In his classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell presents his theory of the monomyth—or the archetypical story that has appeared in the written and oral traditions of seemingly unconnected cultures across the world. This monomyth defies space and time, being told in various forms by the ancient peoples of Greece, America, China, India, Africa and everywhere in between. It is the tale of the hero’s journey, the age old legend of the adventurer who leaves the comfort of his home to embark on a quest that ultimately leads to the betterment of mankind.
Campbell’s theory of the monomyth has influenced countless artists since the book was first published in 1949—from musicians like the Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison to filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas. Beats Antique can now count themselves among those ranks, and the electro/world fusion trio have taken Campbell’s influence to the next level. Their latest release, A Thousand Faces Act I, is a concept album in the purest sense of the term. The two part record (Act II will be released in the spring) breaks Campbell’s monomyth down to its many parts and distills each of them into a piece of music that stands on its own, while also fitting nicely into the larger story. We caught up with Beat’s Antique’s Tommy Cappel and David Satori to talk to them about the new album, their live production, working with Les Claypool, Burning Man and more.
You guys got Les Claypool to help you out with a track called “Beezlebub,” which appears on your new album, A Thousand Faces Act I. What was the inspiration for the song and what convinced you to get Les on board?
Tommy: What convinced us to not do it? He’s amazing. Incredibly creative and an icon. We thought of him because of the devil and he’s so badass.
David: I feel like he plays the bass like he’s the devil incarnate. He’s Lucifer on the bass and looks like him a little bit. He’s one of the most inspirational artists we grew up listening to. This is a concept album we’ve been wanting to collaborate with Les for years after we went on tour with him in 2010. This was a perfect opportunity to invite him to be part of this concept album and play the devil in our hero’s dream.
Tommy, Les mentioned you once auditioned for the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. Is there a story behind that?
Tommy: Well my best friend and collaborator at the time, I was in a couple bands with him, Eenor had been playing guitar for him and he told me they were looking for a new drummer. And I was like, “Oh well I’ll go and audition.” It was super fun, I got to up to the studio, set up and play some music. I got to actually go back there twice. He told me I could do another one. It was pretty awesome. It’s funny, back at the time I had pigtails which is kind of funny. Les always seems to remember that part that I had pink pigtails.
He did mention that.
Tommy: I think it his favorite thing about me. Or possibly least favorite. Who knows? It was a lot of fun. We had a blast playing together. It was really cool to play with the guy you had been playing with for years along with Les Claypool as our bass player because Eenor and I had always had a hard time finding a bass player to stick with so that was the ultimate, it was like, “Oh man, we got Les now.” It was more kind of like it was our band, it was kind of funny. At the end of day I didn’t get the job, but I got to continue playing with Yard Dogs Road Show who later on Eenor joined that band after his time with Les. We toured the world and did a bunch of crazy stuff and ended up going on tour with Les Claypool’s project at the time. It was all good and fun. We had a blast and got to know Les a little bit. We got to connect a lot of little dots that I felt needed to be connect.
David: It was pretty cool that Tommy opened for Les in two different bands.
Let’s move on to the new album. As you said it’s a concept album and it seems the concept is built around Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces? Can you talk a little about that?
David: We decided to move with that because we wanted a structure to work on with this album. We wanted a narrative and a story. But we didn’t want to be too particular, we wanted to encompass all cultures and everything. I studied Joseph Campbell back in high school and Tommy and Zoe read bits and pieces of him. We were inspired by his overarching idea of the monomyth, which is the one story that is tied in all cultures and all traditions. We took each stage of that journey and wrote a song for it. The beginning, usually called the “Call to Adventure,” we wrote this song that brings up the inspiration and foreshadows the whole journey. Then we have “Meeting the Mentor” that Obi Wan Kenobi moment when you meet your teacher. And then you have going into the underworld. That’s where Les comes up, he’s this devil in the underworld. He’s this trickster character where everything is chaotic and your confused about who you are. And then it comes out the other side. This all part of all our whole album is, we are only releasing “Act 1” right now. We are releasing half of the journey in the fall and then Act 2 is going to come out early spring/summer 2014. And then the whole thing is going to come out together. That’s the gist of it.
