The Disco Biscuits have been quiet this year. With the exception of a few festival events like Mayan Holidaze, Camp Bisco and the new City Bisco, the 17-year-old Philadelphia livetronica group had no 2012 dates planned until they scheduled a three-day Road to Camp Bisco tour a few weeks ago. During the Biscuits time off, bassist Marc Brownstein and keyboardist Aron Magner have toured nationally with their electronic group Conspirator while drummer Allen Aucoin has focused on his solo project DrFameus. Disco Biscuits guitarist Jon “The Barber” Gutwillig, who pushed hardest for some time off, has played out less frequently, with the exception of some sit ins and DJ dates.
But, despite online speculation, the Disco Biscuits are not breaking up and are ready to dig into their deep catalog in the coming weeks. Playing in Conspirator has also put the Disco Biscuits’ sound and unique career arc into perspective for Brownstein, who is currently preparing for tours with both acts. Shortly before the Disco Biscuits kick off a run of dates at Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club this evening, Brownstein discussed the Disco Biscuits’ future, Conspirator’s recent summer shows and much more with Relix and Jambands.com.
Before we get into the Disco Biscuits and Camp Bisco, I wanted to talk a bit about Conspirator’s summer tour. I saw some pictures of your set at Electric Forest this past weekend. It looks like one of the band’s biggest shows so far. Does it feel like when the Disco Biscuits were working the jamband festival circuit in the late ‘90s?
MB: Back in the late ‘90s or the early 2000s, when we’d get a slot at Gathering of the Vibes and play for 15,000 people, it was just the most exciting thing of all time. Conspirator has played a bunch of festivals over the last three years, but we’ve been building up to something like this. When Conspirator played festivals before, we weren’t anywhere near the biggest set at the festival. Electric Forest the other night was incredible. It was massive. It was exciting to see Conspirator have a massive crowd after all of the hard work we’ve been putting into it.
You always see what’s possible when you get to the summer, when you get to the soft ticket shows. People don’t see you by accident at festivals. I’ve played enough small slots at huge festivals to know that people go see who they want to see at festivals—they don’t accidentally find good music. Sometimes you do, but it doesn’t accidentally turn into a 15,000 person show. A festival crowd is not a guaranteed crowd. This summer has opened my eyes to our growth because it was not like this last summer. Now, people are showing up at the stage for the beginning of our shows, and that tells me that hard work is starting to pay off. It’s really refreshing. I hope you can hear it in my voice—we’re like freaking kids in the candy store. [In a weird way] now I’m coming off these gigantic festival shows with Conspirator and going to Biscuits club shows.
Electric Forest, in particular, seems to appeal to both the electronic and jamband crowds Conspirator has worked for.
MB: Dude, it’s right up our alley, it’s the perfect festival in terms of the crowd—both crowds Conspirator works with. Conspirator works the same way that Bassnectar and Big G works both crowd. That’s Conspirator’s style. That’s been our thing and now we’re starting to pump out songs in that style—their electronic songs, and they’re just getting better and better. We just put out four new songs and we played them the our last two shows, and it’s great to see brand new songs blowing up in front of people. We put up some videos on the Conspirator page, just a minute or so of the new tracks.
Are these totally new Conspirator songs that you guys worked on while on the road?
MB: No, we worked on those in May and June in the studio. We had five new songs and four of them are done. We went in with a goal of May and June to come out with an EP’s worth of new material—five or six new songs—and four of them are done.
Conspirator’s recording approach has changed a bit over the years. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached writing these songs in the studio?
MB: We just try to get in a room together, that’s the key. We have computers that we write songs on, so that we can start three songs and work on them separately. Once it gets to a certain stage, Magner can take the song into the other room and start changing the MIDI over to the audio while [Conspirator guitarist Chris Michetti] and I will start firing up a new song. So we have multiple stations going, but back in the day it was a one station thing and we’d all sit around a computer. Now we have multiple songs brewing at the same time. Chris is the main producer, whereas DJ Omen was the main producer when we were doing it back in the day. Part of the idea behind Conspirator is Magner and I, two musicians, are coming together through a producer. Chris is such a talented producer that it helps bring our ideas to life and take everything to another level.
