WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LA LAs is the tenth studio release from moe. It is also the first outside label release, via Sugar Hill Records, in almost a decade. The record features some old, some new, some tweaked, mostly road-tested tunes that cover quite an extraordinary amount of sonic geography over its ten eclectic yet exciting tracks. Released on January 24, the band will follow with a winter tour before hopping the pond to play at Jam at the Dam, whilst also hitting other cities for a European tour, which will feature the new, dynamic album, plus the usual glorious moe. assault.
Jambands.com sat down with guitarist Chuck Garvey for a discussion on the band’s latest work, the highlights of the year just past, as well as what it is like to be in a band that is now in its third decade of endurance, with a sturdy and vigorous back catalogue, as well as the ability to energize an audience with thrilling new material and old twists on familiar tunes. Garvey is an amiable, intelligent, and perceptive man, while being a warm and engaging artist, not only on the stage, but off, as well. We will continue our look at the new album, as well as the State of moe. in 2012 with a second part featuring Al Schnier. Stay tuned for that feature in the coming weeks.
RR: At this point in moe.’s career, does it feel pretty good to have that tenth studio behind you, and are you excited about fans hearing the album? What are your overall feelings about WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LA Las ?
CG: Definitely excited for its release. I have no idea what people are going to think. I think that it’s good—at least from our perspective—that we are doing something that’s a little bit different from what we are used to. The sound is a little bit different, the arrangements are a little bit different from songs that people have heard before. I don’t know. I think there’s a freshness to how we approached it, and it is going to rub off in
other ways. It’s just like some of the other albums we’ve done where we’ve chosen a way of operating that would be specific for that album, and, hopefully, it influences how what the final product is in a new way, and, this time, there is definitely no exception.
We brought in a producer for the first time in a long time. In some ways, we really deferred to him as someone who could say, “This could be better. This could be different. This could be a little more unique, and more of your own personality, which could be infused in this a little more.” John Travis is the producer that worked with us on the album, and, I don’t know, he just kind of flogged us a little bit. (laughs) He made us work on things with a slightly different mindset. I think all the songs benefited from that approach. It’ll be interesting to see what people think of it once they finally hear it, and have a little while to digest it.
RR: The album sounds tight and colorful, and not produced by someone other than moe., while maintaining that complete album experience, which is vital to me. How did you choose John Travis to produce the album? What had been his experience with moe.? And what did you feel he could bring to the band in the studio?
CG: He actually has known about us for a long time. He used to live in New York City, and he said he used to go to the Wetlands quite often, and he had seen us there, like in ’95 or ’96, around that time. He was familiar with the band in that way. He has worked with a lot of different bands. He’s worked with one of the grindcore bands. He’s worked with Kid Rock, Sugar Ray, and these kind of pop bands [i.e. No Doubt], and he’s also come from this punk background [i.e. Social Distortion, which is a genre upon itself]. It was weird that…in one way, he knew about our roots, and what we were doing 15 years ago, and, on the other hand, we had this conversation with him where we were referencing these different kinds of music, these specific albums by artists that we liked, and we had a lot in common, or, at least, the conversation was very easy in that we could get ideas across just by talking about specific albums and specific approaches to making recordings. And I think that was the one thing that clinched it for me—in that conversation, he didn’t seem locked into any one thing or another; it just seemed like we would all have the tools to talk about what we wanted to do and execute it. In that way, he seemed like the guy for me.
It’s hard to talk about music. You can say I really like this artist or this album, specifically, but when it gets down to the nuts and bolts of doing it, it gets a little harder because it’s not always apparent how to convey how to get a feeling across, or how to maintain energy and interest in a performance. It gets kind of gray. (laughs) It was good to be able to have that kind of rapport with him in talking about what we wanted to do. That was pretty important.
RR: Definitely. I think what is also important is that moe. is known for their expertise during live performances, and on a studio album, where consistency is vital, maintaining that live energy and momentum can be difficult. Travis does capture that live energy and consistent flow on this album, even with all the elements, i.e. the occasional Tom Waits vibe, and the wonderful instrumental that Jim [Loughlin] wrote. Did Travis intuitively understand that moe. needed a live feel with these songs, while at the same time wanted to craft a proper studio album?
