Photo by Dino Perrucci
In the early-to-mid-‘90s, guitarist Jeff Raines and bassist Robert Mercurio, childhood friends from outside Washington, DC, were attending different schools in New Orleans and creating what would become one of the city’s staple acts, the funk-forward collective Galactic, which has grown from its New Orleans funk roots into a fusion of traditional and modern styles, collaborating with a wide array of vocalists, R&B artists and pretty much anyone who they feel can help them make great music.
While aboard this year’s Jam Cruise, Raines, decked out in a 9:30 Club t-shirt that showed his DC roots, reflected on seeing some of his idols, The Meters, reunite with their original lineup on the boat, while discussing his initial discovering of funk music through Red Hot Chili Peppers, the development of Galactic in the rich New Orleans music sphere, what the future holds for the band and more.
You guys have been on the Jam Cruise every year so far. Can you talk about how the cruise has changed or stayed the same, what you’ve experienced all those years?
It’s always been kind of wild out here, but I think originally—if I had to just say how it evolved—in terms of the audience, originally it was a little crazier. The younger kids were coming. There was a Phish concert one year in Miami, and the boat filled up with Phish kids who were quite wild. And over the years, it seems like the crowd has gotten a little older. It’s people who don’t want to go, like, sleep in a field in Tennessee in July or something. You don’t have to drive, you don’t have money or responsibilities, and all the food is taken care of. So it makes a lot of sense. Were I getting on [in age], and still doing rock festivals, this would be perfect. You can see the logic. But people are still out here having a good time; it’s not like a sedate event by any means.
And the music? Has it always been so New Orleans-centric?
It kind of has. New Orleans seems like it’s always very well-represented on this boat. I know so many people in town that have been on it, or are on it right now, and it’s certainly cool that they have kept to a New Orleans vibe. It sort of fits the spirit of the whole thing. I keep hoping they would take the ship out of New Orleans.
So you guys are pretty synonymous with New Orleans, but you’re not from there.
That’s true! I grew up outside of D.C.
Can you talk about discovering New Orleans funk music, funk music in general and how you got into that music and it became part of your life? Along with moving to New Orleans and hooking up with Stanton Moore and things like that.
When the bass player, Robert [Mercurio], and I grew up in D.C., we were really into the punk-rock scene. In the ‘80s, you could go see shows at community centers and stuff, so it was awesome because we could actually go see these punk-rock bands playing on a Sunday afternoon. So we got interested in starting a band by way of that. We’re in 8th grade, we started trying to be a band—you know, played our talent show. We were playing, like, surf music. We were called The Schizomatics, and we were playing “Wipeout,” Agent Orange and bands like that, playing surf music that Robert’s sister thought was cool, but kind of edgy. We were playing in the band for years, and then I got a Mothership Connection tape, and that kind of set me off on this funk tangent. Robert and I just became interested in that music, and we started buying records, Funkadelic records and James Brown records. And the punk-rock scene’s very aggressive—the slam dancing, the stage diving, the fighting, skinheads and shit—and I remember it was kind of refreshing. This music was fun and imaginative and interesting and just badass, musicianship-wise, much more so than the punk rock scene, which was bar chords and aggression.
And that was when the Chili Peppers were really making very compelling, cool records; they were super creative and interesting, at least to my adolescent mind. Then we started to go see them, and they kind of bridged the gap between punk rock and funk in a lot of ways. So they were an important band in my memory from that time, before I was 18. So we sort of randomly both went to college in New Orleans; I had worked in New Orleans when I was 16 at a presidential convention running for a newspaper, and loved the city and had the best time—never went to work, went out every night, drinking bars, I couldn’t believe it. So I just became totally, like, “When I go to college, that’s exactly where I’m going!” And [Robert] had gotten into Tulane and NYU and he ended up going to Tulane, and I ended up going to Loyola—and eventually failing out of music school, or dropping out—where Stanton and Rich [Vogel] both were.
So once we hit New Orleans, The Meters were playing—we knew who The Meters were by way of the Chili Peppers because of “Africa” and “Hollywood,” and we knew George Porter was this legendary bass player. So we started to go see The Meters all the time, and by way of that, we started to go see the Ohio Players—a lot of classic ‘70s funk bands were still touring at that time, Average White Band, Slave, Brick. The Ohio Players shows were always just fucking kickass. I particularly remember those. Then just all the New Orleans dudes: Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Rebirth [Brass Band]—there was just so much going on in the scene. We had mountain bikes, and we would go to nightclubs at night on mountain bikes all the time; we sort of became known as these two dorks that would show up and lock our bikes up out in front of these little clubs. So by our sophomore year, we started playing in frat houses, covering Meters tunes—very badly, you know. And over time, we had some success. We started getting some club shows and getting shows opening up for other bands.
Then we got Stanton in the band, and then things started to happen for us, because he was just a really good drummer, even then. He was playing on the heavy-metal scene in New Orleans, in this band called Oxenthrust, and was interested in James Brown and The Meters and heard that we trying to play that sort of music and just approached us. Once we got Stanton, things started to happen—we got a horn section, through Loyola’s jazz department, essentially. And Rich was trying to get in the band—everyone wanted to get Rich, so we got Rich. Then the core kind of fell into place, and we never looked back, really. I mean, we started making a record maybe two years after that, and started packing clubs locally, and the rest is history I guess.
