Lo Faber’s schedule is filled to the brim. In addition to his responsibilities as a professor, author and father, he will spend part of his summer performing with his longtime band God Street Wine. “My wife is always saying, ‘You need to do less!’” he laughs over the phone.
A mainstay in the ‘90s New York City jam scene, God Street Wine made a name for themselves with their intertwining guitar riffs and their lively, hours-long concerts. Currently, the band has three east coast dates scheduled for this month, two new singles and, as Faber revealed in our conversation, there’s even a 9-track album on the way.
It’s been a few years since the band reunited, but you have these shows coming up and you just released a new single. So what’s the current status of God Street Wine?
The current status is that we just love to play. We all do other things nowadays, so when we do get together and play it’s special and rare and it’s really great. Back in the day when it was our full time job, there used to be undercurrents of anxiety, like I think a lot of artists have. “Are we doing the right things? Are we gonna make this work?” But now, it’s honestly for the love of music and being together as friends, and that’s so great.
Would you guys ever consider working on another album?
Yeah, we have an album. I don’t know if I’m supposed to even… So that track we just released [“Firelight Flickers”] was one of nine new tracks that we have. I don’t know if I’m supposed to even tell you that.
Okay. Do you guys have a name for it?
No…I’m trying to think if maybe I’m not supposed to…Who cares, really? I’ve never stopped writing songs, and Jon [Bevo], our keyboard player, also has a lot of songs. So it’s really taken shape very slowly over the last year and a half, since we’re all over the world, we’re not in one place. I’m down in New Orleans, I record a demo, I send it to our drummer who lives in Berlin, and he records the drum track along with my demo, and basically we scrap the demo and treat the drum track as the beginning and recut all the other instruments to the drum track, so that it has an organic feel.
So what inspired you guys to finally those songs down on wax?
I love that phrase, “wax.” It hasn’t been wax for a long time. I think what inspired it was me just wanting to do it. The only outlet I had for the songs was to play them as a solo acoustic, me and my acoustic guitar, and that wasn’t really enough for me. Solo acoustic is fine, but I like to think more in terms of orchestration and instruments and grooves and colors and so…I really wanted to hear these songs come alive with the band and get them out into the world. I’m not gonna get any money off of them, so it’s just wanting them to be heard.
I wanted to touch on the shows you guys are about to play. I’m curious if there are certain periods in the group’s catalogue that you haven’t revisited since your reunion that you were hoping to dig into when you have this live forum?
We’ve tried to be very balanced in our post-reunion incarnation because, I don’t know if you know the whole story, but we broke up at the end of 1999, and then we didn’t play at all for a full decade, and we were all doing other things. We ended up getting together in 2009 because of the sudden death of an old friend of ours. We played at his memorial service and since then, in the eight years since then, we’ve played maybe 20 shows. So two and a half shows a year on average. Not very much.
So in that decade we didn’t play, everybody forgot all our songs, I forgot that we were ever even a band. We had to go back and relearn songs, and I always say that we became a God Street Wine tribute band [Laughs.] We listened to ourselves and tried to learn all the songs, and that was a really cool process. It allowed us to be very objective, like, “This song is kind of cool…” When we were out there playing five shows a week, we never really heard it the same way. When we’ve done all these shows, we’ve tried to do the greatest hits of the original God Street Wine. We really try to spread it out. We did have very definite phases and periods that we went through in our 11 years together, and we’ve tried to mix it up and do justice to all of it.
But one thing I really do like is playing new stuff. We do play some new stuff, and we play some covers, we play songs of ours that are old but were never really released or never played that much. The most rare and unusual stuff is the most fun for me live, it just has more novelty.
You used the word “balance,” so I’m curious how you guys are crafting setlists for these shows. Are you going in with them set in stone? Are you striking a balance like, “Alright, these fans favorites with these deep cuts and these new songs?”
I start off by asking all the guys if there’s anything that’s a little bit unusual that they’d like to play, and then once I have that input from them I write a list—a draft setlist for the three shows. But it’s understood that it’s gonna change, that it’s just a starting place.
Do you think after this new record you guys will tour more and announce more shows?
Not me personally, but I think some of the guys in the band, when you say the word “tour,” they start to shiver. I don’t know. I’d love to do that, but I don’t know if it’s in the cards. We’ve played in New York and we’ve played in California, and those are places that everybody kind of likes to go. When you start talking about getting an actual vehicle to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Springfield, then it starts to become a whole different thing. That’s how the real people do it. Bands like the Allman Brothers that tour nonstop for 40 years, I just can’t say enough about how much respect I have for that. It was too difficult for us, I admit. It was too much for me. I couldn’t handle it. You have to be really built for it. We were built for it for a little while, but that’s just not where I want to be, especially after I had kids. I like the quiet life.
