We all have that one friend who never lets us down, never stabs us in the back, and is all around reliable and genuine. The jam band equivalent of that friend is moe. For nearly three decades the New York group consisting of bassist Rob Derhak, guitarists Chuck Garvey and Al Schnier, drummer Vinnie Amico, and percussionist Jim Loughlin have been touring constantly with a live show that to this day is still one of the more exciting concert experiences you can get for your buck. Even as the members of moe. have grown up and started families over the years, they have continued to tour and host their own music festivals such as moe.down, which celebrates its thirteenth year this August, Summer Camp, and snoe.down.
The band’s music, best described as a simmering, psychedelic gumbo of every style of rock ever done, has always found a large and loyal enough audience willing to support them on just about every endeavor. Through it all, the members of moe. have never let the hardships of the road and the kind of personality differences that often compromise a band’s longevity get to them. There have been no break ups, prolonged hiatuses, or major drug issues, but rather just a group of ordinary guys who happen to make music for a living and can always manage to crack a smile onstage no matter how many times they’ve played the same song or venue.
As if a perpetual tour schedule and handling their own festivals isn’t enough, moe. have released 24 albums consisting of studio and live recordings. This doesn’t even count the soundboard recordings they distribute of nearly every show they ever play. Their latest studio album, No Guts, No Glory (Sugar Hill), promises to satisfy even the most die-hard fans (aka “moe.rons”). The record is an amalgamation of the quintessential moe. sound, kicking off with the steamy “Annihilation Blues,” a catchy anthem rocker that sets the high energy tone for the rest of the album. “Same Old Story” features Jim Loughlin’s rousing xylophone work while the jammy “Silver Sun” dives into the band’s Pink Floyd influences, and “Billy Goat” sees an older live favorite getting respectable studio treatment. All told No Guts, No Glory rocks through and through and is an exceptional effort from the jam band that never lets us down. Recently, one of the band’s two lead guitarists, Chuck Garvey, took some time to discuss how No Guts, No Glory almost didn’t happen and the state of moe. as we know it.
(Glide video premier of moe.s lyric video for “”Annihilation Blues”)
How’s everything been going with putting together a new album and getting it out?
Everything’s been going great so far. The way that it works for things like this, there’s kind of a lot of planning that goes on a year, six months, three months before the album comes out, so by the time stuff is actually happening I’ve already forgotten what the plans are [laughs]. I actually get surprised by some things, like a friend of mine just got in touch and said, ‘hey, I like this track on the album.’ I was thinking, how did they hear it already? I forgot you can preorder and hear songs before they are available. The music business is different than it was 10 years ago, so every time you put out an album things change a little bit. But it’s good because word travels so quickly for very small pieces of information, and it seems like the word about [the album] is spreading very quickly.
Why did you think the band’s initial attempt at making an acoustic album didn’t work out?
We had a vision for what we wanted to do. At first it seemed like everything was in place and everything was going to be great, and we were all ready to go. Then, each of the many aspects of the production – the how’s and where’s, the producer and everything – little by little everything started to change. And then one day we realized that a lot of the aspects of our original plan had begun to crumble, and the whole thing ended up just not being what we wanted it to be, so we had to adapt on the fly. It wasn’t a bad thing, we’re all grateful for how it turned out, and we managed to get a new plan together. It was one of those things where we had this idea and the idea morphed away from that and we realized we weren’t going to be able to do what we originally intended. We still have an opportunity to do [an acoustic album] in the future.
If you look at Dave Aron’s production resume, it doesn’t exactly say moe. What did you think Dave Aron could bring to the table that would be different than your previous work?
Dave’s been a friend of ours for a while. We met him maybe ten years ago, and we see him just about every time we come to LA. You’re absolutely right – his resume is a completely different world. [But even] being in the hip-hop world, he’s always liked rock bands, and his studio in Burbank caters to a lot of rock bands. It’s funny because we were supposed to work with Larry Campbell originally when we had the first kind of more rootsy, acoustic foundation to our album and that was what we wanted to pursue in the studio. The time that everyone was available was just not working out, so when we realized that wasn’t going to work we said, ‘you know, we’ve been friendly with Dave for a really long time and let’s just try something completely different and see what happens.’ That was really what we were thinking going into [the album]. Dave’s aesthetic, personality, and way of working – it became more obvious to us that we could have a conversation about what we were trying to do and he would get what we were talking about. He had also seen the band live and heard our recordings for a decade, so we felt like he would really understand the aspects of our live shows and what our fans have come to expect or enjoy from us. We thought that he could help us draw more out of that in the songs we were working on, and that was a really big part of what he did.