But songs start in all sorts of ways. Chris could start a track or, sometimes, I’ll work on a track all the way to the end and Chris will work on a track all the way to the end. Sometimes we get in there where we’re sitting around a computer breathing heavily on each other. Mostly it starts from saying, “Hey, we’re writing songs this week.”
This time we had been working on them in the studio and Chris went to finish them, and I heard the finished product the night before Electric Forest, and we played all four of them there. I’m still learning them. They’re incredible. We’re just starting to get an idea—back then we were sort of screwing around with different styles of electro and dubstep, and maybe trying to do like remixes like Avicii things and Porter Robinson things. This year we’re just trying to concentrate on finding our sound and where it fits in the scene, where it fits in with the old sound, how they kind of intersect. [We want ti know] where the improv intersects with the electronic beat-making, where the DJ intersects with the instruments, and I think we’re learning. It’s a DJ show but we’re not DJs. We’re musicians, so we’re learning how to control the crowd on a DJ level.
You and Magner have spent the past six months touring with Conspirator. How has the band’s sound changed since this has been your primary project?
MB: We’re just trying to find our sound, and that’s exciting because it really is a blank canvas. What I was saying to these guys the other day is, “dude, do you know how hard it is to get into the pipeline? To break into the pipeline?” Usually, you’re a band and nobody knows who you are. It almost doesn’t matter what the music sounds like at this point and I say that knowing that we can make whatever kind of music we want at this point. We’re fortunate enough that we’re getting these incredible spots—Conspirator’s put time in. Even though we’ve only toured for one year, we’ve been a band for seven years, and enough people know us through the Biscuits that we’ve had this really, really incredible opportunity that I’m really grateful for.
It is scary to start a new band. I don’t really need to do it—we still have the Biscuits—but we are playing 150 shows a year with Conspirator. I just get really anxious when I have time off. I want to be making music, I want to be touring. You know me well enough to know that that’s just me—that’s who I am. I’m a road dog. I look at Warren Haynes and I’m like, “yeah! That’s how you fucking do it!”
Conspirator’s sound is changing, and it is getting better. I went back and listened to some of our old music. I know Biscuits fans always want to hear old Conspirator songs [which were adopted by the Disco Biscuits] and whatever. We play them all at this point but we barely played any of the old ones this weekend because we just don’t have enough time in the set. In our opinion, our new songs are the best shit we have. It’s exciting—I tell these guys everyday, “Conspirator has been around long enough that our songs from 2004 are old songs.” I feel like the songs we are working on will start taking off in 2013. It is like when you buy a car in 2012 and it is called the ’13.
An EP is going to come out sometime late 2012-early 2013. What we had done in the past is make the tracks in the studio, release them and add more instruments on them. So when we made our live album it was like the track had already been released but now it is bigger, thicker and fuller. Now, I think instead of releasing the tracks without the instrumentation, we’re going to take these studio tracks, play them live, learn how to play them live, figure out what lines the crowd loves and then bring them back into the studio.
In a sense, Conspirator has given you an opportunity to grow a second band with 16 years of Biscuits experience. Do you think there are now Conspirator fanswho were never into the Biscuits?
MB: That’s my thought. We have now been to a lot of towns three or four times since the last time the Biscuits were there. These kids are young, and we have the collaboration with Big Gigantic, which I think has opened us up to lot of people who are the next level generation of Biscuits fans.
It also helps that electronic music and dubstep are mainstream styles of music again.
MB: Right, it’s pop music again. And, if you’ve been reading the blogs and all that, you are aware of the fact that the people at the top feel like it’s over. But, once it hits the major mainstream, there’s only one direction for it to go. And once it hits the top, you can’t keep going up and up and up. At some point, there has to be some sort of correction—it is like the housing market. And especially with trends, it is just the nature of trends. It’s underground, it is cool, people latch onto it, it becomes mainstream and people run away from it. It’s the nature of the beast, so we’re just grateful that we’re not in the mainstream, that it blew up into the mainstream but we’re on the fringe of it. I’m grateful to be on the fringe of it because I’m old enough—and wise enough—to know, as great as it is to be on the forefront of a movement, if you’re on the fringe it lasts longer.
