In the early 2000s, Tea Leaf Green were at the forefront of the West Coast jamband revival, honing in on an infectious sound that mixed thoughtful, lyrically driven songs with fierce improvisation. They shared the stage with luminaries like Trey Anastasio, Dave Matthews Band and the members of the Grateful Dead and, along with peers like ALO, New Monsoon and Hot Buttered Rum, morphed into one of the Bay Area’s unofficial house bands. But despite releasing a series of successful albums and headlining large clubs and theaters around the country, the group faced several hurdles—in 2007, founding bassist Ben Chambers left the band, and the quartet found themselves at the center of the jamband scene at a time when many bands started moving away from free improvisation. Tea Leaf Green soldiered on however, recruiting Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey bassist Reed Mathis and percussionist Cochrane McMillan and focusing in on a more rock-and-roll-oriented sound.
As the members of Tea Leaf Green grew older, started families and moved out of their band house, the group started touring less, but they continued to nurture their passionate fanbase. Earlier this year, Mathis made the decision to step away from the band in order to focus on his new “classical dance music” project, Electric Beethoven, as well as his work with the Golden Gate Wingmen and Bill Kreutzmann. McMillan, guitarist Josh Clark, keyboardist Trevor Garrod and drummer Scott Rager reorganized once again and brought in new bassist Eric DiBerardino, a veteran of the Bay Area scene who had already subbed for Mathis for a few gigs. The band is committed to touring too and recently completed a lap throughout the East Coast. In advance of Tea Leaf Green’s New Year’s Eve run at Doc’s Lab in San Francisco on December 30 and 31, DiBerardino looked back on his first few months holding down the band’s low end.
Let’s start with a little background. You recently completed your first proper tour as an official member of Tea Leaf Green. Where did you grow up and how did you first connect with the members of Tea Leaf Green?
I grew up in Orange, Connecticut, and I started playing music at 15-16 years old—I came from a blues background. I traveled to Colorado for college and moved back to Connecticut for about six years, then moved out to San Francisco in 2010. As soon as I moved out here, I started playing with some people and joined a band at the time called Acacia Collective. I basically just went at it, trying to pick up any gig I possibly could. Being a bass player, there’s usually room to hop in and get some gigs where you sub out for people. Cochrane might have been the first [member of TLG] that I met. We started doing some gigs together; we did a gig with Trevor and Jay Cobb Anderson from Fruition. Then, we did a four-piece gig out in Tahoe where I got to know Trevor a little better. Being in the music scene out here it is a bit incestuous—everybody plays with everybody, in side gigs and things like that. I eventually ended up joining a project with Josh Clark called Little Brothers, where we did Little Feat and Allman Brothers covers. It was pretty short-lived, because he ended up having kids and moving up to Oregon. So I’d say it was mostly pick-up gigs and the occasional get together, things like that. We became friends more than we became co-workers.
Were you familiar with Tea Leaf Green’s music before you moved to the West Coast and started hanging out with them?
What’s funny is that I never really dug deep into their catalog. I had seen them—we opened up for them at the Independent twice, for the Harvest Ball, which they had every November. Besides those shows, I hadn’t dug into their repertoire at all. Being in the position that I’m in right now, it’s actually really fun, because every day is brand new—every day is like Christmas morning. I wake up and there’s 30 new songs that I’ve never heard before that are really inspiring. But, yes, my familiarity with their material was very minimal.
You subbed for Reed Mathis for a few shows before officially signing on with Tea Leaf Green. How did you move from being friends to more official, as you said, “co-workers.”
About a year ago, March of 2015, they had a gig in Phoenix that was a part of the McDowell Mountain Music Festival. They needed someone to fly down and sub for Reed, and that was my first real call to play with them. There were a couple really short rehearsals, I flew down, and we had a great time and we had a great gig. Obviously there was a lot of pressure that I put on myself to fill in for someone as talented as Reed. Reed and I are friends; we get to hang quite a bit, living in the same area, and we’ve collaborated on other stuff as well. Anyway, I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I think that pressure actually helped me prepare and do the material as well as I could. That led to another two gigs—one was a Bread & Roses benefit at Terrapin Crossroads. I believe Reed was out with Billy & The Kids at the time. The last gig was a private party for some longtime friends and fans of the band.