The other really exciting news is that we’ve actually been in touch with the Joseph Campbell Foundation and they are really excited about this project. We are in conversations to collaborate on something really exciting. That’s some really exciting news we just found about.
Tommy: One of the cool things about aligning with Joseph Campbell’s work is that we found out that a lot of our friends and people we respect out there are really in line with him and really kind of resonate with his writing and use his work as inspiration in their lives. It’s pretty cool. Personally, I wasn’t too aware of him. I had heard of him. Through doing research on this album trying to figure out exactly what path we were going to take on this, there are so many things you can do. David had brought him up at one point and we were looking at some diagrams that had been written to encapsulate his idea. It was a circle, the shape of CD, a record and it had these perfect amount of little notches on it to make an album. It was this perfect collaboration.
David: It was a map.
Tommy: Yeah it was like a map. It gave us the opportunity to write music. Since then our whole team has been super inspired, the collaborations we’re doing the videos and the production.
David: That’s a huge part of what we’re doing. This whole album came out of doing a concept album, but more than that, let’s do a concept show. We’ve been doing shows for years that have their own valleys and dips to them, but they haven’t had a cohesive story. So we were like ‘let’s do a show that is a story’. And so that’s what we’re doing. We have full projection mapping and interactive video with a brand new set design that is totally interactive with the story and the content goes along with the story. It’s taking the audience through the hero’s journey, but they are the hero and they are going through each world with us.
When you do this new live show, do you plan to perform the album in sequence?
David: Yeah, we are performing the whole show. And then Act 1 is the majority of the first half and then that’s what we’re releasing. But we are going to perform 19 new songs, but we are releasing 10 of them.
Tommy: Yeah, so we are performing the whole thing in sequence of the hero’s journey, but the audience can only get one half of it and then the whole half of it comes out next year.
You guys recently used Kickstarter to raise good bit of money for this new live show. What made you turn to Kickstarter for that?
Tommy: We wanted a way to tell our story. That was one of the big thing. Kickstarter allows you to tell a story and allows you to reach out and get people’s support through inspiring them. That was a good way of us to get the story out there and our ideas for exactly how we were going to portray it. It was also a great way to promote the shows we were going for.
David: Yeah and the production is really expensive. (Laughs)
Tommy: We wanted to pay the artists, the videographers, set builders and make sure they all got paid and we get into the red. It’s a beautiful, new DIY model for artists to produce. We are fully independent. We’ve been producing our own albums, building our own buses. We don’t really have support from a label really. We are just really honored our fans did it and it all came together.
Besides Les, you have a few other guests on the album. Can you talk a little about them?
Tommy: The first guest that appears on the album is Alam Khan, who is the son of Indian classical musician, Ali Akbar Khan, who has the school here in the Bay Area. That was a really cool way that it come about. We had a meeting one night, three of us, about who we wanted to collaborate with on the album. His name was pretty high up on the list. The next day I had a message from on my Facebook before we had even called him that saying how much he’d love to collaborate with us.
We were just kinda like, ‘what, really?’ We were actually going to call you today, try to find your contact and try to get in touch with you. That was already solidified. We went to see him at a performance and he came down to our studio and we did a bunch of sessions. We got three-four sessions with him. To give you context, his grandfather was the guy who taught Ravi Shankar. He comes from the highest, forms of musicians from India. He’s kept that tradition alive and we’re honored to help support that music and keep it alive for a younger generation.
Tommy: And the mentor track is called “You the Starry Eyed.” The lyrics are written by Lynx. We decided to put her together with a singer Morgan Thorne, who has a band named ‘Sorne, who is amazing vocalist as well. The two of them together create an…
David: Androgynous mentor.
Tommy: Yeah, like a two headed mentor. Obviously Les Claypool. Who else did we collaborate with?
David: Micah and Leighton from the Yard Dogs, Tommy and Zoe’s old band. They did this really great game show, they are just really great comedic and charismatic emcees. They are these hosts on this interactive game show that we’re super excited about. We have this moment where we have the game show and we bring someone up from this stage and they interact with these characters and the video. It’s a 70s game show that goes haywire.
Tommy: It’s sort of just a tip of the hat to The Yard Dogs. That was such a huge inspiration in my life. I was in that band for close to nine years. The video we ended up doing we used Yard Dogs banners and some lights. Obviously Micah and Leighton are from there. It ended up being a quick nod to some our family which was awesome.