Moving onto Camp Bisco, it is funny that when you started the festival in ’99 we were still at the tail end of the rave scene. Then you kept the festival going when everyone was going to jam and indie rock shows and now electronic music is hot again.
MB: I get messages that are like, “you guys have really sold out,” and stuff like that. When people asked Jerry Garcia, “Do you think you’re selling out?” when he released his ties he said, “I’ve been trying to sell out for thirty years, but nobody has been buying.” Yeah, we sold out—we actually sold out, there were no tickets left last year, but it is not because we’ve changed our plan—it’s just cause the shit we’re into got cool again. We didn’t run to what was cool in ‘01, ‘02, ‘03 and ‘04—we stuck with what we liked, that’s the great part of the success of Camp Bisco as far as I’m concerned.
It’s not about the tickets, it’s not about making money, it’s about bringing the music that you’re into to the people that are into your music. It’s about spreading the creativity. It’s like Wyllys said the other day, “I hate when people say they don’t do it for the money—that’s just fucking bullshit!” And then he goes, “I do it for the fucking money, and I’m having a good time!” Early on we were just artists—we were trying to promote the type of music we like. We had no idea that it wasn’t cool. But, if we had to suffer through all those years when it wasn’t cool, I’m not going to apologize for enjoying it when it is cool. And my answer to those haters who are saying we “sold out” by booking electronic music is: “that’s always been our thing, and we’ve always gone with the current styles of electronic music at Camp Bisco.” It just so happens that right now electronic music is popular again.
Bassnectar was a sidestage act at Camp Bisco years ago—we paid him $500. Now, he is headlining Camp Bisco, and we can’t get anyone bigger than him to play because he is the biggest thing out there. But he is a grassroots guy. We’ve been lucky that a lot of people we have met at our shows have become big in their scene—it is the greatest thing when that happens. We met the guys from [Camp Bisco promoters] Meatcamp before they even started out and now they are killin’ it with all these shows. Dan Berkowitz started out at our shows and now he is the VIP guy for the biggest bands around [with CID Entertainment]. It is like when the Kings of Leon played at Bonnaroo. We watched them grow until they blow the place out.
People have mentioned that there are not as many jambands or rock bands on this year’s lineup. Do you feel the need to balance live and electronic acts at the festival or are you just concerned with programming three days of quality music?
MB: Well, at this point the Disco Biscuits are one of the only [nationally touring] jambands that play the festival. We do have Papadosio, Lotus and Brothers Past—bands we want to promote, our friends—and we try to bring some acts that are not huge. But to be honest with you, this year, we [the Disco Biscuits] didn’t bring anybody. I didn’t put anybody on the lineup this year. I legitimately trust that our promoters know how to do it. They know how to make a festival sell out, and this festival is going to sell out. They’re as good as anybody. It felt good to be honest, it felt good to let them do their thing. It felt good to watch these young promoters play with the big boys.
The Disco Biscuits only have a few shows scheduled for this year. Have you been working on any new material for the band that we might hear this week?
MB: No, the newest material is the stuff that we put on [2011’s] Otherwise Law Abiding Citizen. Pretty much all of the new songs that I’ve been working on this year have been dedicated to Conspirator because Conspirator’s touring. It makes sense to write music for the band that’s playing shows, so we don’t have a ton of new music. Our hardcore old school fans always give us shit for playing new music anyway. So I just feel like the right thing to do is play our older songs this week. We are not going to just run through the hits though—everything’s on the table. Everything’s rare—when you play six shows every six months, nothing is overplayed.
