photo: Andrew Blackstein

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Scott Metzger has been a known quantity in improvisational rock circles for over thirty years, growing to household name status by playing with the likes of Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (JRAD) and LaMP, the jazz/funk trio he formed in 2018 with half of the Trey Anastasio Band’s rhythm section. He’s one of the most tasteful players around, emphasizing fundamentals over flash and crafting his tone the old-fashioned way – through tube amps and a small but mighty set of analog effects – like a painter blends colors on a palette.

Metzger is as humble as he is talented, expressing gratitude for where music has taken him and ever appreciative to those who contributed to his musical upbringing. He continues to play with many of them, including Chris Harford, whose Band of Changes has counted Metzger, as well as JRAD bandmates Dave Dreiwitz and Joe Russo, as members over the years. Like so many pioneers of the improvisational rock scene, his musical story begins in a small town in New Jersey.

SM: I grew up in Lambertville, a very small town in Central New Jersey. The first concert I went to was in 1993, when I was in junior high – I saw the Ramones at City Gardens in Trenton, a club that isn’t there anymore – and I felt an energy that night I’d never felt before. After that, I became obsessed about wanting, needing, a guitar and saved up money from my landscaping job to buy one. I spent god knows how many hours teaching myself to play since there wasn’t a whole lot else to do in my town besides get into trouble. I was a punk rock kid, so I started with “Blitzkrieg Bop” and as many other Ramones tunes as I could, then I think I learned about half the Misfits catalog in my first year of playing.

I was really lucky to live right across the river from a really special town called New Hope, Pennsylvania, which had a really thriving and inspiring artist and musician scene, and I came up in the sweet spot of an era. There’s still a small club there called John & Peter’s, and that’s where I started playing once I was old enough to lie about my age well enough that they’d let me in. Over time, I got to know people like Chris Harford and the Ween guys – Mickey and Aaron, Dave and Claude, Andrew Weiss – and wound up playing a lot of shows with them and other friends I made in the area. Playing with these dudes really established a foundation for me in terms of what’s important in music: what’s good, what isn’t, how to do a gig, and how not to.

When I was 18 or 19, two friends and I started an instrumental trio called F-Hole and developed a small regional following. One night we were playing Small World Coffee in Princeton – it’s still there, a great place that has a real community scene that supports the arts – and Trey Anastasio happened to be there with Tom Marshall. They stayed for the whole set. When we finished Trey came right up to me, introduced himself, and wanted to talk guitar stuff – who I was listening to, etc. It turned out we had a shared love for Marc Ribot’s Los Cubanos Postizos record, which had just come out. I didn’t know it, but he was feeling me out as a potential guitarist for Tom’s new band, Amfibian, which Tom wound up asking me to join. That would turn out to be my first real touring gig, so I was really fortunate to start out playing rooms like the Wetlands, Higher Ground in Burlington, which was brand new back then, and the Middle East in Boston. Everything sold out instantly, lines around the block… the works. It was a trip.

MH: Amfibian only played 25 or so gigs, right? So how did you get from there to here?

SM: That’s right – it wasn’t a full on touring band or anything like that, though that came soon enough when my Amfibian bandmate, Andrew Southern, invited me to jam with some of his high school buddies in a band called RANA. I wound up joining, and we put together an album that came out pretty well, especially for one that we totally DIY’d. We played a lot regionally, including a lot of shows at the Wetlands, where I met and got to know a ton of other great musicians I’d wind up playing with down the road: Joe Russo, Marco Benevento, Tom Hamilton… Anyway, our little album (cd, actually) somehow wound up in the hands of Buck Williams, a big-time booking agent/manager out of Nashville, TN whose Progressive Global Agency worked with Widespread Panic & R.E.M. at the time. He reached out, we headed down to Nashville, and he signed us to his agency. We were unbelievably lucky – after 30 years in the business, I can say how rare it is for anybody like that to seek you out as an unknown quantity. He signed us, and we spent the next 5 or 6 years touring the country in a van playing 150-200 shows a year.

The whole experience was awesome, but I wound up in bad shape after being on the road so long. I knew I had to get sober, which turns out to be one of the most important decisions I’ve ever made, and I decided to step away from touring for a while. I spent about two years staying local, teaching, studying, and practicing, which was great because I have an insatiable appetite for musical knowledge. But I eventually realized that I just missed playing gigs, so I spent the next few years doing what would essentially be considered session work in New York City. It wasn’t uncommon to play four nights a week at four different clubs, with four different artists. It really sharpened my musical abilities since I had to be “on” in a very specific, supportive role every night. Carrying an amp up & down a floor flight walkup every night – it really taught me what it means to be a working musician.

Then one night in 2013, Joe Russo & I had dinner in Park Slope, and he invited me to join him for a night of playing Grateful Dead tunes at Brooklyn Bowl: he said he was gonna call it “Almost Dead,” which I thought was a great name. I wasn’t super familiar with the Dead’s catalog, but I knew I could learn the music after so many years of learning so many other artists’ tunes. I said, “I’m in,” and here we are 12 years later. The band has gone WAY above and beyond any expectations I may have had, and the audience continues to be outrageously open-minded and supportive. I’m incredibly grateful to Joe for bringing me into the fold.