What’s it like for a small band in New Orleans, with that super rich music scene? Do you think it makes it easier to get gigs with so much going on, or is it harder because there’s so much competition?
I mean, back then, it was different. It really was. There were more clubs, seems like. Small clubs. And a lot of bands would do weekly shows. Like, Walter Wolfman Washington would do every Saturday night, and if he went out of town, all of a sudden we would get his gig. And then you’re playing in front of his crowd that doesn’t know he’s out of town. So we were facilitated by a lot of that kind of stuff like that, which was awesome. And then we just got a couple of club shows a month around those little clubs that we would just pack the shit out of. It was just a very exciting time, because it was like, sky’s the limit, that kind of thing. We were young and hungry and bought a van, started driving to Colorado.
Can you talk about getting into specifically funk guitar playing, and maybe some of the early specific influences you had?
I mean, there was Eddie Hazel, of course, from Funkadelic, but then it was really The Meters. Robert and I spent our freshman year of college trying to learn Meters licks, and learning the tunes—essentially wrong. That was really where we both started really trying to figure out what the hell they were doing—and still am, really, in terms of Leo Nocentelli. He just wrote so much material, in the early ‘70s especially. Like the Alan Toussaint recordings and stuff—you could kind of figure it out, but not exactly. That was definitely the stuff that we really dug into and started to figure out—and still love that music to this day.
Obviously you guys have developed your own sound since then, with a lot of R&B influences, working with R&B artists, things like that. Can you talk about that development and if it was a conscious effort to go those different ways?
I think you have to evolve in some way to keep everyone interested to a certain degree, and you’re just reflecting the changing times in music and production techniques. We have sort of bridged the gap between analog recording—our first record was all on two-inch tape, no computers—to now, where everything’s done on computers, no analog. Our career spans that huge technological leap, and I think that has really affected the way we record records, obviously, but also what we’re doing. And also just access—on Spotify, you have access to everything ever recorded, and it didn’t used to be like that. We all carried around cassette tapes, giant boxes of tapes, and it was just a different era where you were trying to find stuff. It was more like digging through shit. But now, there’s so much access to so much international music from all over the world from the history of recorded music, and I think that has really affected what we do, too.
Can you talk about how some of your collaborations have come to fruition, like on your last album with the great female singers you had like Mavis Staples and Macy Gray, and in the past hooking up with rappers and artists like that?
A lot of it has come around just through friendships we’ve made on the road, touring with people and meeting people. We’re fans as artists, and we’ll just approach and say, “Hey, let’s do a tune.” For instance, right now we have like 20 demos sitting around, probably, and we’re slowly molding into our next record. No one in our band is a decent singer—or lyricist, really—so we’ll send people ideas, demos, and try to build tunes, see what they come back with, and from there, build tunes in our studio. So a lot of that comes about over time, just sending stuff back and forth with artists that we’re either friends with or fans of.
Can you talk about any of the songs you have, or future plans to record this year, maybe?
It takes us about two years to make a record, and right now we’re in year one, but getting to the end of year one I would say. So there’s a big pile now sitting there, and the cream kind of rises to the top, so the good ones are starting to emerge, I think. So we’ve got a couple things that are further down the road right now with actual lyrics, but we haven’t approached any artists that we’ve wanted to collaborate with yet. Or no, that’s not even true—there’s a couple things that are sort of more on the semi-completed side of what they will be, but not completed. So we’re in that stage right now. It’s about a year out from our next record, I think.
Are you guys always writing or do you have writing sessions for specific albums?
A couple of the guys in the band are very into production, especially our bass player. He has really been obsessing over that kind of world lately, and he’s very talented at it, so he’s sort of spearheading this album, as well as the last one. So we go in, and if you have a demo idea or whatever, we’ll make a rough track with pre-recorded Stanton drums and then rerecord everything at a later date. So we’re writing on the computer to drum loops, and then we’ll all bring it into our room and hash out things and work on it as a unit. At some point in the evolution of a tune, that definitely has to happen. And then we’ll go in and do a big session and record everything as well as we can.
And you, personally, when you’re not touring with Galactic, or in the studio or with that band, do you work on other projects, side projects?
I have another small band that I play with in New Orleans around town. We just played Texas and San Francisco. But Galactic’s pretty much a full-time job. That’s not totally true, actually. Our year is kind of pre-set; we’re about to go on a huge touring cycle and do our national tour, and we’ll tour up until Jazz Fest and then take some time off, and then do the summer festival season, and then sort of take off the holidays because that’s no time to be on the road, apparently. So from the end of the summer to late January, that’s when we’re not touring as much. That’s kind of how our year has been for quite a while now, so it’s kind of cool; you can set up your time. We feel very fortunate to have the longevity that we’ve had and be able to still tour at this level and play music that we’re proud of and all that.
So when you have that break, do you try to actually take a break?
We’ve been trying to hit it in the studio and move this record along in the last few months, that’s what Galactic has been up to. And just rehearsing—we try to always be bringing new live material forward, because you don’t want to tour on the same stuff you did last year, obviously. We’re always trying to think of interesting ways to either cover old songs and make them our own, or bring up songs that we haven’t been playing for a while–we’re doing a couple medleys now, playing some of our older material, stuff like that. So the wheels are always spinning in some regard with the band, for sure.