CG: He knew what we had been up against in past experiments like doing Wormwood, which was half live and half studio-recorded. We talked a bit about that. What we ended up doing was just saying, “We’re only going to give ourselves three weeks.” To put ourselves under that time constraint really made everyone have to get to the point quicker. It is kind of better for us not to fuss too much over it.
That was one thing. The other thing was that we really, for the most part, did whole band takes of everything. Every track that you hear, the whole band was playing together with only the exception of like Jim’s song, “Chromatic Nightmare.” I think they recorded Jim and Vinnie [Amico] playing drums, and Rob [Derhak] playing bass, initially, just to get the timing right, and then we put on a couple of other flavors on top. To keep that live energy, it was the whole band playing together, and playing off each other.
One thing that I think that he understood was that those kind of performances, when the band is all playing together, you get more of the dynamic and you get more of the intensity that you might not get if you’re just trying to go for a perfect-in-a-vacuum performance of each instrument individually. It definitely helps out. I think when we all play together and, hopefully (laughs), we all have the same goal in mind, we can all push things in that direction and keep the energy up, even though we may have been working on a song for half the day trying different arrangements. Once you hit something that’s working, it’s almost like it’s fresh and it’s a brand new thing, so you get a little bit more of that initial spark and energy as part of the performance.
[Travis] made one point. He basically said that many of your favorite classic recordings have mistakes and out of tune stuff all over it, and it actually becomes part of the charm, or the uniqueness of that recording. And it’s definitely true, even if you listen to Beatles’ recordings. He pointed that out, and you don’t really think of it that often because a lot of people hold artists like the Beatles in such high regard. Of course, they are excellent singers; they never sing out of tune. It happens (laughs), and that contributes to the texture of what is going on. Sometimes, you can call it texture, and sometimes, it’s just so far out, it turns into something that is low quality. There’s a fine line there, as well.
You want to get the fire and you want to get the inspired performance, but you don’t want to lose quality control completely. I don’t know. This goes back to what I was saying before. There are a lot of elements to making a good recording without sucking the life out of it, and I think that was one thing that [Travis] is aware of, or he was tuned into was getting good performances out of us without sucking the life out of it, or without losing control of the quality of what was to become the final product. It’s good having someone else to do that, rather than the band responsible for every decision. It’s good to have someone else say, “No, it’s good, keep it,” because they can be a little more objective about it. It was good having him on board for this.
RR: Wormwood is one of the best albums to come out in the last ten years, easily in my top 3. What I enjoy about the new album is that the band was able to capture that same fresh and live energy within the studio, but in a different way. I’m curious about the song selection for WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LA LAs. How did you choose the songs to be recorded, and how did John’s influence change the songs, i.e. some of the older cuts that had been played for a while on the road?
CG: We had a list of 23 songs, I believe, and that included everything from songs that were less than a year old, and a couple of songs that had not even been played by the band (they were just demos), and all the way to older songs like “[The Bones of] Lazarus” is a fairly old song. We’ve been playing it for a while. Out of this list of 23 songs, we wanted to hear what he thought was interesting and what he thought had the most promise. We let him go through all of them and say, “These are the ones that I’m really attracted to; these are the ones that I am inspired by.” And, then, we went back and said, “We’ll pick a couple of fan favorites, or pick a couple of songs that we also feel strongly about.” So, we put the two lists together, and what ended up happening was that he chose songs, specifically, for their uniqueness. They didn’t really necessarily sound like they were stylistically taken from a certain genre, or a certain band. He also picked songs that he felt had the most appeal for being memorable songs, or something that you might even be able to hear on the radio. That wasn’t really the utmost concern for us, but in picking the songs, I think his criteria were more about getting songs that he felt would reach a lot of people, and that would be really memorable, and not something that was just so unique or a novelty that it would stick for a little while, and then maybe fade. I think that was kind of what he was doing when he was choosing the songs. We just had to add a couple of things that we just felt strongly about.
RR: What were some of those things that you felt strongly about? I would think “Downward Facing Dog” was high on the list of songs to be on the album.