I think [with my joining,] it became a combination of things where I expressed how much I enjoyed the music and really the whole intention and vibe of the band and that, if they ever needed me in the future, I’d be on board. As Electric Beethoven came to fruition, combined with the Billy & The Kids shows Reed was doing at the time and some of the John Kadlecik shows he was doing, it started to seem that his availability was going to have to be something they would work around for shows. So I just threw my hat in the ring and said, without pressuring them, “Hey guys, if you want to consider this, I would be on board 100%.”
Tea Leaf Green has had two long-time bassists, Reed and founding bassist Ben Chambers. There’s some overlap in their styles, but they’re also very different players. While you were learning this catalog and digging into it, what were some of the shows and albums you listened to? Also, were there are certain elements you thought you could take from Ben or Reed and combine them with your own take?
Yeah, I definitely started off listening to a lot of the loud stuff; I attacked Reed’s style first. I wanted to see what they were up to for the last nine years and how they progressed with Reed at the helm on bass. So I listened to most of the stuff that was online with Spotify or Google Play, music from the 2010-era, roughly, when they were still touring really hard and Reed had established himself as a unique personality since joining the band.
Reed and I have different styles, and Reed did a lot of amazing things with piano playing as well as his bass playing, so it adds a different element than I could ever accomplish. I tried to concentrate more on the vibe than the actual playing, and I tried not to replicate it, because it just doesn’t go anywhere when you try to copy somebody. So I tried to see what aspects of my bass playing were similar, and I focused on those things. When I got the big call to do the East Coast tour, I went to the early material. I started with the first three albums, which they have compiled as a [box set] called Seeds. So I went all the way back and I tried to listen to Ben and see what he was bringing to the table. After listening for a while, I just found that I’m probably a happy balance between the two of them, stylistically. Instead of concentrating on just one, I tried to figure out where my personality fits in between them both. I really dug into the old material, and we ended up playing a lot of old material on the tour as a result of that.
Tea Leaf Green just wrapped up a pretty sizable tour during which the band revisited a lot of places they hadn’t been to for a while. Were there certain albums or specific periods that the band focused on during that recent run or some sections of the catalog the band decided to un-shelve after a few years?
Yeah, a lot of the new material did fall on the back burner. In preparing for shows, I got really excited for the album Raise Up The Tent, which was their 2008 release. I believe they were in the midst of just about recording it when Ben left the band and Reed stepped in. I’m not exactly sure who is on bass for that album. [Ed note: Mathis appears on the album, which was produced by Cracker’s David Lowery.] That album really struck me, and I felt like it was the most complete album that I listened to at that point. I dug in and charted every song on the album and started there. Then I started to bring my focus onto some other material. One of the other albums that stuck out were Living in Between and Midnight on the Reservoir. It turns out that we focused on mostly that era from 2002-2006 and 2008. I just picked out a bunch of songs and charted somewhere about 60.
They didn’t want me to go overboard and learn the entire repertoire, because they thought it would be more productive to learn around 40 songs really well rather than learning everything and being overwhelmed. We started focusing on that material and it felt great—it invigorated the band to be playing some of the material that hadn’t been played in maybe a decade. I could see the excitement in rehearsals with Trevor and Josh and Scott, because this is stuff that had a really big impact on them, especially in their earlier years when they were really breaking out into the scene. It became really fun to be like, “Oh what else we could bust out next?” Without even really having to try, I just kept bringing some older material to the table.
You are in a unique position to dig into Tea Leaf Green’s catalog and analyze the band’s stylistic ebbs and flows from a slight distance. Are there certain themes or conceptual developments that you observed after completing you pre-tour homework?
