Circling back from RANA’s reunion to its origins, for those readers are just now hearing about the band, can you provide a little backstory about how you, Ryan and Matt first started playing music together in the Princeton, N.J. area and eventually formed the band a little over 25 years ago?

Ryan, Matt and I were hanging out at Matt’s house after school––we were sophomores, juniors in high school—and he had a drum kit. One of us said, “Hey, let’s play a song.” And I think Ryan said, “Well, what should I play?’ and we were like, “You should play the drums.” Matt already played keyboard, and I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll play guitar.”  That’s how RANA started—we just enjoyed playing songs together.

We played together for more than a year and even played some gigs. Then somebody introduced us to Scott. He came to play with us, set up his guitar and, after the first thirty seconds of  hearing Scott play guitar, I was like, “I’m gonna play bass.” [Laughs.] We didn’t have a bass player at the time, so I was like, “I am finished playing guitar.” And we never really ever looked back. 

Scott was already in the William Paterson jazz program at the time and after we graduated, we all went to college in different places. The entire time we were in college, we were touring on the weekends and during our breaks, building the career. And then, when we got out of college, we really went on the road. We were able to manage the education and the rock, even if that sometimes meant that we missed out on some fun campus stuff, although we would play at everyone’s colleges as well,

Early on, you and Scott concurrently played together in RANA and with Tom Marshall, as he was getting his musical career outside of Phish off the ground. How did you end up joining his group, Amfibian?

I was friendly with Tom Marshall from Princeton Day School. When I was a senior, I sought him out as Phishhead—I knew that he had gone to Princeton Day School as well—and I had a senior project to do. So I reached out and said, ‘Hey, I go to Princeton Day School and I like Phish. Would you help me with my senior project?,” which was gonna be an album. He was so gracious with his time and helped me write lyrics and write songs. It all culminated in a little duo performance, him and I, in front of my school, playing this music as a senior.

So I owe a lot to Tom. And then a little bit later on, he was forming his band, he asked me to play guitar. He and I had already played music together from this high-school project, so he asked me to join the first version of that project. Scott, of course, knew a lot of these same musicians as well, and he also ended up joining. I actually met Scott via Tom Marshall. After getting to know him through Amfibian, I asked him if he’d come play with RANA. He came in one day to jam and that was it. I moved immediately to bass and Scott took the lead guitar role.

In my mind, RANA will always be associated with the Wetlands. You were one of the final bands to come through the club’s ranks before it closed in 2001 and were something of the venue’s final house band. I heard you met Jake Szufnarowski, the club’s talent buyer, when you sat near each other at a Phish show and started playing the venue regularly. How did the club contribute to RANA’s growth?

It was the very natural progression of promotion that the Wetlands was so good at doing. You’d

score a gig in the basement on a Wednesday night and, if you brought enough people to fill the bar, then you would get a Thursday night gig down there. Then you’d move on to a Saturday and then, once you had packed it down there, you’d move upstairs.

Jake was booking it at the time and he was really interested in a jamband that was also a rock band. We jammed but we also had these harder songs, so it was a slightly different thing than maybe the more spacey stuff that was happening. That appealed to what he was into, and Pete [Shapiro, who owned the club] was also on board with helping us find more of an audience. Looking back, I’m so honored to be one of the last bands to come up through that program. And then, after the city suffered a terrible tragedy [9/11] and we also lost Wetlands, RANA was trying to find a new home venue. We ended up playing a bunch of different rooms, and CBGB became our next home.

I loved that those were our two home venues in the city; it showed two different sides of our music. So many times, we’d play these really late shows at Wetlands, and we’d be loading out, and I’d be driving back to New Jersey as the sun’s coming up. And at CB’s, I remember there being just a huge mono sound system. There was no left and right channels, it was just straight ahead, everything coming out of all the speakers. And that’s just pure rock.

In more recent years, the jamband scene seems to have circled back to some more traditionally rooted improvisational acts, between Billy Strings, Goose and Eggy. But for a while, the scene seemed to be leaning a little more toward the rock and indie worlds and even this new crop of bands cover that material, using it as the launch pad for improvisation. RANA were one of the first bands in the modern jam scene to bring in a more alternative, punk aesthetic. Did you always have an interest in combining those two worlds?

There’s a couple different things at play. First of all, there’s a lot of people that were doing really fantastic bass-y, more traditional jamband stuff back then. Our interests were a little different and Scott was coming from a more rock background. I loved Phish, but I also loved Led Zeppelin, and I know that’s the same for Ryan and Scott. But you’re in a scene where there are a lot of bands doing something similar, and one thing we could do was we could make it a bit more high octane. We could make it a little bit harder. We could still improvise, but we were improvising at a different level. And I think that when Jake came onboard to help us and manage us, he recognized that, and he pushed us even further to explore that part of ourselves. And then, if you think about it backwards, it actually served us really well because, when the jam scene sort of lost its home in Wetlands, we could go on to CBGB’s, Mercury Lounge or places like that and still rock it. We even played with Skynyrd.

