Billy Iuso will be taking the stage in a number of different capacities during this year’s Jazz Fest, which kicks off in New Orleans this coming Friday. He’s got a variety of gigs scheduled around the Crescent City, including a Dead Feat show with Paul Barrere, Fred Tackett and Bill Kreutzmann, a charity crawfish boil, a musicians benefit with Widespread Panic’s JoJo Hermann and that’s all without even mentioning his May 1 set at the festival proper.
Iuso is one of the most versatile guitarists on the New Orleans scene these days. While he’s built up a reputation as a top-notch player in the funk and rock arena, his latest album, Naked, showcases his abilities as a songwriter above anything else. We caught up with Iuso to talk to him about Naked, his Jazz Fest plans, the evolution of the jamband scene, playing with members of the Grateful Dead and Little Feat and more.
So you released your latest album Naked last year. I very much enjoyed the record, though it seemed to be more focused on crafting songs than building jams. Would you say that this is a fair assessment, and is this a stylistic move that we can expect from future releases?
I think for a little while, yeah. You know, I actually started with songs. I started my career pretty much playing as an acoustic artist myself and then slowly developed into bands. So I always started with songs, and I’m kind of old school in that way where I’m more of a Grateful Deadhead than say a Disco Biscuits fan just because I like to think I’m more attached to a song than just a jam. Call me old, whatever you want at that point but to me that’s kind of the difference in some of the newer jam music and some of the older jam music. It’s more song-oriented, making two songs together was the jam, or a segue in a middle of a song or something like that. So I wouldn’t say that it was a stylistic change that I made. I think I’m just coming back to it and realizing I do that better than I do endless jamming and funk jams. So I would expect to say I am writing songs for a new record right now, and they do lean towards similar to what I’ve been writing on Naked.
Can we talk about the next record? What’s going on with that?
Well it’s in the early stages at the moment. I do have George Porter signed up to play bass on it. I’m probably going to use different musicians than I normally use. I usually work with the kind of core of the Restless Natives, but I think for this record I might use musicians from different areas. Not just New Orleans musicians either, because I have used so many New Orleans musicians and I just feel like I’m not exploring some of the options of people I’ve played with in other scenarios. But I am excited, and I plan on doing it this spring. Once I get into it I am able to create more things and put pieces together. I have notebooks of lyrics and iPhone messages to myself of rhythms on guitar. So once I piece through all of that and put it all together like a puzzle I usually can find a couple more songs out of what I have.
Do you flesh these songs out with Restless Natives live before you go to the studio with them or do they come first on the record?
Lately they’ve come more first on the record just because we have all been pretty busy. But it really depends on the song. Some songs develop live. Some songs I’m much more anxious to play live before they’ve been released. I would say it’s more song-to-song. It’s not really a process. It’s more song-to-song. If it just fits, then it fits. I’m not afraid to bust out a two chord jam at a gig if nobody’s even heard it. It’s a little risky in that way.
You first gained notoriety with your old band, the Brides of Jesus, who used to play out in the Wetlands scene up in New York City. How has the jamband scene evolved since those days in your opinion?
It’s gotten bigger, obviously, and like the times, it has changed just in its creativity and ways to survive in the environment of our economy. And what I mean by that is that the festival scene has become more popular. There were a lot less festivals back then.. Maybe it just appears that way with the internet, but it seems like there used to be to be a lot less festivals that big. It’s definitely grown, but it’s hard to compare the two.
The New York scene back then was very small. You had CBGBs and Wetlands and Nightingales and a few other places, but it was pretty small with a core group of bands that were playing. I’m sure that was going on all over the country in different scenes, but it just seemed that it was more spotty and there were less scenes. You had your San Francisco scene, you had south scene from Athens, Georgia. But now it seems with the Internet you can just do it from anywhere, so there’s just a lot more. I think that’s the best way to compare it. It has just grown, and it’s become more creative too. Jam Cruise and the Island Getaway things and stuff like that, people have gotten more creative about how they get more people out to these events.
Would you say that that’s a good thing? Do you appreciate that development?
It’s a good thing. It can always grow. You have to expect, in life, that there’s always change so you roll with it. It’s a good thing because there is more of it, but on the other hand there are also more bands competing for those spots and a lot easier accessibility. When I started I was pretty gung ho in my twenties, and we would just sit around after rehearsal and mix tapes for hours. Now you just create an event on Facebook and press send. So it works in many different ways, where it’s a lot easier but there’s a downside. I mean, how many events do you get on your Facebook every day? (Laughs) Whereas, you used to just get a flyer from The Blues Traveler or Brides of Jesus back then in the mail. I think it works in both ways. There’s definitely more money in the scene now. I don’t know where it gets all spread around, but it does. (Laughs)
In a past interview Anders Osborne told me that you were one of the main reasons that he had gotten into the Grateful Dead—that you were the one who was really pushing him in that direction. Can you tell us about your history with that band and how they have influenced you?