CG: I think that was one of the ones that John actually picked. I can’t remember, specifically, which ones that we came in afterwards. He liked “Chromatic Nightmare,” and I think, maybe, that we mentioned “Lazarus.”
RR: What about something like “Paper Dragon?” I think that song is a perfect example of a song that doesn’t sound like it came from anywhere else, but it has a lot of different elements, and somehow all makes each piece fit within the structure. I loved the overall colors on the back half of the album—side 2, if you like—and “Paper Dragon” starts off the back half very well.
CG: That’s interesting, actually. We were working with Sugar Hill [Records] for the first time on their label, and Sugar Hill had a couple of people there listen to it, and there are
different ways to look at sequencing an album, and one of the guys that Sugar Hill said, “This is how I think it should. I think we should do it like it’s vinyl, and do the first half of the album in this way with a concentration on these songs, and then, the second half of the album will go in a different direction, in, maybe, a slightly darker direction.” I think “Paper Dragon” is like that, that might be that turning point, halfway through the album, where things get a little weird. (laughs) It worked out. Everybody really liked that running order, so we went with that.
RR: I love that “Suck A Lemon,” which you wrote, ends the album. I know you wrote it for the psychedelic Halloween show, but what was the genesis of that song?
CG: That song was specifically for the Halloween show, as was Jim’s “Chromatic Nightmare.” [moe.’s 2010 Halloween show was themed the Electric Lemoe.nade Acid Test, which was rescheduled to December 2010 due to an illness in the moe. family.] “Suck a Lemon” was the basis of the song like ‘suck it up’, basically, and, also, it’s a reference to taking acid. (laughs) It just worked out well. I ended up writing that song on a plane ride somewhere. I think I wrote 80% of the lyrics in two hours. I just did it. And then I worked on it a little bit afterwards just before the show. It was weird because I was thinking of a Syd Barrett-type, slightly classical influenced, but also a definitely English flavor to it, psychedelic rock flavor. It was kind of hard to get away from that after the initial playing of it. I think everybody in the band liked the song. It was hard to get away from a little bit of that forced flavor, or that novelty, or whatever it was that made it more appropriate for the Halloween show.
Sometimes, especially for me, if I start doing something one way, I stick with it. It’s hard to let that go, and completely shake it up. We started and we had problems with the instrumentation of it—with the band and how to do the rhythm and get the melody across and not have it be too cluttered. When we got to the studio, it was actually difficult—played it on the acoustic guitar for a while, try and change it around and the feel of it. I think we were working on it in the PM of one day, and the next morning, we started working on it again, and after a couple hours, we just decided to take it in a really heavy direction. I think we, literally, did it two or three times once we came up with the approach, and that’s the take that you hear. I don’t think we added very much to it in overdubbing. That’s pretty much a live band version. I don’t know. Just that approach seemed to work right away, and the recording caught that, that initial spark that we had in approaching it from a different direction. It was new to all of us, so it had a different kind of energy to it. I think, for some songs, that really benefits the treatment of it, when it’s really fresh and not too labored-over. You get the rough edges and you get that texture from it, and that recording definitely benefited from that approach.
RR: There were not a lot of overdubs on the album, but I know that may not be the case with that song. What special guitar treatments were laid down for it? Were you and Al using standard guitars and amp setups, or did you do things differently?
CG: The one thing is that Al had a slap back delay on his guitar, and this weird tremolo. I don’t know if he was using…he has one that I think it’s a Schaller, a German tremolo pedal, or tremolo effect, and it’s kind of square sounding. It chops off a little bit. He started using that, and probably like a fuzz or something, some kind of heavy distortion. I turned my delay all the way up, and I would turn it on and off for all that ‘ray gun’ effect, kind of like a really fast [Garvey scats a really fast ‘ray gun’ guitar effect] sound, and we ended up just playing it like that, and I think we only did three takes of it, and the third was the one that we kept. That’s pretty much the band playing live. During the verses, I don’t even think I’m playing guitar on the recording. It’s just Al’s fuzz guitar, which is really huge, and on the choruses, I don’t think I was playing, all I played were the verses when I did that effect, and I played that effect in between the verses.