It’s funny that you bring up the Allman Brothers, because I was actually about to pivot towards them. What was that experience like, to share a stage with them, opening for them and seeing that whole machine?
It was amazing. Like I was saying, I have so much respect for their longevity and their ability to jam. The music was just very alive, which you don’t always necessarily hear with artists who are older and have gone out for 30, 40, 50 years doing the same thing. How they kept it that way-I know it wasn’t easy. Shortly after we toured with them, Dickey Betts was out of the band. I know there were some troubles there. I can’t speak to him as a human being, but as a musician, he was just unbelievable. The band with him and Warren Haynes on guitars was when we mainly toured with them and that was just terrific guitar interplay. And God Street does that too, we have two guitarists, and we have a lot of written stuff. We’re solving the same problems. What can you do with two electric guitars in an improvisational band? The classic Allmans orchestration is to have these written lines, usually in thirds or sixths between the two guitars, and that’s what you hear on stuff like “Jessica” and “Come and Go Blues.” Maybe it’s getting too technical, but I just loved watching them. Every night I loved watching the shows.
On the H.O.R.D.E. tour in the ‘90s you were on the road with Aquarium Rescue Unit, so I have to ask about the late, great Col. Bruce Hampton. Do you have any memorable experiences with him? Did he do that trick where he guesses your birthday?
He never did. I never asked him to, because I was afraid of how creepy it would have been if he actually did it. I know a lot of people that he did that to. For some reason, the memory I have that sticks out in my mind of Col. Bruce is sitting backstage with him—I don’t even know where—but he was just on an all day rant about Wolf Blitzer. You know the guy from CNN? And Bruce was just going on and on. He was stopping everybody backstage saying, “Can you believe this guy Wolf Blitzer?”
So I stopped him, and I was like, “Bruce, what’s the deal with the Wolf Blitzer thing? What are your thoughts on Wolf Blitzer?” And he was like, “I just think he’s the most mediocre human being.” Like, okay? I mean, he was just so passionate about it. In that day, he was just feeling a very strong feeling about Wolf Blitzer. Bruce was a nice guy. He was a warm person, and he liked to find these amazing young musicians and put them together and see what they could do, basically. He brought happiness into the world.
That’s such a nice way to sum him up. Moving on, Jason Crosby has drifted in and out of GSW’s reunion shows in the past. Is he going to be be a part of this run in August?
I don’t think so. I think he’s out on the West Coast during this run. So I think it’s just the 5 of us. Actually, Pete Levin, who has also played keyboards with us a lot, is going to sit in with us at Peach Fest, I hope. I don’t think Jason is going to be with us.
I know in the last few years you’ve shared the stage with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, so I was curious what that was like. Did you get any pearls of wisdom from them?
What really was thrilling to me about working with Phil is how much he likes to rehearse. I don’t think the Dead rehearsed that much, and maybe the fact that he likes to rehearse a lot now is a reaction to the Dead not having rehearsed enough. But we played at Terrapin Station, which is his club. We played three nights there and so obviously it went without saying that every night was going to be a wholly original setlist and it was going to include Grateful Dead songs and covers, and it was going to possibly include covers that he had never played because he wanted to always be throwing in his new music. And we were going to rehearse all day, we were going to spend a lot of time working on our vocal arrangements because Phil was very excited about the fact that God Street Wine had a lot of harmony singing, just like the Dead.
So we basically rearranged all the harmonies on every song we did. And on the third day, I woke up with this idea that I wanted to do “I Am The Walrus,” and I called Phil in the morning, and I was like, “What would you think of doing ‘I Am The Walrus?’” And there was about 10 seconds of silence on the phone, and I was like “Oh my god, this is a terrible idea, I should’ve never said anything” and he was like “Yes! Let’s do it!”
He still has that spontaneity.
It was such a good feeling…For an encore, we played Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue,” which Phil said he’d never played before. And he was like, “Yeah, it’s a simple song. I can do it.” He’s just all about having fun. He’s Phil Lesh, so what more do you have to prove, really? He does certainly play loud, that’s another thing. Nobody’s telling Phil to turn down.
And what about Bob Weir?
We’ve done a bunch of things with Bob at this point. We played with Bob on Jam Cruise, we did his TRI studio thing, which is awesome. So many bands did that and unfortunately I think because of money they had to shut it down. But we had this album that we did for Geffen Records in 1994, it’s always been our fans’ favorite album. When Geffen got sold to Universal at the end of the 1990s, a lot of the Geffen catalogue went out of print and is not being released, and that includes that album, so we can’t legally distribute it. So we figured we’ll do the next best thing and just recreate it live…
$1.99 Romances.