The funny about all that is that, yeah, I’m definitely the one that brought that to his attention. Now whether I pushed him or not I wouldn’t say that is a fair statement because I was trying to get away from playing the Grateful Dead my entire career. I’d been known to play Grateful Dead, so people would always ask me if I had my own original stuff. So of course I was pushing my original stuff. But as I got older I kind of welcomed it back into my life and decided that I liked doing it again. Anders kind of said, “Man I want you to play with me because you know all that Grateful Dead type stuff, so hopefully we could do some of those in my set.” And that put pressure on him to have me sing a couple songs on his set at that time.
He’s found a real natural ability to play that though. He plays the Jerry role really well, and it’s just natural to him. It’s just really not what Jerry did unless he was on the pedal steel. So it’s interesting, but I think that would be a fair statement, that I brought it to his attention. But it was kind of at his own doing where he saw it in me and wanted me to do it in his band and then saw the reaction and such and such. Technically, I think the first time we played “Sugaree” was at Bear Creek. That was the first Grateful Dead song played under his name.
When was that?
Might have been 2011, that one from Bear Creek. I did that whole summer with him, so we did do some stuff here and there, and then we played some Dead songs. But that was the one that kind of got the attention of Anders playing Dead songs. I don’t know how many times, but a lot.
You’ve got the Dead Feat project, with Bill Kreutzmann, Paul Barrere and Fred Tackett, that you’re going to be reuniting with at Jazz Fest. Can you talk about that? What was the inspiration for that, and what can we expect?
I think it came, partly, from what Anders and me were doing with The Dead, and then I had also done a benefit for Richie Hayward a couple years before he passed away. It was here in New Orleans and Paul Barrere came and Anders was on it. John Gros and a bunch of the New Orleans cast did it, and we had so much fun playing together. All of us kind of connected in our own way and it just kind of came together. And then in New York, our promoter Howie [Schnee] kind of put that together and brought Kreutzmann in and it was a blast. It’s real fun. I mean, where can that wrong? Those are two of my favorite bands, and here I am playing with them. So it’s a blast for me. I’m looking forward to two nights. I hope we can explore a bunch of tunes.
What’s it like getting to play with those guys?
It’s a trip. Like everybody else, I’m 20 years younger than most of those guys. I grew up buying their records and learning to emulate them, and now I turn around and there’s Bill Kreutzmann on the drums behind me. Even more so with Paul Barrere because Little Feat was a big influence on me. As big of a Dead fan as I am, Little Feat is what turned me on to playing music. I was looking for something a little more funky than The Dead, and that’s what did it for me. So for me, playing with Paul Barrere is a real trip, and I’ve done that multiple times now. He’s played on my records. It’s quite a great relationship, and all of those guys are great guys, Fred, Paul and Billy. They are all great guys and fun to hang with. But as a fan, it’s a trip. (Laughs)
That’s quite a journey…
The first time I did it we played the Shrine during Jazz Festival four years ago I guess, and at one point I was singing “Franklin’s Tower” and I turned around and just looked at Billy Kreutzmann and thought, “If you had told me when I was 17 that I’d be doing this I would have said you’re crazy.
Going back to the ‘90s. You’re not originally from New Orleans at all, but you’ve very much made it your home. What made you decide to move on down to the Crescent City?
I was born in Port Chester, New York. By the time I was 7, I had already moved out of that area. My family migrated into Connecticut. My mother remarried, and I had moved to Ohio, Florida, Texas, and during high school I returned back to Connecticut to live with my dad so I could finish high school. I’ve been kind of nomadic my whole life, so I kind of got used to that. As soon as I got done with high school in that area, it was the ‘80s, I was following The Dead. I was in that scene, I was looking for a college town to start playing music, so I went to Providence, Rhode Island, and started Brides of Jesus and found out that really more of our gigs were coming down south. So I moved to Athens, GA, and during that time Brides of Jesus had been opening for The Meters and Brides was more of a funk band, so we were doing a lot of those openers and The Meters kept coming up. I mean I kept playing with those guys and The Tramps at the Terrace Club in Stamford, CT, and all kinds of different venues. They would see me with different members all the time and they would say, “You know, you’ve got to move to New Orleans. There’s a lot more members to choose from.” [Laughter]
So my love for New Orleans music sort of blossomed at that time and I was living in Athens, GA, and I decided to make the jump. I came down here and slept on Russell Batiste’s couch for a week and then found an apartment and have been down here since ’96. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere.
And you’re fully integrated into the New Orleans scene now…
I was already pretty tight with the guys in The Meters and The Neville’s just from doing opening acts with them before I lived here. I mean George’s wife sent me a newspaper at one point. I’d played here a bunch, so I kind of was already into it. I’d say I was probably more ahead of the game than most musicians who jump right in here because I had friends in high places. After I came here I only kept Brides alive for a few years and took a few years off, and I tour managed for George and The Meters and The Neville Brothers and took a break from playing live music. I really solidified a lot of my relationships during that time period too. You know, the trust, and when you work on the other side of the stage for these guys you start to understand the whole game, and I think that helped me in the long run when I came back to playing music. I already had all these allies that I had worked for, and they trusted me. So I know my relationship with George has changed a bit in the last 20-something odd years that we’ve known each other.
