In certain ways, your career arc foresaw the current indie-jam movement—you’ve played in both improv-oriented bands as well as more song-driven, Downtown New York projects. What are your roots in the Grateful Dead world?

The indie crossover is rather hysterical now because, if you lived through the ‘90s, you know damn well that wasn’t the case 20 years ago. But it’s fantastic that there’s this crossover now. I worry about the music itself getting a little too diluted and watered down and its original intent forgotten, but that’s another conversation. As for me, I’ve been a Grateful Dead fan for many years. I saw shows in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s. I saw the Jerry Band. So I’ve been into it for a long time.

The music is very much a part of my DNA and that’s where it resides the strongest. By that I mean that in the ‘90s and the early 2000s—and really until CRB started—I didn’t spend my time learning the Grateful Dead catalog in detail, because I was too busy writing my own songs and making my own records with my own name on them. I was doing my best to find my own voice as a musician and chart my own course as a musician so I was never involved in the finer points of learning Grateful Dead songs, because I just had such a wide field of music that I was interested in and I was really trying to write my own. So their music did exist on the DNA level for me. I did listen to it a lot and I did learn some songs, but I learned more about chord changes and actual songwriting from them than I did lead guitar playing, so to speak. I always thought that their songwriting structures and how they put tunes together were so interesting and there was so much to learn there. But I never spent time learning stuff in detail until I started playing with Phil [Lesh] a few years ago, and that came through the CRB. We get to spend time with [former Dead sound engineer] Betty Cantor, who’s out on tour with us now recording. I’ve enjoyed getting to play with Bob the few times that I have, but playing with Phil is mostly what turned my focus to actually learning how to play that music and looking closely at the DNA of that music—which is really a version of looking closely at my own DNA and putting a magnifying glass on that music, what made it tick, what made it work and how I can learn to play and sing it.

I think about how I can possibly bring my own reverent yet—hopefully—soulful approach to it, because with any music that we ever cover, the intent is not to imitate or copy but to find a way to bring it forward and communicate it in a fresh way that has some living quality to it in this moment now. That’s the challenge with Grateful Dead music.

Whenever the CRB does Grateful Dead covers, we do our best to bring our own voices to it. That’s not hard when you have a singer like Chris who stamps his own identity on everything that he touches, because he has such a strong identity as a singer and musician. When I get to play with Phil, it’s just the highest honor for me. I never take it for granted and I do my best to play reverently, but also with my own charged energy to it. Anyway…Grateful Dead music—it fucking rules!

I always felt in The Cardinals, especially those early years, were channeling some of that Dead ethos, but maybe it was just a subconscious thing.

No, that’s definitely true, because Ryan was fairly obsessed with the Grateful Dead as well. The Cold Roses era, extending into Easy Tiger,was based on a lot of that stuff. Ryan wanted to explore those avenues, and that’s really what got me going into it a little more deeply. Phil sat in with The Cardinals at the Hollywood Bowl in 2006, so I met him then. I actually sat in with Phil and Friends in 2008, and that was the first time I played with his band. Then, I had a book of photography—my documentary book of my Cardinals years—and Phil wrote the afterword for that, so I had something of a friendship going with him before the CRB.

The Cardinals were getting into some of those vibes, but really on a vibe level though, not on any specific level. That seemed to put the idea into the air, so I guess something was destined to happen because it didn’t go away. The Cardinals broke up and, a couple years later, up springs the CRB, and Phil is sitting in with us and then Terrapin Crossroads opens and Phil needs musicians to fill out his rosters for Rambles or for the shows at the bar and for all of their activities they have going. I just happened to be standing in the right place with my guitar on when he needed me for some of that stuff. I was more than willing to go where he called me, because he’s such an extremely important figure in our musical lives that the chance to be around him and learn from him as a musician is not one to be ignored. As you know, he is still absolutely playing his ass off, and he can run most 28 year olds into the ground when it comes to stamina and focus and energy. Chris feels the same way.

