Cass McCombs had already staked claim as one of the indie-folk generation’s most prolific voices by the time Bob Weir covered his biblically charged “Love Thine Enemy” at a benefit show in 2012. That unexpected nod helped McCombs connect with Weir, who included him in his all-star, cross-genre Jerry Garcia tribute Move Me Brightly the following year, and brought his songwriting style full circle to the Grateful Dead-inspired psychedelic-folk that inspired him as a young songwriter in California and the Pacific Northwest. Move Me Brightly also introduced McCombs to Phish bassist Mike Gordon and cemented his relationship with Joe Russo, both of whom appear on his double-disc 2013 release Big Wheel and Others, and added a new, jammy twist to his songwriting style. McCombs has continued to veer into improvisational waters during the past two years and, this spring, he will play the holy grail of “Dark Star” of The National’s long-awaited Red Hot Grateful Dead tribute. While be puts the finishing touches on his next studio project with pals Russo, Ryan Sawyer, Jon Shaw and Dan Lead, McCombs released the rarities collection A Folk Set Apart, which features a lost collaboration with Gordon and a slew of live gems. He also plans to develop his next batch of songs during a big show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom on January 7.On an unseasonably warm winter day, McCombs stopped by the Relix and Jambands.com offices to talk about his new album, Deadhead roots and how an old Phish demo inspired his latest epic.Let’s start by talking about your new album, A Folk Set Apart. Though many of the songs will be fresh for listeners, it is actually, as you have eloquently described, “a mixture of B-side rarities and space junk.” What was the original idea behind the compilation and over what span were these tracks originally recorded?It was probably a span of about fifteen years. They’re mostly taken from 7-inch one-offs that we would release around our tours, though a few of them were outtakes from our albums. Some of them are from split 7-inches with other bands—on one side would be people like the Meat Puppets, Michael Hurley, White Magic or other bands we were on the road with and the other side would be us. So it’s our side, not theirs. [Laughs] I put them all together because a lot of those were my favorite tunes. You don’t stop writing music just because you are off an album cycle. You want to get it out. And there is something really cool about a 7-inch. It also gives you a chance to work with different people and other independent labels. I’ve been with Domino for records.As you look back on this fifteen-year period of work, were there certain commonalities that you found among the songs that helped them fit into a cohesive collection or do still like they are year-book style retrospective?It’s kind of bipolar. I don’t know what they have in common, except that they’re all recorded very poorly. [Laughs]Have you continued to play the songs presented on A Folk Set Apart since they were originally released?We try to change the setlist up every night. We play a lot of these tunes—“Bradley Manning” we play all the time. “Evangeline,” we play a lot. “I Cannot Lie” was the first 7-inch I ever put out, so we played that every show at our early shows. It was one of the only songs we had. We had to play it. It had this Velvet Underground kind of feel. We always started the shows with it because it got the party started. It doesn’t have to sound nice. It’s always good to start the first song in the set with—whatever can go wrong. Suddenly, it feels fine. The sound guy is tuning in, and it’s all good.You’ve been playing in different settings over the years. Can you talk a little bit about the band that will back you?Shaw, who is on the bass, has been with me for several years now. I met him at Occupy Wall Street. I was just hanging there. I was there every day. He grew up with Dan, who also plays steel and guitar in the band. He’s been in many bands, and they grew up together. Musically, they were like the same person. Their interplay is like Everly Brothers level of osmosis. So yeah, Dan will be there—we call him Buddy. Jesse Lee has been playing drums with us now here in New York. Ryan Sawyer, another drummer and percussionist—I don’t even know how to describe his role—will be with us. We’re trying to get some people to play with us onstage. Soldiers of Fortune, who are old buds, are opening for us in New York, and I am hoping Matt Sweeney and Mike Bones and all of those dudes will sit in. It’s going to be cold outside—at least I hope so given the weather recently—and I hope people can come warm each other up. That’s the idea—this wintertime orgy.Before this collection, the last album you released was 2013’s Big Wheel and Others. That album had something of a different, groovy psychedelic sound that was directly informed by the Grateful Dead. It also featured Phish bassist Mike Gordon, Furthur drummer Joe Russo and a few other musicians from outside your normal stable of collaborators. What was the mindset going into that record and did the process of touring Big Wheels with Russo and playing with members of Phish and the Dead change your songwriting process in general?Well, with the Dead thing—I kind of grew up around that music, and some of my earliest bands were in the psychedelic, Dead, J.J. Cale, jam-influenced vein. I read Relix in the 1990s and went to Dead shows. For one reason or another, you get older and you find other musical avenues to go down. The Dead were always there in my music, but I was venturing somewhere else. Then, I befriended [Joe] Russo and just kind of started to get back into the whole Dead thing and was being inspired by it again. I started remembering, “Oh, shit, I play guitar this way because of ‘Mountains Of The Moon.’” This idiom, this way I play, I got this from the Dead—or this Doc Watson phase I went through. I just started getting more into the Dead, and I wrote a whole new batch of songs on that trip.You are currently working on a new studio album. Would you say that project continues the jammy, Grateful Dead feel of your recent work?I would say it is a continuation of that groovy shit. The songs maintain that Dead influence. What I love about the Dead—you see it on their early posters. They were “Grateful Dead Dance Concert.” That’s built in into what they’re trying to do. Even on the slowest tunes, like “Stella Blue” or whatever, people are still dancing. You know, you take your shoes off, and you fucking get your rocks off. Whether it’s slow or fast, you can dance to it, find the groove. That’s what I learned.