Speaking of the songs, one thing that stands out to me is that the album closes with “Billy Goat,” which has been in your live rotation for a long time. I’m curious how you decided out of all your songs to include and record that one.
That song has become a newer fan favorite and we felt it was something that, with a studio recording, if we pulled it off correctly, would be a song people were really excited to hear and get a really great studio document of. We also wanted to have a lot of songs that no one had ever heard before, but a couple of the songs like “Billy Goat” we felt were important. I’ve read a couple of things online and people seem excited that “Billy Goat” and a couple of other songs are included on the album, so it seems like we made a good choice.
Al Schnier recently mentioned in an interview this idea of putting a song through the “moe. ringer.” Can you elaborate on what that means?
[Laughs] It can mean one of two things. That could mean when one of us writes a song and then we bring it in and present it to the band, and then we all work together to hammer the arrangement into shape or make tweaks to it. I think in that way Al is referring to our democratic process, like every band member putting their own personality into it so the end product sounds like a moe. song. The other thing Al might be referring to is to actually play the song live for a little while. Sometimes it’s how we do it; if we include the song in a set and it’s part of a segue between two songs or if we put it in the middle of another song, or if we extend part of it and improvise sometimes we’ll come up with new sections. Sometimes we just find parts of the song that maybe can be improved or edited or re-arranged. Once we get it into a new form we kind of know when it’s done.
When you enter the studio and you’re putting songs through the “ringer,” is it difficult for you to take a song that’s maybe twenty minutes in the live setting and condense that into a five-minute standard song?
It depends on the song. I know exactly what you mean. For the last album What Happened to the La La’s? we had Al’s song “Downward Facing Dog,” which is essentially two songs kind of put together. There’s one half and then there’s this whole second half outro part to the song, and it’s [fully] composed, meaning we’re not improvising but there are all these parts – like on “Rebubula” – that you go through to complete the song. Most of the time we’re striving to have the basic foundation of the song be a good, memorable pop song – not like Britney Spears – but something that’s hooky and memorable and the lyrics tell a story that’s important. To get it played on the radio or just to present it in a different way we actually made a radio edit where we took out different parts of the song so that the overall result was a little more of a manageable time. We had to go back and learn it like that so we could play it like that, and it was weird because in some ways it didn’t make sense, but in other ways if you haven’t heard the song before maybe it did make sense. It’s hard for us to do that sometimes, but other songs have large improvised or solo sections that we can simply cut out and you can still have that foundation of the song and it makes sense.
Given how long you have been playing together as a band, is there a formula to keeping the dynamic interesting onstage and even in the studio?
It’s not a hard and fast set of rules [laughs]. I think we just know at this point the circumstances under which we’re all happy and produce good work. Really the best way for us to do things is to work in as concentrated and quick of a burst as possible, and to get a lot done then step away and reassess it. I think that’s one of the ways we’ve learned to come up with a good result. The other thing is, as far as new songs and playing them live, we like to road test songs and kind of tinker with them over time. Years can go by and all of the sudden someone will have a new idea about how to change a song. Another [thing we do] is try and make acoustic versions of all the songs, like when we play acoustic shows or in different settings we’ll try and adapt to play them differently, and that kind of challenges us and keeps things interesting.
Let’s say a song like “Plane Crash” that you’ve played a million times and people always want to hear – do you ever hit a wall with a big song like that where you’re like, ‘how do we make this exciting for us to play?’
One way we can do that with a lot of our songs is to try and figure out creative ways to use them within a set, and having segues or transitions from one song into another, or even like playing half of a song, transitioning into something else, and not even finishing it. That’s kind of an interesting way to use parts of a song as building blocks. We’ll even take parts of songs and tease them in another song instead of playing the whole thing. Those are all pieces we can use to construct something new, and constructing a set is a creative process that we take pretty seriously. We try and make everything different every single night. We were wondering if we ever repeated a very similar show or made a complete duplicate of a show unknowingly, because we don’t repeat a setlist intentionally. I’m sure that there are similar nights, but there’s never going to be two that are exactly the same…hopefully [laughs]!
Top photo and live photo by Jay Blakesberg
No Guts, No Glory comes out May 27th on Sugar Hill Records. For more info check out moe.org.
One Response
moe.down celebrates it’s fifteenth year this year, not thirteenth. Other that that typo, I really enjoyed this article/interview. Thanks!