Songs like “Therapy,” “Rainbow Song” and “Stone” come to mind but in terms of [what we might play], but it could legitimately be anything. Everybody in the band is expected to know how to play every song [this week]—it’s part of our thing in the Disco Biscuits. At Biscuits shows, you’re expected to show up knowing how to play all the songs. For our New Year’s Run, we practiced hard when we got there. We’ll practice for hours a day over the next two weeks while we’re playing the shows—in between the shows and everything—but we find that we play better at the shows when we don’t exhaust ourselves out in the studio practicing new material and old material. It becomes stale after a week of two of practice, it’s almost better to make sure your hands are ready and your mind is ready. Your hand has to be warm, and your mind has to be sharp. That’s the recipe, for me, for the best Biscuits shows.
How have you felt this new approach has helped the band’s dynamic?
The last couple of runs that we did have felt the freshest we’ve felt in so long. I felt like we were just killing ourselves with practice for a while—we’d practice so much. Other bands that I’m friends with just don’t practice. So, it occurred to me that maybe we were overworking ourselves a little bit too much. Practice gets tense too, and you’ll end up getting into a fucking unnecessary fight before a big show, and there are so many variables when you’re a band like the Biscuits where you have temperamental personalities. I tell young kids, if you want to be good, if you want your band to be good, practice seven, eight hours a day. But after fifteen years, take a step back.
I don’t know what’s right for other bands, I just know that for us, I’ve found that we work best when we practice mostly for a few hours before the shows because it’s about the improv. Whatever, if you miss a note or something, who fucking cares? I know people do, but I don’t. Whatever, that’s not what you’re coming for. You’re coming for the peak, the energy moment. If you’re coming to see ballads, you’re coming to see the wrong band. Wilco is down the road that way! We’re not that—we’re the peak energy band. We don’t always achieve it but it’s about getting the fuck out there and finding what works. I see the responses to our shows on Facebook.
I genuinely have a child-like glee about going to the 9:30 Club to play with my brothers. You get to that point where you think, “How can we make this work?”—keep the cash flow going, keep everybody happy and everybody wanting to do it. Bands don’t traditionally last 16 years—and I know there are some bands that have been around for forty years and Mazel Tov to them—but it’s not easy to keep a band together for even two years—let alone for 16, 17, 18 years. This whole year is about taking a deep breath and, when we finally do show up, being really excited about it.
We’ve been around for over 16 years, and it’s hard to keep that fire going. All the bands we grew up with—moe., String Cheese, Sector 9—have all put the brakes on the touring. Nobody has done it with as much fanfare as the Biscuits because I think there are all these “are the Biscuits breaking up?” vibes that are undercutting us and because me and Aron are out on tour with another band. Sector 9, they do that shit with such grace. They take time off so gracefully that you don’t even know they’re taking time out. They really do it well.
I think it is OK that our scene is taking a collective breath because it’s overkill. There are too many DJ’s, there are too many producers, there are too many live acts, there’s just too much out there, so it makes sense for our part [of the scene] to collectively take a deep breath and, dare I say, wait out the storm. For me it feels like when this whole batch of trends goes away, we’re gonna be left. We’re still gonna be standing there with fucking instruments. Jamming.
I think that’s true, if you look at the last height of electronic music in the late ’90s, right after that, the jamband/rock boom happened. Same thing with the late ‘80’s and early 90’s. It’s like a pendulum.
MB: Right. It’s a cycle. There are trends and cycles in style, and it’s fucking awesome to be able to kinda ride the fence between the different genres so that we never really become irrelevant. When bands come back into style, we’re one of the bands. When the electronic stuff comes back in style, well, that’s our shit too.
You mentioned a few songs you are thinking about playing with the Disco Biscuits. Are there other areas of the Biscuits’ songbook you want to focus on during this limited run of shows?
MB: Well, it’s like I said to my buddy Dennis the last time the Biscuits had a run in Mexico [earlier this year]. I kept asking him, “what should we play?” and he goes, “Honestly, at this point, just play a fucking Disco Biscuits song.” Nobody cares anymore! Nobody cares what songs we play, it’s just not about that anymore. It’s about, “play some shows so we can go watch our favorite band play.” That’s the vibe. For a while I was uncomfortable with our [classic jamband-style songs] like “Therapy.” As the Bassnectars and Big Gs and all these electronic bands started to blow up, those songs felt less relevant.
