Fans of the Disco Biscuits might not be ecstatic about the band’s light touring schedule as of late, but—for the past few years at least—their annual Camp Bisco retreat has always been a given. That is, until 2014, when the festival was forced to take a hiatus due to issues with its longtime home in upstate New York. Fortunately for the Biscuitverse, Camp Bisco is ready to make a triumphant return at a brand new site—Scranton, PA’s Montage Mountain. I sat down with bassist Marc Brownstein at Electric Forest to discuss the new festival grounds, what’s in store for the reignited Camp Bisco, the future of the Disco Biscuits, whether or not he’s been writing music and much more.
How are you guys feeling as we approach the first Camp Bisco since last year’s hiatus?
Camp Bisco means the world to us, so having to take a year off is always really a painful thing. Even though we know that every five or six years we need extra time to make some changes in order to make it better, and keep it within the vision of what we want Camp Bisco to be. That’s where we got to be with Camp Bisco. It needed some time off, and we needed to make some changes and a lot of changes got made. We’re just so unbelievably excited, coming down the homestretch here. It’s going to be awesome. Tickets are selling really, really well. We just went up to the site last week, and it’s going to be magic.
What kind of changes are you talking about?
We moved the site. That changes everything. Once we leave New York State, everything changes. The new site has a lot more infrastructure than ILCC, where we’ve been doing it for the last five years. It’s at a ski mountain, and also, there’s a water park at the mountain, and there’s a lodge at the water park, which would be the ski lodge in the winter. It’s a huge lodge area, where there’s going to be an indoor disco. We don’t have to have a silent disco, and we can keep the music pumping because it’s indoors. I was like, “Whoa! There’s a Ben & Jerry’s here?” There’s a Ben & Jerry’s store. There’s going to be a Ben & Jerry’s store at Camp Bisco. I thought that was really awesome.
We’re playing in an amphitheater at the festival, so it’s a different kind of a stage for us. When we looked at the site, we were like “This is going to be a lot different. This is going to be cool.” It’s such an awesome amphitheater, and the people that built it also built a handful of amphitheaters around the Northeast that are prime. They’re just ridiculously gorgeous, well sculpted theaters. Invariably, it’s going to rain, and you have an indoor-outdoor situation. The hotels are close by, and there’s shuttles running back and forth from the hotels. So if you’re the kind of person that wants to camp, then great. But if you aren’t there’s more options. There’s more infrastructure and ultimately it’s going to be a better experience. That’s how I feel.
You’re playing with Electron here at Electric Forest. How has that project really evolved since you brought it back last year?
The thing about Electron is that everybody in Electron has a lot going on in their own world. There’s a lot of momentum with Electron. Tommy has a lot of momentum with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and American Babies. Mike has a lot of momentum with Lotus. We bring it all together and it just seems like it clicks really well every time this particular lineup plays. So when we came back and we brought Mike [Greenfield] into the fold—because Joe [Russo] was never available—it felt natural. Electron was always my favorite side project and it was exciting to me that there was another option. It was so great with Joe, and it was exciting that we could slip Mike in, and it would also feel really natural to me. Mike is one of the only drummers who truly gets what everybody’s doing in this scene. He’s been there to watch the Biscuits, and other bands in the Biscuits scene, like the New Deal and Sound Tribe. He’s seen what we have been doing all these years. He’s played with us and he’s played our songs a lot over the years, so it’s a really natural fit.
What’s been great about Electron is that we’re getting a chance to take it out and play on bigger stages. It’s unique for a band that doesn’t tour. For a band that doesn’t go out and play 25 shows around the country in little clubs, it’s unique to have an opportunity to come out and play at Electric Forest, and Gathering of the Vibes and Hulaween and Jam Cruise. And that’s just because everybody knows everybody in the band. The promoters are able to look at the lineup and be like “Well, let’s do that. These guys all have a lot of fans. They’re all legit guys.” So that’s a unique position we’re in. But we’ve been playing it for 15 years, so it’s not like we didn’t pay our Electron dues. I love playing in this band. I’m excited for tonight. They put us in the jamband slot.
As for the Disco Biscuits, obviously you guys are going to play Camp Bisco and you guys had your shows in Colorado. Can we expect any tour dates coming up for the Disco Biscuits outside of the summer festival season?
Well, North Coast and Phases of the Moon are on the books. And then Dominican Holidaze is on the books. That’s really what we have on the books right now. Is shit going to happen? For sure. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s about to either be confirmed or be announced, but right now when I look at the schedule all I see is North Coast, Phases of the Moon, Dominican Holidaze and Camp Bisco. Fortunately for us, that’s perfect for us. That’s the perfect amount. I think there’s some opportunities to play some shows in the fall that we’re kicking around. Things that might pop up sometime in October. I hope we’re going to do some stuff in October and November before coming around for New Year’s.
Electron
Do you ever foresee a time again where the band might be playing 40 or 50 shows a year?
