Photo by Jay Blakesberg
The North Shore of Oahu provided the locale last spring when the members of ALO convened to work on their latest studio album. There the four musicians (bassist Steve Adams, guitarist Dan Lebowitz, keyboard player Zach Gill and drummer Dave Brogan) were joined by their former UCSB college rival/collaborator Jack Johnson to record the follow up to 2007’s Roses & Clover. Johnson, who also enlists Gill in his own four piece touring band, produced the disc and eventually co-authored a few of the songs. The resulting effort, Man of The World blends pop hooks, a sense of the sublime and a feel for the absurd. In the following conversation, Adams outlines ALO’s path to Oahu, with stops along the way for Free Range horns, masks and sarongs as well as a wedding gig at the Santa Barbara Zoo for the Animal Liberation Orchestra.
My initial impressions of ALO were that you guys were some sort of avant collective. I can remember receiving the first Animal Liberation Orchestra disc in a red jewel case with cool artwork and I’d heard that when you guys played live it was much more than a show, it was a performance. Does that sound accurate or was that a misguided take from the East Coast based on limited knowledge?
To say an avant collective, I don’t think we ever were quite that far down that side of the spectrum. We kind of came up together studying music and we studied jazz in college and got into all types of music. When the Animal Liberation Orchestra formed at the end of college it was definitely an experimental outfit but it wasn’t quite an avant collective like a John Zorn thing or Sex Mob. It was more playful, sort of a funk orchestra with humor. We had this horn section called the Free Range Horns and we would play with that. We’d shackle them and then free them during the set and there were lots of theatrics and there was a collective spirit to it because we had this 9 piece group and we all brainstormed different ideas of what to do.
That was the end of college and I think that was our most extreme in that way. We did make a record and we did send it out and it might have been in a red jewel case with beads on the side and we silk-screened the covers ourselves. So there was something to that but to the extent that people thought it was an experimental avant garde jazz collective, I don’t think that’s quite what it was.
After you graduated, where did things go from there?
From that point we moved to San Francisco. We left the horn players in college and we picked up with another drummer and kept going as a four piece. Eventually we shortened the name to ALO because it was mouthful and as the Animal Liberation Orchestra we were getting all these questions about vegetarianism and animal rights. So the name evolved to ALO and maybe along with that the music evolved back to our real roots before the end of college. If you listen to our demo from high school it almost sounds like Rush, Van Halen or maybe Stone Temple Pilots. We’ve always been very song-oriented and I think for a moment we got out there and experimented with a lot of different things. After the first record there’s a soundtrack which is also pretty experimental. Then there’s a dance electro record which was influenced by the acid jazz scene in San Francisco and also jambands like the Disco Biscuits and Sound Tribe Sector 9 and some more electronic stuff.
Then we came to Fly Between Falls where we had all these great songs that we’d written and we got Dave Brogan back in the band. He was somebody we were friends with in college and he has incredible songwriting skills. We always felt like we connected on that level. So when he joined back up, we picked all the best songs from the past and put them together for Fly Between Falls and I think Fly Between Falls is the real marker for the return to songs. After that was Roses and Clover and now Man of the World. I think all three records are pretty song-oriented.
I’d also heard you described as a vaudevillian jamband. Is it fair to say that with the transition to named ALO, you curtailed some of those impulses?
I think so. I think we tamed the beast a little bit. For a while, we would do these guerilla tours where we’d book whatever show we could and head out for the middle of the country and Zach he’s always been a real theatrical person. He was in musicals in high school and college and he’s written pieces of rock operas and he has been the musical director for musicals before ALO and the Jack Johnson stuff really kicked in.
So in that period where we were all having side jobs trying to figure out how to be musicians, Zach would make these masks out of paper mache and he was the one that really pushed us to get into this whole vaudevillian theatrical thing. So for a while when we were touring the country as Animal Liberation Orchestra, we’d do our concert and then after, we’d go hit the streets with our acoustic instruments and our masks and sarongs around our naked bodies and put on theatrical performances. So now that I think about it, I understand why people would make that connection.
You describe having non-musical jobs. When was the point where the four of you finally were able to put those aside?
There was a moment in 2002. Animal Liberation Orchestra started in ‘98, our last year in college. Then we took it took to San Francisco in ‘99 and played with this other drummer until 2001. And then 2001 was a year off a bit because Zach had a baby and our drummer really wanted to play bass so everything was breaking off from itself.