I kind of understand where Trey [Anastasio] was coming from when he was like, “I never want to play ‘You Enjoy Myself’ again” or whatever that was about. I guess I kind of identify with that a little bit, on the level that it is hard to keep your music relevant after 16 years as all these styles change. That’s why so many acts stop playing and start new bands—they want to have a chance to stay relevant as different music gets popular and the music changes.
But we’re not doing Conspirator because we wanted to do what was popular, we legitimately are into that. We’re into the electronic scene. Before all this shit became popular in 2004, we were starting to try to figure out how to get to where we are now. It took almost eight years for it to come to fruition, but this was kind of what our vision: a band that didn’t sing, that was all electronic. Now that we have that, we don’t have to try to force the Biscuits to be that. I’m much more comfortable letting my songs be what they are and playing them. When we played those shows at [New York’s] Best Buy Theater in April last year, it was almost cathartic to play those old songs.
“Therapy” is the song that sticks out the most, but there are a lot of them. Of the songs that I wrote, a lot of them that are in that same range of rock songs where I really like the melodies, and I like the choruses and I like the harmonies and the chord changes and shit. But the reality is that they, that I felt they were outdated in a certain point of time. I just got sick of playing that style of music, and a lot of those songs just never got played—they got buried. And we’d just play like, “Cyclone,” “Gangster,” “Caterpillars” and “Rock Candy” and the new stuff like “Catalyst.” But now I’m eager to get that out and play “Spectacle” and “Hot Air Balloon” and “Mulberry,” all of which are Jon’s songs—they’re the best. I can’t wait to play Jon’s songs. Playing those songs with him is one of my favorite parts of my career. Now, I love the shit we’re writing in Conspirator, too. Chris is a whole different person with a whole different set of ideas, and he’s brilliant. I said it before, we’re so fortunate to be able to play with such brilliant people from Jon and Sammy to Allen and Chris and all these people.
When I was a kid in college all I wanted to do was play music but wasn’t really good at it. I needed to go to music school and really dedicate myself. Almost twenty years down the line and this is where we are, and we’ve had all of this success and it’s still going, and we’re starting to have it again with a different band. We built a sustainable model with the Biscuits over a long period of time and are lucky that selling tickets was our bread-and-butter, not record sales. It’s just, sometimes you need to take a step back and take a deep breath and smile and enjoy what has been accomplished. And we’ve certainly been doing a shitload of that this weekend.
It is funny that after 16-years of nitpicking setlists and songs, now Disco Biscuit fans are just excited to hear you play together.
MB: For sure, 100%. We’re not breaking up today. Every band breaks up eventually, everything dies eventually. But for us, we’ve got plans through 2013, and we know what we’re doing with the Biscuits. We’re a little shaky on what our fall plans are for Conspirator right now, but it’s nice to kinda sit back and have the fans know that they’re getting more Biscuits shows. It’s gonna be spread out and spaced out, and we’re gonna come in and give our all to that. It’s exciting for us that the fans are there, man.
It’s so exciting meeting up at Camp and meeting all these kids brimming with excitement—when sometimes, for me, it’s a little frustrating, admittedly, trying to bring a new band to a fanbase that’s emotionally attached to the old band’s music. It gets frustrating sometimes because you’re playing all new music in a different style, obviously. This is a long process and these are two different bands, and they are potentially two different fanbases. All music isn’t for everybody, and if you’re gonna dedicate yourself to making something that’s totally different, you maybe have to come to terms with the fact that not only is the music gonna be totally different, but maybe the fanbase is too.
Biscuits fans have been really supportive of us this year, more so than I could’ve ever hoped for. We’ve been out on tour road-dogging it, and as it’s been growing, there’s been a phase of Biscuits fans supporting me and Aron. I can’t thank them enough for sticking with us through it because I know it hasn’t been easy for the fans—and it is hard for us to maybe not know exactly what the future’s going to hold, and not know who you’re going to be playing with, who’s gonna be there. I feel almost more now than I have in a really long time just wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and just so overwhelmed with the excitement involved with what’s been going on—and the possibilities of what’s about to go on.