Good question. When you look into the albums in succession, you can hear the progression. The band is a two-headed dragon in a way. You have Trevor, whose music and poetry combined are really something special. Then Josh has his own style—a lot of his songs are heavier, but then he has some serious and deep, deep ballads. I feel like they really have a two-headed dragon of personalities coming through the music in a different way. They have this happy marriage between the two. Something very important to me is seeing the way their jamming progressed, especially in the mid-2000s where it’s improvisational but not just one person soloing; it’s collective improvisation. I think they do a great job of that. I do feel, as they progressed, that Reed added a third personality to the top of the music. Not just the rhythm section, which had its own personality; he added a third personality that I think was really strong and really benefitted the music. It was nice to see that, and something I’ve been concentrating on is how we can keep this collective improvisation where even if Josh is shredding over the music, it’s not just him soloing over a band, and there’s actually movement coming from the bass and piano—things that are helping build tension and build relief to that tension as a collective whole. The concept of a solo in itself, by name, is something that focuses on one person, but this collective improvisation has been the most intriguing part to me. It’s something I love in music, because there’s a lot more that someone can do to support a solo that you don’t always find in music. Some people just lay back and play their part and let someone solo over it. This is a lot more sophisticated and has a lot more room for success.
In the mid-2000s, Tea Leaf Green grew from a classic-sounding jamband to more of a rock-and-roll-based band. But it seems seems like, in more recent years, they’ve come back to the jamming you just mentioned. Do you think that was a collective decision or a natural progression?
Just from my opinion, it comes from what I’ve been diving into lately. Before the last few months, I wasn’t around or even technically a fan even, though I enjoyed their music. The band went through a natural period of growth and songwriting—maybe that was the rock-and-roll period. As you get older, you start to blend styles, and you can concentrate on songwriting but also enjoy the parts that involve improvisation and jamming and more of an exploratory platform. My guess is that they ended up marrying the two and eventually came back to the jam thing because of how fun it is to improvise and to make every show different and to really have fun with the music. It grew into a rock-and-roll band with an emphasis on songwriting and continued to grow while bringing the jam back into it.
As we mentioned before, Tea Leaf Green’s recent tour was both their longest run in a while and also their most extensive East Coast tour in a few years. Was there an official band decision to slow down on touring a few years ago, and was there a moment when the band decided to return to the road on a more full-time basis?
Most of that happened without me, so I can only speculate. I was just the lucky soul who got the call. I would say there are two big factors: one of them being that [this is] a band that had done this for about 15 years straight, playing 180 shows a year. You start to spend half your life on the road, and it starts to wear on you. It affects your relationships, like the guys who are married. It grows on you, and I think they were looking for a break. Again, this is speculation, but I’m assuming they just needed a break from touring for a bit. The second part of that, which I think is important, is Josh starting a family. He got married and had twins two years ago—two twin boys—and I think that had a big impact on them deciding to take a break from heavy touring. Those were the main things that I could see from an outsider’s standpoint. As far as moving forward, I think you can’t get rid of the passion involved in doing something you love like this. It’s hard to stay away from it for very long. I think the band was really excited to get back into it and especially back to the East Coast where they built a great following. When you haven’t hit a market aside from a few festivals, when you haven’t hit a market in four or five years…I think they made the decision to go to the East Coast for that reason. Not just to show their appreciation, but also give a nod to what they’ve grown there and give back to the fans by bringing it back there first. As far as the future goes, we don’t know exactly what it will hold, but coming from my standpoint, I’m excited to do whatever they have in mind.
It sounds like the future is not planned out yet, but looking ahead, does the band have any new material they’re working on, and have you brought any original material to the band yet?
I believe that it’s something that will happen in the future. As far as my own material and bringing something to the table, this is so fresh that I’m really concentrating on getting a scope of all the songs and learning all the material, so I haven’t really gone forward with any of my own. I’m in more of a support role at this point, because when you join a band with 200+ songs, there’s a lot to learn. Without it being overwhelming or daunting, you have to sort of pick away at it over time. On this last tour, we did debut one of Trevor’s new songs, “Happy, Rich and Beautiful,” and it’s a song I’ve been playing with Trevor at local get-together gigs over the past year and a half. We did bring that to the table. He and Josh have songs tucked away. So there has been talk about them doing a new album. I just don’t know the details or if I’m qualified to speak on the future of that. But I do know there are songs out there, and we did bring one of them into the new tour. I know the band would love to record a new album, and there have definitely been whispers. We’re definitely looking forward to bringing this to as many parts of the country as we can, as soon as we can.