RR: Are you and Al both playing slide guitar on “Downward Facing Dog,” or is that double-tracked slides?
CG: We’re both playing slides on that. Al plays in an opening tuning, an open G, and I play in standard tuning. At one point, in the second half of the song where it gets really intense, I think I added one other guitar overdub, just for that really crazy mechanical-sounding riff. (laughs) But, yeah, again, that is all tracked live and we all played together.
RR: “Rainshine” has a really impressive guitar solo near the coda. Was that recorded live, or did you measure it in later after you laid down the basic tracks?
CG: Oh, the one that sounds like it has an octave, or weird effect on it? O.K., yeah, that was played live. I played that with an octave pedal. Oh, no, actually, I think I went back and re-did that. I think what we did was that we did the song, and I immediately went back and re-did the solo. I think at the end of that you can hear the last note gets cut off a little bit, but we tracked it and I went back and re-did it. We were working very quickly, so it is actually kind of hard to remember some of the things we recorded.
RR: Some of the material has been out there for a while, some of the material was also previously written and then tweaked in a different way for the album, and some of the songs are brand new. How will you introduce this material in its current form into the new live setlists?
CG: After we completed the album and the mix, we were touring in November, and we ended up recording acoustic versions of all of these songs as bonus stuff.
We did it during soundchecks. It was done really simply and on the fly while we were on tour, and some of those ended up being pretty interesting. We were pretty happy with how all that stuff turned out. It’s not perfect. They’re not studio gems, but it’s just interesting to hear this whole electric album in that acoustic treatment. It was pretty fun to do, but we had to do it very quickly, and now, we actually have two different new versions of a lot of these songs.
We’re going to start right at the beginning of this tour, we’re going to play the album in its entirety, and we’ll also probably start incorporating acoustic songs when we have the time and the ability to do that—we’ll start playing those live. So, yeah, it’s going to be interesting. We’ve been playing some of the songs, and, actually, playing them with almost their new arrangements and the new treatments. But, for the upcoming tour, at least for a while, we are going to play the songs much in the same way that we did on the album. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’ll stay that way; we’ll see what works, and what doesn’t work, and tweak everything accordingly.
Photo by Chris Paul
RR: I love that you were able to play these songs immediately in an acoustic fashion. Sometimes, musicians get away from themselves and don’t realize that the songs need to stand on their own, and I think that’s just a great idea for the band, too.
CG: It’s pretty important for us that all of them work (laughs)—just one guitar and one voice; hopefully, all these songs can be effective in that way, and then you know you have the good essentials of the song, and everything else is just gravy.
RR: Other than the upcoming moe. winter tour dates here in the States, you have some shows overseas where this new material will be played, as well. What does the Jam in the Dam mean to you and the band at this point in time? And how excited are you to be able to go over to tour Europe in 2012?
CG: We’ve been to the Melkweg before and we played two nights, and that was really special for us, but the trip was way too short. (laughs) Now, to go back and also have this other music out, which is important, it’ll be great just to be able to hang out and see these other bands in that context, and to be able to hang out in that city is lots of fun. We’ve never done it before, but it made a lot of sense and we are pretty excited about creating a European tour. We had plans to do it a couple of years ago. We had talked about doing it, and it just never worked out, so this visit is going to be pretty special, especially starting off with that kind of festival atmosphere. If you can call it that. It is kind of like that.
And, then, to do these [other European] gigs is going to be pretty interesting for us. It is going to be a lot more like 1994 (laughter)—small places and hard work and tight quarters and loud rock and roll. (laughs) I think it’s going to be kind of fun.
I can’t even…I haven’t even been thinking about it much. We’ve just been working on the day-to-day stuff with the album and everything that goes along with releasing it, and touring it here in the States. We are going to be playing at the Macworld convention, too.
RR: I was going to ask you about that. January 26. Macworld as part of the conference’s Music Experience. How did you get approached for that gig?