Do you think 2013 will be a year where the Biscuits record more and tour more?
MB: I want to say that I think we’re going to tour more. That’s what I want to say, but I just don’t know. One thing I can tell you for sure is that I’m going to be on tour. There’s no way I’m not. The only way I won’t be on tour is if I’m dead, and I don’t plan on doing that for a long, long time. So, I’m going out, everybody’s different, and I hope that as we continue to take a break we’re extending the longevity of something that is very special to us—and a lot of people out there. That’s what it’s about—extending it into the future.
If we go like we did in 2009, it’s over, man. You just can’t do that anymore. The dynamic of a lot of bands isn’t strong enough to withstand the hardships and the lows that the road brings to you. It’s hard. Living in a bus is tough, it’s tough business. While I’m sort of built for it, it’s in my DNA to be out there on the road, I totally understand if Jon doesn’t want to tour—I get it. It makes sense to me. How could you possibly want to do that forever? In the same breath as I could say how grateful I am, and how incredible it is, there’s a part of me that’s envious of my friends who don’t have to live nomadic lifestyles in order to take care of their families.
There are times where I look at people and say, “Man, I can’t believe that person put himself in that position,” but for me the passion and the art and the crowds is addictive. I love it and, whomever I am playing with, I push them so hard when I’m out on tour. I’m trying to learn, maybe, to find a little more balance because I don’t want to drive this band into the ground by touring so hard that we all burn out.
Conspirator is different—we wake up and all four of us go to the gym together. It’s a little bit more disciplined in terms of a healthy lifestyle. Not to say that if the Biscuits went out on tour right now it wouldn’t also be disciplined in terms of a healthy lifestyle—we just got to a point where we wanted to live healthy—and in Conspirator we have been living healthier, so it hasn’t run us down as much. We’re not getting sick and going out of commission for two weeks or whatever.
What type of tour could you see the Biscuits going on in the near future?
MB: If something comes along like Identity Tour and that makes sense we’ll go and play the whole country. We love playing the sheds. Maybe next summer, if a tour came together that made sense for us, with the right acts. Maybe something like Identity but more in line with what would work in the Disco Biscuits world. I wouldn’t rule that out. Fuck, I’d do it, but I don’t know if everybody would want to do that. Who knows what’s gonna happen? That’s just me daydreaming. But that’s what I do. I’ll sit on the phone with someone and I’ll start daydreaming, and then come up with an idea like that. I’ll call my manager, Kevin Morris, and be like, “Yo, what if we set up a 20-show tour in summer of 2013 with this band, and that band and this band, and try to get something together.” That’s how it happens. It’s just brainstorming.
When I interviewed you guys in 2004, around the time of the last Biscuits breaks, you said that one of the Biscuits’ mantras was that if someone doesn’t want to tour, you take a year off and you let people have their space and digest and don’t push them to the point where it becomes an unhealthy situation. That’s a smart plan for any band looking for a long term career plan.
MB: That’s 100% true and 100% right. We don’t break up. Everybody’s like, “are you guys breaking up?” The Biscuits don’t break up. We take time off until everybody is ready to play again. We’ve learned from watching other bands that when you break up, generally what ends up happening is that you get back together. So, instead of breaking up, we just take our time, do our thing, and that’s how we operate and that is what our business plan meant. We’ve discovered that as a business plan, it’s almost more sustainable to play less shows—less is more. I’m sorry, Mississippi and Arkansas.
You play better shows, the demand goes up, the shows are all bigger, everyone is in a great mood the whole time. You don’t give yourself a chance to run yourself in a downward spiral. With 25 shows there’s no downward spiral. It’s like five vacations together. We’re not together long enough to hate each other. It becomes more sterile and more friendly and more about the music—less about the bullshit. It’s great. Whatever it is, the way we’ve been doing it has been so exciting on both fronts.
I’m excited to get back on the road with Jon and Allen, and fucking throw down the way that we know how. That is the only we know—other people throw down in other ways, we throw down in our own way.