You mentioned that Joe Russo, who leads his own Almost Dead, inspired your stylistic shift. He appears on Big Wheels, you’ve toured together intermittently during the past few years and you have even joked about starting a new project with him, Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and Delicate Steve. How did you and Russo first connect?It was originally through Jon Shaw [a longtime member of Cass’ band who plays with Russo associate Scott Metzger in Wolf! and will sub for Dave Dreiwitz in Joe Russo’s Almost Dead this spring]. We have some mutual friends, and then we did the Move Me Brightly Jerry Garcia tribute at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios [in 2013]. That was when we really connected and that’s where I met Mike Gordon, too.Joe and I played together with Alex Bleeker & the Freaks earlier this year. That was really fun, and you can feel the crowd, the Dead audience. When we went into “Shakedown Street,” you could feel the crowd move.Speaking of TRI, you originally connected with Bob Weir when he covered your song “Love Thine Enemy” with members of The National during a HeadCount benefit show at the studio in 2012. That cover, in certain ways, laid the groundwork for the last few years of your career. The National chose that song because of its political connotations. Did you have any sense that they were going to bring that song to Bob before the show?No, it blew my mind. That was an insane, mind-altering honor. I didn’t believe it when someone told me. His delivery is so unique, I think it’s hilarious. I love it.You’ll emerge from the studio to play a big show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom on January 7. Do you plan to test out some of the new songs you’re working on for your next album?Yes, we will definitely be trying out some of the new songs in January. I’m a bit nervous. We toured with Kurt Vile a couple of months ago on the West Coast, and we played a bunch of the new tunes. We played at the Fillmore, and it was rad. It went over good, but I’m still nervous about it because it’s new. If people don’t like them, then I don’t mind. We have to do it. And I apologize in advance.As a performer, have you found that testing your material in front a live audience has helped you when you return to the studio?Well, it helps on both sides. It could help to tour with your new songs, because as much as you can play the fucking song, it’s just going to improve. That happened to us while we were recently recording. One of the dudes in my band said to me after our first take on a song, “Wow, that was awesome, that was magical,” and the second one we were like, “No, let’s do it again. Let’s see where it goes.” It wasn’t as good as the fucked-up version. And it goes back to that James Brown quote: “The first take is God’s take, and the second take is man’s.”What have the sessions been like so far?I’m in the middle of the new studio session, and it’s almost done. We’ve been recording here and there, in New York and Los Angeles. Russo, Shaw, Dan and I were in the studio together [in mid December]. We’re working in Los Angeles with a producer called Rob Schnapf. He did Kurt’s record, and Elliot Smith and Beck. He’s hilarious.On both Big Wheels and also this new album, you feature Mike Gordon. Can you talk a little bit about working with him and his inclusion on your past two albums? I’m assuming that the stuff on this new album are from those sessions as well, is that right?Yeah, the same Big Wheel sessions. And, actually, the tune that he’s on, “Texas,” was included as an extra 7-inch in the deluxe edition of Big Wheels. So it’s already been released once, but only a couple of hundred people have heard it on a 7-inch.After I met Mike at Move Me Brightly, he agreed to play on Big Wheels. I love Phish. I don’t think I ever even told Mike this, but I wanted that song “Texas” on this new comp to be like something off Phish’s demo, The White Tape [Phish’s 1986 self-titled first album and demo recording which circulated in bootleg form for over a decade before the group officially re-released it on CD in 1998].I got the original promo version of The White Tape in ‘92 or something—the dub of a dub of a dub. There were no CDs of that album back then. It was just some guy asking me, “You like Phish? Here’s this thing that they’ve never released, called ‘The White Tape.’” It was just the weirdest skits and fucked-up music. It’s kind of punk. It’s right there with that era of four track recordings and just oddball, outsider music like Daniel Johnston or Camper Van Beethoven. It kind of blew my mind—that and their shows and everything like that. [Laughs]I wanted “Texas” to sound like a track that could be on The White Tape, specifically Mike’s song “Minkin,” which is sort of like a jingle or commercial [written about his mother, who designed Phish’s backdrops in their early days.] It doesn’t have to have the aural quality of it, but kind of that sense of humor, and just non-sequitur kind of narrative. We never talked about that as a reference while we were recording, it just kind of became that, on its own. You could tell just by listening to the tape that they were “out” people, even back then.Earlier this year, you snuck in a few underground gigs at the New York venue Max Fish with Russo and your band where you played a few Dead tunes. What was the idea behind those shows?Well, the first one we set up because we did the Red Hot and Dead comp and we did “Dark Star” with those guys—with Russo. But I wanted it to be a sound-style collage that weaves in and out of studio and in life, in kind of a cut-up technique like Anthem of the Sun. So we set up the show for the purpose of just doing one song—“Dark Star”—and then cutting it in and out of the shit we do onstage.How much improvisation do you actually do onstage with your band with these songs?We improvise a lot. It’s affected the way I write, too, because the more I’m blessed with playing with people who are into improvising, the more I want to write tunes to hear them fucking play. So I write songs with them in mind. I love the Dead song structures where they can do a verse and a chorus and then just—however long it takes. It’s not like a strict script. The composition ebbs and flows based on what’s happening. So that’s affected the way I write. Sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn’t happen. I think improvisation is hand in hand with composition. Schoenberg, the composer, has a famous quote. He said, “composition is improvisation in slow motion.” So it’s just all perspective. It’s the same thing. You’re utilizing the same musical—you only have one mind, you don’t have two. As a musician, you just have one engine. Everything is these nuances that define whether it’s a composition or improvisation or free music or all these weird terms that we use to describe music or even genres. It really is all the same fucking jambalaya.