MH: What do you think it is about the Dead’s music that allows for a band like JRAD to exist?

SM: I think it comes down to improvisation being part of the DNA of the Grateful Dead sound. There are plenty of bands that might extend a couple of solos live, but group improvisation isn’t really part of their approach to music. With the Dead, it’s baked in. In some ways, what we’re doing with JRAD is part of a jazz lineage of taking songs that have been around forever and pulling something new out of them. The whole point of playing jazz standards is to use your musical imagination to take a song that’s been played thousands of times and come up with a new way to perform it that nobody else has done before. We’re just being ourselves and playing the music the way we want to play it. And of course the songbook is amazing, both the music and the lyrics. Robert Hunter and John Barlow had amazing vision and an unbelievable ability to express themselves with words. I was lucky enough to play with Phil Lesh many times over the years, and he always found new things in those songs 50 years after he wrote them. That’s the mark of a great song & a true songwriter.

MH: You’ve had a lot of experience joining bands with established rhythm sections: Marco and Joe have been playing together since high school, and Russ and Ray have been playing in a duo since their earliest days with TAB. What’s that been like for you?

SM: It’s funny, I think it suits my personality really well. I like it when there’s a foundation that’s already set, musically, and I don’t have to be in control: then I can come in and add something to it as opposed to building it up from nothing. Both things are great, but I really enjoy coming in and being the new guy.

I’ve been lucky to play with some amazing musicians who are really welcoming and inclusive. I’ve always thought the best musicians are the ones who take the music very seriously, but don’t take themselves too seriously. Willing to have an open mind about where the music they’re playing can go. That’s how the best music happens, when there’s that spirit of everyone being on equal footing and there’s no hierarchy going on. That’s what it was like the first time I played with John Medeski, Billy Martin, and Nels Cline. Those guys are masters and have been improvising together for 30 years, and I was definitely the new guy, but they were so welcoming and inclusive. From the first note, it felt like a band.

It was the same thing with Russ and Ray. We got together in Vermont in 2018 and played a gig, and it was immediately obvious that we had something special. Now, years later, we’re doing 60 gigs a year all over the country. It’s become a really important part of my life.

MH: What’s the biggest difference between playing in an organ trio like LaMP versus a guitar trio like WOLF!?

SM: I can play less and leave more space in an organ trio. The sound of organ and drums is just so awesome, and it doesn’t need much else. It’s unique, too. Meaning, most bands have a bass player, but not many have an organ holding down the basslines. And the way Ray does it is so unique and fresh. The band would sound completely different if we had a bass player. The drum, guitar, organ trio is a really pleasant sound to me. There are a lot of nights that I just let those guys play for a while and I just sit out and listen because it doesn’t need anything else. It just sounds so good.

MH: LaMP has been playing a lot more shows lately. I love the live record you guys did, and I know you’re releasing your second album next month. What’s it been like putting together the second album as compared with the first?

SM: It’s been really great. We’ve been playing a lot of the new material live, which has been really helpful in terms of flushing it out and seeing what’s working and what’s not. We recorded the new record up in Vermont at Ben Collette’s studio, and Chris Connors in Brooklyn mixed it. Those guys make a great team, and made it sound really great. We’re all really excited about it.

MH: What do you feel like are some of the main differences for you between playing in LaMP versus JRAD?

SM: LaMP is a very listenable, pleasant, and accessible kind of sound that really stays within the parameters of the fundamentals of music. JRAD is more of a free-for-all where nothing is off limits. It’s like prying open the top of your head with a can opener: any and every idea that comes out is fair game. LaMP focuses more on the groove and the momentum of that groove as opposed to JRAD, where I think the focus is more on getting into unchartered territory and group improvisation – pushing the limits of what we can get away with as a collective, ha.

Joe and Russ are both drumming machines…but different types of machines. Russ is really like the nuts and bolts of drumming, and Joe’s thing is a little bit more “anything goes.” I can lean more into being a guitar player with LaMP, whereas JRAD my approach is maybe more about colors and imagination. It’s a different kind of focus.

I’ve always thought the drummer is the most important person in a band and the fact that Joe and Russ are the two drummers I get to play with the most – well, what can I say? I’m a lucky dude!

MH: You’re playing a lot of shows between LaMP and JRAD. What’s life on the road look like for you now as compared with 20 years ago?

SM: It’s nothing too exciting, I’ll tell you that, ha. The way we roll with LaMP is that Russ and Ray drive the van with the gear, but there’s so much gear that I actually don’t fit in the van, so I drive myself. So I’ve been doing a LOT of solo driving lately, and it’s been really nice to just pick a couple of albums or audiobooks and to really get deep into them.

MH: Any standout records or audiobooks from the last year?

SM: My 2024 record of the year was definitely Wes Montgomery’s Boss Guitar. It’s just unbelievable: I could listen all day. That’s something I always try to keep in mind – I’d like my playing to be something that someone could hear and just say, “I could listen to that guy all day.” I want my playing to be pleasant and uplifting, and at the same time interesting and surprising, and have all the fundamentals of music that I consider important. Wes was on that, man. I don’t think you can do much better than Wes Montgomery.