Dan and I were real excited about being musicians and being full time on the road so we joined Global Funk Council with Anthony Smith and assorted others. We basically just jumped in their bus and toured for the next four months. And then we would come through San Francisco and we’d have dinner with Zach and he’d say, “Man, I really want to get the band back together and do some touring like you guys are doing.”
In 2002 Zach came to us and said, “Let’s just do it.” That summer Dan and I left Global Funk Council, we picked up a new drummer and Zach bought an RV. Then we hit the road and that was a big moment for us in terms of just going for it. For a couple years we still had to do freelance work and extra gigs. I do a lot of design work and I was doing design work from the road.
So 2002 was the real marker for us and we picked up Dave Brogan that fall. We got a call from Jack to come open for him at the Fillmore in Denver. We hadn’t talked to him for a while and we didn’t have a drummer because our drummer had quit. So we called up Brogan who we played with in college and he was in Seattle and he had just gotten laid off at Microsoft and was sort of looking for a gig. He said, “Yeah, come pick me up.” So we drove to Portland and his girlfriend drove down to Portland to drop him off with us. We rehearsed in a hotel bathroom on the way to the Fillmore. We did that opening slot and that was the first gig back with Brogan and it was opening for Jack too so it was kind of a neat moment. And it just kind of happened from there.
I’m sure you long imagined what life would be like as a full-time touring musician? What has most suprised you now that you’ve achieved that goal?
I think what may be most surprising is the fact that you don’t have to be on the road all the time. I think when we first imagined it, we thought we had to get an RV and a van, throw our stuff in storage and be on the road all the time. In reality that’s a hard lifestyle to sustain. Eventually you’ll have a girlfriend, you might have a wife or a kid and you’re going to need a place to call home just to stay sane. But it’s different for everybody. Some people can just live on the road and do it and be very bohemian about it and we did do that for a while and that’s what I thought the lifestyle would be. But in hindsight you do all that legwork to get your name out there a little bit and then you can scale it back and tailor it a little bit. You can figure out where are the places that really love ALO make sure you go back there once or twice a year. Then you realize people need new music from ALO so let’s go spend time recording and then promoting the album. There’s so many ways to do it and I think every band finds out what works for them but I think what was the biggest surprise to me was that to be a professional musician you don’t have to be on the road 365 days a year.
How would you describe Man of The World in comparison to your last release, Roses and Clover?
It may be obvious to say but it’s an evolutionary step in taking things from that record and every other record we made. I think that one of the things we took from Roses and Clover, part of the process of that record was we had some songs we’d worked out before we went into the studio but we also discovered a few new things in the process of recording and those ended up being the most exciting things for us. “Lady Loop,” “Shine” and even “Roses and Clover” were all new discoveries we wrote because we were jamming and the jam was really cool and somebody had some lyric ideas. So seeing how much we loved that, we really wanted to focus on that approach as much as we could for the next record.
It took a couple of years for us to get into the studio to even try that idea out but leading up to it we said, “Let’s leave things open-ended and leave room for jamming in the studio and the process of discovery.”
I think we did a pretty good job of it. There were a few songs on the new record that were pre-thought but a lot of the songs developed where we were free-playing without any sort of agenda. “Suspended,” the first song on the record, is definitely like that. We came up with that intuitively and in the moment. It’s also the longest song on the record and we decided to open with it. I remember when that decision was on the table, I wondered, “Is that a good idea?” But we all really liked the song, we liked how it turned it out, it was natural-sounding. So we decided to put it up front so people could hear it. “The Champ” was kind of a jam. “I Love Music” was a jam that we pulled out from our archives. It was this random show at the Mystic Hot Springs in Utah and we had this crazy free jam and we listened back and said, “Whoah, that’s really cool.” We never played it except for that time so we took that and developed it a little bit. We definitely got into the crafting element on this record but the source of it is that free play, free jam space.
Was that part of the process, going back and listening to earlier shows for ideas? Was it happenstance?
I feel like I might be the one who does that the most out of the four of us. I’m big into archiving, so in the past I was always the one to bring the tape deck to the show and record it. Then at the end of the night I’d go home and transfer it to a CD and have it on my hard drive. So I feel like I’ve been the one to do the archiving and listening back to live shows. The other guys will do a little bit but they’ll do it more if I point something out. There have been a few songs where I’ve found some cool jams from the archive, presented them to the band and we’ve worked with them a bit.