CRB will have released two albums by the end of the year, Any Way You Love, We Know How You Feel and the If You Lived Here, You Would Be Home by Now EP. It seems like a really fertile period for the group. Can you pinpoint a moment things really started to gel on that front? 

It’s really just a product of being together for five/six years and having built some confidence up. The beginning was simply the beginning. You don’t have your legs under you yet. On the other hand, there are some bands that come out of the gate fully formed, make a brilliant debut record and spend the rest of their careers trying to chase that. That’s not us. We had to build up to where we are now and earn our stars. So on this record, some of our personal leanings come forward more and create a cohesive whole. For instance, on “Narcissus Soaking Wet,” you immediately you hear these P-Funk style vibes coming through, and that really is primarily Adam’s influence. Chris is a major [George] Clinton devotee, but it is really one of Adam’s main influences, and you hear that coming to the foreground—we had never done anything like that before. Then, with a song like “Forever as the Moon,” you hear this Beggars Banquet [1968 Rolling Stones album] thing coming through—which, OK, in relation to Chris’ voice, no one’s surprised—but in this song you hear more of the subtle layers coming through.

Moving to the EP, there’s a song like “Sweet Lullaby” with that country vibe. That comes a little bit more from Chris and me; he and I share a deep love of the lost singer-songwriters and country-rock artists of the golden ‘70s era, people like Gene Clark, Steve Young, Paul Siebel. There’s so many great, obscure records that exist in this Light in the Attic reissue generation that we’re in now that still very few people know about, so a song like that comes from a shared love that Chris and I have of songs and artists like that. “Roan County Banjo” puts it all together; there’s a little bit of the psych-country, our San Francisco influences like Quicksilver [Messenger Service] or even more LA stuff like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. Adam manages to sneak his funk in there, Tony [Leone] gets his Band-esque Levon [Helm] pocket in there and the rest takes care of itself. There are a lot of things coming together in a couple of records here.

Our new rhythm section has changed things dramatically, too, no question about it. We had an excellent rhythm section before. George [Sluppick] and Muddy [Mark Dutton] were founders of the band and they helped write the blueprint for what we’re doing now, but with Tony and Jeff Hill, we found two people who already knew each other and have played with each other for a long time and have a friendship that stands outside of the CRB. They didn’t become friends or meet each other through this band; they already knew each other, and there’s a strength to that that’s really apparent in what we’re doing now. They’re just a great rhythm section together and they’ve brought such a deeper pocket to our group. They’re two world-class musicians, simple as that. No band is going anywhere fast without a great rhythm section—it’s just not going to happen. At a certain point, if a band doesn’t have a great rhythm section, there’s going to be a reckoning. Lucky for us, we have a truly superb rhythm section and we feel like we can go anywhere with these guys; they can play anything. Tony is not only a great drummer, but also a well-rounded musician—he plays mandolin, he’s a good singer and he’s even writing a little bit with us now. He hears not just drum parts; he hears the song. He hears and feels the bigger picture of what a song or a band is supposed to be, and it’s the same thing with Jeff. I’ve known Jeff for many years. He’s played on four of my solo records, and we were in a band together 10-12 years ago that made three records. Jeff is not only a great bass player but also an engineer. He’s a producer, he has tremendous studio skills, and he’s a great upright player and great singer.

All of these ancillary skills—not just the bass playing and drumming—that’s what makes a musician great for a band. There are individual musicians who are great as players on their own but they’re terrible in bands, because bands are all relational. Some of the greatest virtuoso musicians are not meant to be band guys, and the CRB is very much a band in the real sense of the word. Anyone that plays in this band or comes around us has to be a true band guy or girl. In our new rhythm section we have both: virtuoso players and strong band personalities.

Who played bass on the album?

A guy named Ted Pecchio. He had played bass for Susan Tedeschi’s group a long time. He comes from the Tedeschi Trucks world. He played with Col. Bruce [Hampton], too, for a long time.

Shifting to Circles Around the Sun, you have a few shows scheduled in the next few months. The project started as simply the house music for Fare Thee Well, so what has the process of adapting that music to a live setting been like?