That’s $1.99 Romances, right. We performed it live at Bob’s studio, and then Bob came out and joined us, and we did four Grateful Dead songs with Bob, and he gave us the rights to release the whole thing as $1.99 Romances (Live at TRI Studios).
How would you say that living in New Orleans impacts your writing style, or how you’re approaching music now?
I don’t know if this actually relates, but I’m really into Steely Dan, and I heard a great quote from Steely Dan the other day. They were from New York, they met at Bard College and they were living in Brooklyn for a while, and they were not very successful. So they relocated to LA, which is where they became successful, and they said that they had to move out to Los Angeles to start writing a whole bunch of songs about New York. So I think that resonated with me a little bit, because I still think of New York and New Jersey. The greater New York area is where I’m from, and if I write about a place, I’m writing about that, not New Orleans so much. I always feel like a visitor in New Orleans. But yeah, you get far away from a place and you can kind of think about it in a different way.
I guess this kind of relates: You guys are considered a New York City band, but some of those really fruitful writing sessions that you did in the ‘90s took place in that house out in Ossining, right? So is it a similar scenario? Where you had to get out of New York to write about New York?
The house in Ossining was when we really learned how to play, as far as I’m concerned. Because we were off in the city, but we were students and we had day jobs so we really could only play for a couple hours in the evening when we lived in the city. But when we moved up to Ossining, all of a sudden we were just making enough money where we didn’t need day jobs and basically on the days we didn’t have gigs, we just played for 12 hours a day. We started sounding much better and our style started changing and I started writing songs that were more fitted to where we were naturally going and it just really came together. I think the first couple of years in New York were sort of a prologue, in a way. I could get a lot more technical about how all the things changed…but a lot changed. It’s great for a band to have that time.
It’s interesting. You guys were all living in the same house back then, and now you guys are literally all over the globe.
But we’ve had common shared experiences that will live with us forever, you know?
God Street Wine’s 30th anniversary is coming up next year. Do you have any plans to celebrate that in a formal way?
I hope so. But honestly, we’re not too good on planning. When we had the 25th anniversary, we released the box set and everything, but all I can really say is we’ll see what happens. It sounds like a good marketing angle.
You always need one of those, you know?
I think that we’ll always play as long as there is an audience and demand for it. As long as a few people on Facebook are clamoring to hear us.
We were talking about your anniversary coming up, so I wanted to take it all the way back to your first show in New York City, which was December 13, 1988 at the Nightingale Bar. I’m curious if you could tell me what you remember from that first show?
Well I remember the Nightingale very well because we played there many, many times beyond that first time. It was a great little spot and Blues Traveler started out there, they started playing the Monday nights, then they started playing the Nobody and within a few months they started getting a really big crowd on Monday nights. Then Spin Doctors took over the Monday nights from them and then we eventually took it over from Spin Doctors. And we were all kind of influenced by Jono Manson and the Worms and all the side projects that spun off from the Worms…
But anyway, getting back to the Nightingale. Tiny little dive, 2nd avenue and 13th street, which in those days was not the yuppy nice neighborhood that it is now, it was kind of seedy. But we ended up getting signed because of all the crowd outside that couldn’t get into the show. You could pack like 300 people in there and then it was physically impossible to get more in there, and there would often be a couple hundred people outside on the corner waiting for their chance to try to get in, and it was people smoking pot and all sorts of hippie antics going on outside.
How long did it take for you guys to get that sort of crowd at the Nightingale? Was it instant? Or was it slow and steady?
We played there many times to an empty crowd. The first time—I was telling my students, the first few gigs you can get your friends to come out. But then they stop coming. So I think, probably, when we played there at our very first show, on a Tuesday night, we probably had a bunch of friends there. But it’s different. Your friends, they stop coming eventually. Because they’re your friends they’ll come a few times. But eventually you need people that you don’t know who will actually pay money to see you, that’s when it really counts, you know?
So we played there many times to a half full or completely empty room. My brother used to come see us, and he would sit right in front of us in a chair and read the newspaper. He would read the sports section in the New York Times, and I would be like, “Tony, you’re killing the vibe! You’re killing us here! Could you not sit right in front of us and read the paper?” and he was like, “What? I like listening to your band, and I like reading the paper!” And I’m like “Just move back or something! You’re kind of bringing everybody down!” Sitting right in front, by himself, reading the paper.
That image is just priceless, I can’t even imagine.