To that end, do any particular shows jump out at you as the band’s archivist that you’d recommend folks check out?
I would say any of the shows from Mystic Hot Springs in Monroe, Utah. I think they’re all up on archive.org and there’s even some cool video on YouTube.
It’s south of Salt Lake City, south of Provo even. It’s in this kind of conservative little town called Monroe and they have this amazing little hot springs resort. It’s very bohemian and very hippie and the guy who runs it, whose name is Mystic Mike, was part of touring Dead scene back in the day. And the story goes that on Grateful Dead tour they passed through Monroe on the bus, saw this spot and this dilapidated hot springs resort and settled there. And he built it up, built this killer stage and even built a video production studio. So he gets bands that are touring between Salt Lake City, Vegas and L.A. and he always cooks them an incredible meal and you get to soak in his hot springs and then you play a concert. So it’s a really all-inclusive experience for the band. A lot of times you’re just playing for him and few of his friends and maybe some people who’ve decided to experience the hot springs. It’s always really conversational and there’s lots of free jamming. I’d say any of the Mystic Hot Springs shows are really worth checking out and probably for any band because there’s something special that happens there.
Three of you have been playing together in some form since junior high. Can you talk a bit about that interpersonal dynamic and how it may have changed over the years?
There’s all four of us in the room which is one thing and then there’s different groups that splinter off and that’s another thing. We relate to each other on a personal level and also the group level.
I remember back in the day, Zach would invite me over and I’d sit at his piano and he’d play me his favorite song that he’d written and I’d sit there and maybe I’d play the bottom of the piano and try to play a bass line or give him advice on arrangement. So we have a long history of collaborating.
Dan and I have a lot of history together and we connect more in the jam and jazz space. We both studied music together in college. We were in the music department and we did lots of combo groups there. We studied the details of music together and we’ve had a lot of great conversations about music. When we play together I find it tends to be less about a certain type of song and more of a free play, jamming thing.
Brogan is like our mentor, in a way. We used to go watch his band in college. They were called Evil Farmer—there’s an EP floating around the internet. When me and Dan and Zach left high school and went to Santa Barbara and were in the dorms, we’d sneak out to Isla Vista and go check out music. Brogan’s a little older than us and from the first time we saw his band, that was the band we wanted to see any weekend, wherever they were.
We really looked up to him and he came by our house one time in college, saw that we had a garage and asked, “I’m looking for a place to store my drums. Can I store them here?” We said, “Yeah, be would be sweet,” which led us to us playing together. When our drummer from high school quit, his drums were already in our garage. So he was a musical mentor to us in a lot of ways. He’s also an incredible piano player, an incredible musician in general and a great composer. He’s super thoughtful and intelligent about our music.
As a group all those things blend together and you’re in that space and you’re balancing yourself with everybody else and these guys have their own relationships with each other as well. It’s an interesting process but I feel like we cover all the different bases of making music. Dave is great editor and a great musician. Zach is such a strong songwriter, he’s been like that since I first met him. He had these incredible demos in junior high school of what could have been huge pop hits. And Dan has great ears and spends so much time practicing guitar. I feel my role is to bring in as much groove as I can as a bass player, to make it groove and bounce and feel good. I’ve studied what I thought was important in order to try to get there.
How did that all change during the recording of the new disc, with a fifth personality, Jack Johnson, in the mix as well?
I feel like the greatest thing Jack did for us was to allow us to be who we are and oversee the process and be a voice to bounce ideas off. He did a great job of getting us in there, dialing our sound and really letting us make whatever was itching to come out. Beyond that the five us are all close friends, while at the same time the four of us have a lot of admiration for him as a songwriters and what he’s done for his career, how he just sort of popped out with these songs that the mass public really loved. We have lots of admiration and respect for what he’s done, so we’re very open to taking in some of his process to understand what he does to get what he gets in his music.
I learned that he’s not as laidback as people think in that work environment. He’s super laidback as a person and leads a very laidback lifestyle but he was very engaged in the process. He was always the first one to show up in the studio in the morning listening to something and when we’d come in he’d say, “I’ve got an idea, let’s try this.” But he would also send us off and we’d come back to him and ask, “What do you think?”