We record the music entirely live so, as a matter of fact, taking it out live and playing it is not hard at all. Re-creating it takes nothing. There’s no overdubs that we have to cover, no extra musicians that we have to get to cover all the parts that were on the record, because we recorded every bit of that music live in the studio in two days without one overdub. Reproducing the sound is very easy, but on the other hand I was reticent to play shows with this group last year because I felt like in the afterglow of Fare Thee Well, there was this Grateful Dead fever that struck the nation and it seemed like people who would’ve never been into this before were suddenly claiming themselves lifelong fans. Something felt a little off about that to me, and I didn’t want to exploit it by jumping on the Grateful Dead fever 2015 bandwagon just because people reacted so well to the music that we made for them. It just felt better to wait and see if, once the fever died down, there was still interest in the Circles Around the Sun music, then we would consider playing it live. We were asked to play Lockn’ this year, and that said to me that the music had a life of its own beyond the Fare Thee Well fever.

There was another art of playing that music live that I was a little concerned about, which was whether it would translate live or not, because the music was not meant to be played live as a band—it wasn’t made to be released, it wasn’t anything. It was only made to be played at the Fare Thee Well shows on the screens on the sides of the stage, and that’s a totally different application than taking it out live in front of people. Some of those pieces of music are over 20-minutes long; they’re very, very patient, and several minutes will go by with not much happening in that music.

In many ways, it’s not the most exciting music in the world and it wasn’t made to be. What’s cool about that recorded music is that you can turn it on and it sounds pretty good and you can walk away from it for a while and do some gardening or whatever and have it in the background and forget about it. But then if you feel like turning your attention back toward it, it’s interesting enough that it will engage you, but you can go in and out of that music if you want to. I think that’s great on a recorded level, but as far a live show goes, I wasn’t sure if that would fly or not. But doing that live show, we decided not to try to falter any of the music to please a crowd—we just think it can be background music, a soundtrack to a party for people to dance to or trip to or just hang out with their friends to. The focus isn’t really on any of the band members at all or on any kind of virtuosity or shredding—or even songs—but really on these wide-open palettes of improvisation for people to either get into or not.

The first show went really well. We’re excited to do more and we’ll see how it goes, but the implication of the music was the Grateful Dead. We made it for them, and the way I approached it was to try to create music that Grateful Dead fans can connect to and feel some familiarity with in terms of the sound, being a familiar sound but not laced with such mimicry that it becomes a turn off. To pay true respect to Grateful Dead music is to do your own thing with it, because the Grateful Dead were all about doing their own thing. That’s why people love them. They very much did their own thing in the face of everything else that was going on in the world. These were truly individual thinkers, and that’s why we love them and that’s why they endure. To just copy them is antithetical to what they were all about.

There was a delicate line to walk when making the Circles Around the Sun music. You can feel that it was a nod and tribute of sorts but not so much so that there couldn’t exist a new identity. So I think it’s possible that we may have unwittingly achieved that goal. That’s what I was after, but I had no idea when we made it if we had done it or not. I’m still not totally sure, but people are telling me that we have, which very nice to hear. It’s an honor to have done it and be actually making jam music and that’s truly jam music. Like I said, some of those pieces of music were 15-, 20-, 25-minutes long. I never—and I know I’m speaking for Adam, too—we never would’ve done this five years ago, meaning that we learned this stuff by being in the CRB and through playing with Phil. It’s learning the art of the jam and how to really conduct a jam and how to have the patience that’s required to truly play beautiful music and not just show all your cards in your first hand. It takes a lot of work. If you put 10,000 hours into your instrument to get where you are now, you gotta put in another 20,000 hours to learn what I’m talking about. Within the last five/six years within the life of the CRB, there’s been multiple rounds of 10,000 hours all over again to try to further us and improve and learn to communicate better and deepen our artistic lives. Circles Around the Sun is an accident—well, maybe it’s not an accident… It’s another product of the work that we’ve put in.

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