In terms of the current nature of the band, I love what’s going on in the scene. First of all, I love that Phish is still around, and I love that there’s more prog-rock stuff going on. That really excites me. It’s good to see the jam scene progressing and changing and evolving. 

When we started, we would always play covers pretty accurately. I think that’s probably from the Phish influence, trying to nail the cover, where many people would interpret a cover. I always felt, if you’re gonna learn a whole Ramones song, you’re also gonna learn a bunch of lessons about how the song is put together—the tone of the guitar and all this stuff the Ramones did. And then, inevitably, the next time we would go to write something, that experience of playing the Ramones cover in our set would permeate into the music, and maybe we’d have a super distorted guitar section or something. So we would always try to literally jump into the influences by covering them so we could try and get a little bit of that to brush off onto us.

Speaking of the time RANA opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd, can you retell the story of how you ended up playing with them at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom?

It’s a testament to the fact that we were a well-oiled rock band. [In the fall of 2003], a promoter called us and said, “Is the band in New York today?” And I was like, “Yeah, why?” And they were like, “We have this problem. We’re over at Hammerstein Ballroom, and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s here, and they thought that the promoter was providing a support act, and the venue thought that Skynyrd was traveling with a support act. So we have no one to open Lynyrd Skynyrd’s sold-out Hammerstein Ballroom, and load-in is at 4pm.” And I was like, “Give me 30 minutes.” I called the guys, we just high-tailed it to midtown and we set up. When we hit the stage, I saw on the setlist that was taped to the monitor that “Free Bird” is on the setlist. And I was like, “Man, this is a real rock gig that we walked into here.” I think it was to our credit that we held a 35-minute set opening for Skynyrd in New York City.” Somebody literally, between our songs, yelled “Free Bird,” and it wasn’t ironic.

RANA released a few albums during its original run and continued introducing new material until you stopped touring. For your upcoming run of shows at Sultan Room, are their particular eras of the band you are hoping to spotlight?

Well, one thing we are doing is we are re-releasing our record Subject to Change, which was a live record we recorded at shows between 2002-2003. When we put it out originally, we put out a run of 50 CDs. So, basically, outside of those 50 people, no one’s ever heard this stuff. It’s rip-roaring, awesome versions of these songs from when we were hardocre on the road. So as part of this Sultan Room promotion, we’re finally releasing this album on Spotify, Apple Music and all of that.

We recorded our shows from the Wetlands days. Mixes don’t always come out great from the soundboard because they’re mixing for the room, but we ended up with many shows that sounded awesome, and then we sort of pulled through that and said, “This is the sort of penultimate version of that song.” Maybe it was at the show after Bonnaroo and we were all exhausted, we all kinda just left it all onstage, and so that one take was the take we wanted to use. To be honest with you, it was such a long time ago that even as I’m listening back to it, I’m going, like, “Whoa, this is fire. This is really solid stuff.” So I’m sort of rediscovering it as well because I didn’t have one of the 50 copies. So now I get to listen to it too.

We also have some late-stage songs that we’ve written that have never made it onto a record. At The Sultan Room, we’re gonna do no repeats, so two different shows, and we will definitely get to some of those songs.

Speaking of Bonnaroo, RANA played the inaugural festival in 2002. Joe Russo’s Almost Dead played the most recent installment this past June and I believe Scott and  Dave Dreiwitz, who played that first year with Ween, were the only people who performed at both the first and most recent editions of the festival.

Scott said that to us! He said that someone came to him and told him that he and Dave were the only people that were at the first one and at this one. No one knew what Bonnaroo was gonna be, and if I remember correctly, we played right before Norah Jones—before anyone knew who she was. We’ve had some really cool opportunities to play with people like Norah Jones. One time we were playing at a festival in Atlanta when Avril Lavigne was just coming up. We got bumped from 4 pm to 3 pm because they wanted to put Avril Lavigne on after us, and our agent at the time was like, “Don’t worry, I’m gonna fight back on this. There’s no way that they’re gonna bump you guys earlier.” And we were like, “Nope, don’t touch it, leave it alone. We will happily go on before Avril Lavigne.” I don’t think that they totally understood what was bubbling up. And we ended up playing to a sea of 10,000 people waiting for her, which was so much fun.

It has been several years since RANA has played a show. Though everyone is busy with their careers and families, do you hope these dates are the start of more regular reunions?

Yeah, the last show was about eight years ago, in 2016. I would love to do it more often—here’s hoping that we will.  We’ve had a really great time preparing for the shows, and RANA has given me a lot of opportunities to travel the country and see great things, hang out with my three best friends and get to play some pretty rockin’ music. And so I’m just psyched to have an opportunity to do that again in August.

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