).

How would you say that living in New Orleans impacts your writing style, or how you’re approaching music now?

I don’t know if this actually relates, but I’m really into Steely Dan, and I heard a great quote from Steely Dan the other day. They were from New York, they met at Bard College and they were living in Brooklyn for a while, and they were not very successful. So they relocated to LA, which is where they became successful, and they said that they had to move out to Los Angeles to start writing a whole bunch of songs about New York. So I think that resonated with me a little bit, because I still think of New York and New Jersey. The greater New York area is where I’m from, and if I write about a place, I’m writing about that, not New Orleans so much. I always feel like a visitor in New Orleans. But yeah, you get far away from a place and you can kind of think about it in a different way.

I guess this kind of relates: You guys are considered a New York City band, but some of those really fruitful writing sessions that you did in the ‘90s took place in that house out in Ossining, right? So is it a similar scenario? Where you had to get out of New York to write about New York?

The house in Ossining was when we really learned how to play, as far as I’m concerned. Because we were off in the city, but we were students and we had day jobs so we really could only play for a couple hours in the evening when we lived in the city. But when we moved up to Ossining, all of a sudden we were just making enough money where we didn’t need day jobs and basically on the days we didn’t have gigs, we just played for 12 hours a day. We started sounding much better and our style started changing and I started writing songs that were more fitted to where we were naturally going and it just really came together. I think the first couple of years in New York were sort of a prologue, in a way. I could get a lot more technical about how all the things changed…but a lot changed. It’s great for a band to have that time.

It’s interesting. You guys were all living in the same house back then, and now you guys are literally all over the globe.

But we’ve had common shared experiences that will live with us forever, you know?

God Street Wine’s 30th anniversary is coming up next year. Do you have any plans to celebrate that in a formal way?

I hope so. But honestly, we’re not too good on planning. When we had the 25th anniversary, we released the box set and everything, but all I can really say is we’ll see what happens. It sounds like a good marketing angle.

You always need one of those, you know?

I think that we’ll always play as long as there is an audience and demand for it. As long as a few people on Facebook are clamoring to hear us.

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