CG: They saw the iPad video that we did and they were really excited about it. So it’s all great and positive work surrounding the release of this album, which we are pretty proud
of—all of it from working on acoustic versions of the songs, working on iPad versions of a couple of other songs, doing in-stores, and playing all these shows, and going to Europe is just one giant colossal (laughs) thing to look forward to. It’s a lot of logistics and a lot of planning and a lot of work, but it’s definitely all wrapped up in the excitement of this new thing that we have. I’m looking forward to all of it. It’s kind of a blur; it’s just focusing on the small aspects of it when we need to. It is kind of overwhelming, actually. Small bites.
RR: moe. had a wonderful idea to have fans send in their favorite moe.-gig related photos to the band’s Facebook page for a ‘moe. memories 2011’ section. With your comment about “a blur,” I wanted to ask about the 70 gigs played in 2011. It seems like a somewhat manageable amount for the band to play in one year. When you look back at 2011, do you have certain things that you are able to spotlight for yourself, or is it just one giant big blur?
CG: It kind of is. (laughter) Pictures do a lot to help to trigger memories of all this stuff. Yeah, I do remember a lot about [2011], and it all started at New Year’s last year when we all wore white tuxes, and we had the Dirty Dozen Brass Band play with us in Boston, and that was such a great way to kick off the year. A couple of the guys had their kids come up on stage and played and sang with us. The whole thing, that night, was just a great way to kick off the year for us.
We also went to the Dominican Republic, which was amazing. It was a small group of people, but it was a really cool…I don’t know what to call it…it’s like this cool little field trip. (laughs) We were able to play an acoustic show and three electric shows in this wonderful place, and everybody had a great time. That was the beginning of the year, so we really had a great way of kicking it off.
The touring in 2011 has been a lot of fun. I see pictures of all the places that we’ve been, and remember the stages and some of the songs that we played, and they all start to blend together a little bit, but it’s definitely fun to go through the pictures and see what we’ve been up to in the past year.
I can’t…it’s funny…I think the Dominican Republic was really a big highlight for me. Summer Camp was amazing, and moe.down was really amazing this year—I think that I really feel like those were the highlights of the year for me.
RR: You seem to be caught up in the flow of events while keeping a positive attitude. A couple of years ago, you spent 2010 celebrating the 20th anniversary of moe., so I am wondering about your current take on the band as you move forward.
CG: Well, we’ve been starting to look…obviously, we’ve been doing this for a while, so we’ve been looking at touring and the special event shows. We just look at them differently and creatively every year. This year, we were working towards—and, actually, part of last year—making a studio recording, and gearing up for that as we were
touring, so we were playing some of the songs looking forward to making this album. And, finally, we were able to set aside the time for it. A lot of our energy was focused on that, and fine-tuning the songs on the road a little bit, but looking towards making this new, different recording (hopefully). It’s those kinds of projects and that kind of the planning aspect of what we do where you’re planning six months, or twelve months, or even eighteen months in advance, that everything starts to get a little…not surreal…but, you can lose perspective on some things just because you do have to look ahead a year in advance, or more, when you are talking about making a recording, and releasing it, and setting up a tour, and everything that goes along with that.
You are also talking about keeping a positive attitude.
RR: Yeah, especially when you’ve been doing this for so long. When someone has that much time plotted out in advance, how do you not go on auto-pilot creatively?
CG: See, nothing is completely plotted out, though. Everything changes like the day before. (laughter) It’s having those things like looking forward to playing in the Dominican Republic, or looking forward to playing the Summer Camp festival, or moe.down, or looking forward to the recording, and eventually the release of this album. There are all these things that when you have them to look forward to, as long as you have that, everything else becomes easy, or a little bit easier (laughs) because you are working towards these goals, you are working towards the time when you get to do these exciting and, maybe, different things where you’re putting yourself in a different situation. As long as that’s fun and exciting and you have those things to look forward to, the whole process is definitely a lot better. It’s better for us; I think it’s better for our fans. If it ever comes to the point where the music is suffering and you’re really not looking forward to anything than I can’t see doing it anymore. But, luckily, we always have these things to look forward to, and in that way, it’s less like a job. It’s more like you’re working on your family, you’re working on these friendships that you’ve had with people for 20 years. As long as you have that, you’ve got a lot.