To what extent do you think that his music has had an impact on your own?
I’d say it has had a little bit of an impact. When you’re around another artist that much it’s going to have an influence. ALO has toured the world with Jack. We’ve done the US and Canada and then Europe and Brazil. That’s weeks and months on the road together where you’re hanging out, listening to his soundcheck every day and watching his show most nights. I love Jack’s bass player Merlo [Podlewski]. He’s very understated the way he plays but it’s very supportive, very grooving, it almost has a reggae feel. We all love Jack’s drummer Adam [Topol]. Jack’s songs are great and they connect with people. So maybe the most obvious influence is pushing ALO to write songs that are as catchy or as easy to take in from a mainstream perspective.
When Brushfire Fairytales came out, how familiar were you with those songs?
While we were in college Jack had a band and we had a band and Jack’s band broke up halfway through college. So he was sort of a free agent and me, Zach and Dan always had a band even it was with a new drummer. We were buddies with Jack so we would invite him to come sit in with us. In our last couple years of college we had him sit in with us a lot and he would teach us the songs on the side of the stage before we’d go on. Over time we knew a handful. So in our set we’d do a bunch of ALO songs and then bring up Jack and no one knew who Jack was other than he was in that other band in college but people would like it. At that point we weren’t necessarily trying to impress anybody, we were just having fun. And so we learned a bunch of the songs that ended up being on Brushfire Fairytales through that process.
Then he went off and did some touring as a filmmaker and at some point he reconnected with the idea of pursuing music. That’s when he started looking around for a band and he met up with G Love and the Everloving people and the Brushfire people and it all came together. And while he was looking for a band I think there were times that me and Dan and Zach were still jamming with him.
Then we went to the Bay Area and he was in Southern California. But maybe a year after we went our separate ways, he got engaged and asked us to play his wedding. So we came back to Santa Barbara and played his wedding at the Santa Barbara Zoo of all places. He had the Animal Liberation Orchestra at the zoo. I’m pretty sure that was the weekend when he showed us Brushfire Fairytales. I just didn’t imagine what would happen for him, that the whole thing would just blew up.
Was there ever an element of “Hey, that guy used to teach us songs on the side of the stage,” as you watched him gaining popularity?
I think there’s a little bit of rivalry that goes back to those days in college when we both had those bands and we were trying to get the best gig, so there is that fun competitive spirit between us too. And I think that history came into the new record too, it’s him wanting to be on his toes, the first one there with ideas. And it actually makes it really fun because we sort of push each other to make the best thing we can together.
You recorded Man of The World at Jack’s home studio in Hawaii. Do you think the setting had any impact on the music?
Being out in Hawaii on the North Shore, they have a saying “Keep The Country COUNTRY” and it’s a whole movement to preserve the nature of the North Shore and try to get people not to develop on the coastline. They don’t want the North Shore to be like Waikiki or Honolulu, which it could be except there’s a whole movement to preserve that and protect it. I think that had a little bit of influence on the songwriting, in just the idea of preserving our earth and being thoughtful about how you develop and what you do to build on top of it. I feel that played into some of themes of the songs.
Listening back now, do you have any favorite moments on the album?
“Suspended” was really fun for me, especially how that piece came together in one take. Besides that there was lots of discovery. The song I sing, “The Country Electro, I was playing the steel drum out in the rec room where the ping pong table is. I was playing the steel drum and Zach picked up the guitar and we put that song together right there with ping pong going on. We got all excited and went into the tracking room and just did it like that. And Dave played conga while Dan sang backup vocals. So the original four piece pass at that song was three vocals, steel drum, guitar and congas. We captured it in that moment and then built it up from that point.
These sessions took place late last spring. Did you work the new material into your live shows or did you decide to wait until the album hit?
For better or for worse we haven’t had that many gigs since we made the record. We did a little summer stuff but Dan our guitarist and Jenna our manager, they’re married and they had a baby, so we took a break with no real gigging for a couple months. We’d played “Time & Heat” before, so we already had that one worked up a little bit. “Put Away The Past we started playing a little bit as well but we didn’t work on the rest, we let them be on the record. So it’s all pretty fresh and we’ll see where it goes live. I’m really excited about the possibilities when we take the album to take it to the live stage. It’s going to be cool to see where the songs go.