David: It was cool, we both got to do this on the album. It’s not coming out until the second album, but they got to pay respects to the Yard Dogs and I used to be in a Afro-beat band. I probably shouldn’t say this, it’s top secret for the next album, we have the Antibalas horn section on the second album. Yeah, I used to be in an Afro-beat band so we got Antibalas.
We have this Sufi vocalist musician from Egypt that’s on the album that we sampled. It’s a really cool story because we played the Pyramids in Giza for the Solstice last year. We recorded this song with a Sufi musician in Egypt and we used the live recording from that song for the album.
Tommy: While we were on stage we were actually looking at the pyramids lit up, and it was just amazing with these guys sitting in with us—that just blew our minds. It was a moment in life that will never be forgotten. We got to capture that for the album which is really exciting. I’m glad we got it on there. So that’s definitely a special guest, the Sufi musician, Sayyid.
You guys have performed at all sorts of settings. The pyramids, Burning Man, Occupy Wall Street, you played at the Boiler Room at our office. What’s it like performing in these types of settings? How do you tackle things at Burning Man as opposed to a club in some city?
Tommy: Burning Man is deep in our personal lives as artists and adventurers. The best way to do that is to bring an old computer and do a DJ set because it’s so chaotic and then you can go around and jump on different stages and play a bunch of shows and new music for people. We just got back from there a few weeks ago. It was extremely fun. It was really cool to hear these new songs on a sound system. And be like, “hey you’ve never heard this, it’s hot off the presses.”
David: That’s sort of been a tradition. We’ve all been going to Burning Man for so many years. It comes around the time when we’re finishing our music so we usually go out there and play those tracks we’ve been working so hard on producing for their first time. We have a lot of old school, hardcore fans that go out there. It’s a fun party, sort of record listening part for us. I think we played every song on the new album.
I’ve notice that your shows usually utilize a combination of live instrumentation and pre programmed beats. How, exactly, do you guys pull it off live?
David: We have a set of triggers playing our productions and then we take out the parts. Tommy will take out his drum parts and other parts that he’ll play live, and I’ll take out some melodic parts and we play those parts, leaving room for some improvisational moments to feel it out as a live band.
It’s funny. We’ve all been parts of large bands for years, so really like this big sound. We know it’s hard to travel with 10 musicians on the road. We’ve found our way to put three people on the road with an orchestra or a 10 piece. Something different on this show is that we’ve had the opportunity to record a 50 piece live orchestra and we did about two weeks ago or a month ago. We have full new live orchestration for some of the songs. We are really excited about that. We are literally playing along to brand new orchestrations of our music.
That’s sort of a new element to how we produce and what we’re playing with. We get to play with an orchestra.
Tommy: It’s funny because it started as a recording project only. We never envisioned playing this stuff live. It was like having a bunch of different instruments, musicians all of our friends come in to record parts we’ve written. There is a vast amount of awesome, eclectic musicians here in the Bay Area that are friends are in. You could never put a band like that together because everyone is doing their own thing. We did that and then we got on the DJ tip. And we were like let’s DJ. After doing that for a year we decided to add the live drums because David was already playing some of the instruments live when we were DJing. And then I was like, “ok, I need to play drums.” And adding that in to the dance performance, it just made sense to keep going and see where it led.
We kinda got used to having all these instruments and all these things that are on our recordings that we couldn’t do live. We had to figure it out how to do it. It’s been a journey for us, wrapping our heads around it. It’s been a new way to approach live performance, as we’re predominately live musicians, moving into this electronic world, collaborating with the electronic world and live world. It’s been pretty fun.
Do you guys have any final thoughts before we wrap up?
David: This last week we’ve been able to see our content on our production from the stage that we had built from Kickstarter. It looks absolutely amazing. It looks so cool. It blew our minds. We are really, really excited. It’s taking our show to a whole other level. It’s something we’ve always wanted to do but we’ve never had the opportunity, time or money. We get to do it now. We are super inspired and want people to join us in that.
Tommy: We want to thank Les for being the devil on our new album and much respect to Mr. Les Claypool and all his work.