There are so many stories from the Nightingale. I met Joan Collins in there once at about 4:30 in the morning. She came in with two enormous body guards and sat down at the end of the bar, probably the only place she could find open at 4:30 in the morning. And then of course they weren’t gonna close the bar, because Joan Collins was there.
Wow. You already kind of touched on this with the Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors thing, but obviously, The Nightingale was kind of this spontaneous epicenter for the jam scene in the 90s, so…
It was the first epicenter, and then it kind of moved to the Wetlands as the scene got bigger.
So what was it like for that minute, kind of being in the eye of that hurricane?
It was totally fun. It was really awesome. Honestly, it happened so fast. One minute we’re playing to five people and my brother’s reading the paper, and then a couple months later we’re packing the place. Word got out among the cool people, somehow. I don’t know. But we improved and we got our act together and the word started to spread and it was just one of those things that just hit critical mass very soon. It was totally fun to go from nobody there to all of a sudden a few months later we’re playing at the Wetlands and there’s a line down the block. All these bands are blowing up at the same time. Phish—we were always three steps behind Phish—they were this hippie band from Burlington, VT, and I remember one time at the Wetlands, Phish was playing, and we were playing two blocks down at another venue called the North River Bar, which we played occasionally, and there were so many kids who couldn’t get into the Phish show at the Wetlands that our show was sold out. Like 500 people at the North River Bar. So that scene really just sprung up.
Obviously the Nightingale is closed, and more and more venues in New York City are closing, so I’m curious what your perspective is on the current state of the live music scene, because it’s grown in a lot of ways, like you have these huge festivals blowing up, but then in a lot of ways it’s shrinking at the same time too. So I’m curious, from your perspective, what do you think of that?
I know that bands now can make a lot more money playing live than they used to, I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re asking. I just went straight to money. And that’s for a lot of reasons—because of the rise of Live Nation, and because of ticket prices going up and promoters basically discovering that a lot of audiences are willing to pay more, so the careers of bands like Phish and the Allman Brothers are really prolonged and made very lucrative by the fact that they can stay out and make enormous amounts of money on the road.
So for that, it’s very artist friendly, and maybe not very audience friendly for audience members who maybe don’t have as much disposable income, but that’s another story. By the way, I’ve never been into live music that much. It’s totally hypocritical of me, because I’ve benefitted so much from our fans and supporters who are into live music. But it’s never been my thing. I hate going to festivals. Festivals to me are just the most unpleasant thing imaginable. I’m short, for one thing, so I’d end up standing behind somebody who’s like 6’5”, and all I see is their back, and then it’s just crowded together, lines to go to the bathroom, it’s just not my thing. I’m so grateful for the people for whom it is their thing. But yeah, there’s a lot of people who love doing it, and it’s the music, but it’s also the vibe and the sense of participation and something happening.
It’s interesting that you say that you’re not a big fan of live music, because in my research, I was digging into old Relix stories about you guys from the ‘90s, and there was a quote in there from [God Street Wine drummer] Tomo, and he said, “We’d like to be known as recording artists, as opposed to the road-hog road-warriors.” Basically saying you’d rather be known as recording artists than a live act.
He probably said that in the mid-90s.
So I’m curious now, in 2017, what would you like your legacy to be known as, and has your opinion changed from that?
Well I don’t know if we have a legacy, we’re just happy if a few people remember that we existed. But I think that we did want to be a recording band and we liked the Beatles and the classic rock era of albums from Genesis and Pink Floyd, you know? Where the album was very much the thing. But I think that probably before the time that Tomo gave that quote in that interview, we had probably realized that that wasn’t going to happen and that we weren’t going to be that kind of band and the audience we had was an audience that wanted to mainly hear what we could do live.
So I think we eventually accepted that and were grateful to have any audience of any kind, whatsoever. If live is what they wanted, then we were gonna do live. We did want to give people what they wanted, so the recording stuff was more fun for us, in a way, because you could be more of a perfectionist with it. And the touring thing would get pretty grueling after a while. I think it’s mainly that it’s two totally different things. I mean, they’re both music, but they involve very different skill sets. And they’re totally different experiences for the listener, too. One is a private experience, where you have your earbuds in and you’re jogging or you’re in your car or in Central Park or something, and you’re just in your own world with music. The live music thing is where you’re in a big room with a lot of people and it’s loud and you’re all together and there’s maybe some dancing involved…it can be much more powerful and we have so few things in our consumer society where we all sort of get together communally and do something, which is what makes live music really special for people, I think. So they’re just two totally different things, and if you’re a musician, you sort of do both. But you’ve got to reconcile yourself to the fact that like, if you’re a baseball player you have to bat but you also have to put on a glove and play the field. You just have to do two different things.