I could definitely see that. I don’t see a time where we’ll be playing 100 shows a year, but 40 or 50? That’s only 15 more than we’re doing right now. I can see that! Fifteen is easy! You can do that in two weeks. I can see a time where we say “Hey, let’s go out and do two weeks and really do it.” Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and do it two weeks in a row. Bang ten shows out. I see String Cheese does that from time to time and it’s a big difference from what they were doing, which is what we’re doing right now. Twnety-five shows, but then that extra three weeks where you’re doing five shows a week. It’s not that many shows, but it’s a different impression. I could see us doing that, but I don’t necessarily say “I wanna do that” or “I don’t wanna do that.”
There was a time where all I wanted to do was get back out on tour, but over the last couple of years, I’ve started to grow really accustomed to the balance that I have in my life right now. It’s really good. My kids are getting older. My four-year-old son had to fill this thing out at school for Father’s Day. It said, “What is my dad’s job?” And he wrote “Going to meetings.” And I was like, “Going to meetings!? That’s not my job!” And he was like, “Well, I know you go to shows, too, but you haven’t really been going to shows recently. More these days I feel like you go to meetings.” I thought that was pretty astute. Man, even my four-year-old is picking up on the fact that I’m at home a lot more. Because last year we were on tour with Conspirator, we were on full time tour. This year is the first time in his life that he’s had me around and he’s acknowledging it and appreciating it. So I could see another three weeks though. I think you picked a good number, 40-50. I’m going to make some calls.
What about new music? Are you or anyone else in the band actively writing new music for the Disco Biscuits?
I know Barber wrote a lot of songs over the last few years. But where it all end up. I don’t know what’s going to happen. When I got home from Jam Cruise this year, I thought to myself: “I wanna take some time off.” We had Dominican Holidaze, then New Year’s run, then Jam Cruise with a sort of Phish New Year’s run in between. Then we came out to Colorado and did Electron at the Gothic. I came home and Mike Greenfield had given me this book called The War of Art. It’s about writer’s block, but it could be applied to anything. It’s meant to have widespread applications, but it’s about how to get over writer’s block or, maybe, if you want to run or work out every day but you find yourself procrastinating and skipping. It’s a self-help book.
I sat down and I read a couple of chapters in the book—I had already started working on a new batch of songs—and it started speaking to me a lot, and I banged out like five or six new songs. So we’ve been playing one of them the last few weeks called “Miracles,” and this other one that was a little older, that we brought to the set called, “This is Your Time.” Electron has introduced them in the last couple weeks. So there’s new music on the way. There’s like three or four new songs that these guys are starting to hear and know, but we haven’t learned as a band yet. I’m hoping that I can take them and put them together with songs like “The Bridge” and “Last Days of Everything,” and couple of other Biscuits songs that didn’t quite make it into full rotation, and make an album. Whether for the Biscuits, or probably for Electron, make an album where we take all these songs and get them down definitively. Just as an exercise and for the fans. People don’t listen to studio music that much anymore. I know, I could go and make a whole album of these songs and people are just going to go and tell me that the version of “Miracles” from Disc Jam is awesome and it’s 18 minutes long and they don’t need to listen to a five minute version that I made in the studio. So it’s more for me, because I see people don’t buy it. People barely even download new, free studio music. They want the live shows.
So I’m thinking about it. I’m writing, notwithstanding what the final product is. What’s the product? I don’t know, but I know I need to write. I haven’t written songs in five years, so it’s a whole new batch. I think people are really responding to this song “Miracles.” I’ve been shamelessly self-promoting the song because I think it’s exciting for me after years of being—I don’t want to say jaded—about the whole process, but I was over it. I got to the point where I didn’t feel like creating anymore. I didn’t feel like writing songs and lyrics and verses and choruses. We were playing with Conspirator, and I didn’t really have a band that was touring or learning new music so I gave up on that process. Then I realized one day: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if anybody hears the song. That’s not what I write music for. I’m writing for myself, and so I did. I wrote a bunch of songs. I wrote this one song called “Without You” and I know, for sure, there’s no way people are going to like it. There’s no way. It might be the best song I ever wrote. It’s probably the best song I ever wrote. I have a friend at home who is an adult in the music industry who has heard it. I played it on acoustic guitar for him. This is like three months ago now and he got in touch with me two days ago and he told me, “Man, I’m up in New York right now and I’m just in the elevator, and I’m singing something and I’m like what am I singing right now? Oh my God, I’m singing this dude’s song.” So he reached out to me and was like “I’m singing your song right now and I want you to know something: Three months after you played it for me on an acoustic guitar in my studio, I just started singing it again.” This is good, but I know it’s so far from what anybody in my fan base wants to hear from me. I think I know what people want. But the older I get, I realize that I don’t know what anybody wants. So maybe the best thing is to write from the heart and put it out there without regard for that. It’s all for the heart and from the heart. It’s just meant to put out positivity in the world.
