HT Baseball Preview: Rob Salzer’s Mets

SB: So the rivalry isn’t quite as intense as, say, the Mets and the Braves?

RS: No, it’s definitely not a Mets/Braves thing, or even a Yankee/Red Sox thing — it’s more good-natured.

SB: Would you say you have stronger feelings against the Phillies or Braves?

RS: The Phillies concern me. They haven’t looked great so far this year, but that doesn’t really mean anything. They have a fairly decent pitching staff and they definitely have some hitters that can do incredible damage. Chase Utley is great, Ryan Howard is great, and they have a pretty solid lineup. So they worry me a little bit, at least if not more than the Braves.

Really, my only concern within our own division right now is the Phillies. I’m hoping that the Mets can strike up the rivalry with the Braves this year, because that was a lot of fun back in the late ’90s and early ’00s. I would still say I dislike the Braves more than the Phillies, but we’ll see how this year ends up.

SB: How did you get into the Mets as opposed to the Yankees?

RS: My dad was born in Brooklyn, and he was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. When they skipped town a few years later the Mets were born. He naturally did not like the Yankees because he was a Dodger fan, so he became a Mets fan. He moved out to Long Island at some point, and then when I was born that was it. He birthed me a Mets fan.

SB: Going into the season, what do you think of the Mets chances?

RS: I think the Mets’ chances are excellent this year. I think they have a lot to build on from last year. They had a great run last year. It was a little disapointing [to lose] in the League Championship Series last year, but I think the team chemistry is great, and I think that’s something that is SO important.

Their bullpen worries me a little bit, as they have shaky middle relief. The defense is killer and the offense is killer. [The offense] may be slightly inconsistent right now, but overall I don’t think we have anything to worry about in terms of offense.

Billy Wagner, I know some people are shaky on him…I like him personally. I certainly feel more confident in Billy Wagner than I did in Armando Benitez. No doubt about that. I also like having a lefty closer.

I feel very, very good — I feel as though we have an excellent chance, if not the best chance in the National League to go to the World Series. I’m not gonna make any predications about winning the Series, because I’ve been a baseball fan for too many years to do that. I think we have a better chance then we did last year.

SB: Do you think the back end of the starting rotation will hold up?

RS: I think Perez and Maine have a tremendous amount of potential. If Perez can get command of his control that he is going to be very, very succesful. He is still young, and he’s a lefty, which I like. We don’t really have a fifth starter right now, which is a little bit disconcerting. I know that Glavine is good, and I know that El Duque is good.

Pedro will come back halfway through the year, and honestly the reason I’m psyched about this is that Pedro seems to have problems pitching well throughout the entire season. So it seems that he fizzles out by the end of the year, which is really terrible timing. If we can get him to stay healthy from the All-Star break to the end of the year, he’ll be in tip-top shape and ready for the playoffs, and that would be great. In terms of the back end of the rotation, they are still unproven. That’s probably the only other point of the Mets that I’m a little bit leery of right now.

SB: Let’s talk about your music. You guys are hitting some really big festivals this year like Wakarusa and Summer Camp. Do you like playing these festivals?

RS: Definitely. I think that we have these kind of dramatic longer composed songs, and it showcases our songs in an outdoor environment, where there’s a more natural fit than a bar.

We derive so much energy from the crowd, and from the numbers in the crowd, that we’re very comfortable playing in front of a lot of pople. I think [playing festivals is] really gonna help us tremendously. I’m really looking forward to [the festival season], and we’re really psyched about it.

Photo by J. Gordon

SB: What separates your music from the other jambands in the scene?

RS: I think that a lot of jambands in the scene attack one genre of music. Whether that be electronica or bluegrass and/or everything in between. There are a tremendous amount of different genres within the jamband scene right now.

We’re a band that is coming from a multitude of influences, and we love to compose all styles of music. We’re using lots of music theory and lots of sections in our music and coming from everywhere from latin jazz to very hard progressive rock. I grew up listening to metal from the ’80s, so I’m very influenced by Metallica and other bands like that.

We have a dramatic flair to our music. Our keyboard player Zac was a theater arts major, so he’s got a natural dramatic flair to his compositions. Our bass player was a jazz performance major, so that’s where all the jazz influence comes in.

We’re taking the composition aspect from all these different genres and just trying to make it really fun and really dance-y, and that’s where our unifying sound comes in. I think that we’re really trying to set ourselves apart in terms of composition and the complexity of our music. We’re trying to nail it down to a science, where we can get the music that’s really complex to sound pleasing to the ear and not pretentious. We all grew up listening to dance music too, and we really do love that style of music and we are trying to incorporate that into it as well.

Photo by CL Kunst

SB: You guys play a lot of covers. How do you pick the covers that you’ve been playing?

RS: Some covers are picked just from influences that we love. Recently we started doing Frank Zappa’s Dancin’ Fool, and we love Medeski, Martin, and Wood so we play a couple of their songs as kind of a tribute to them. Plus they are fun and dance-y within the scene, so people recognize them. Other covers we do for humor and the just straight up fun value. [We play] Huey Lewis’ I Want A New Drug or Kool and the Gang’s Get Down On It just because it amuses us and it amuses the crowd. We have fun with it.

Other songs we do to challenge ourselves, to push our boundaries as players. It’s Ice by Phish is actually covered more as an exercise than it is to be a Phish song. There’s polyrythyms within that song where some of us are playing in five, others are playing in seven, others are playing in 11 for one brief section. The theory in that song is really, really tough, and it pushes our boundaries in general. We either pick our covers based on pushing ourselves as players and performers or just straight up fun for us and the crowd.

Thanks to Rob for taking time out from one of his rare days off to chat. We will check in with him again at the All-Star break and at the end of the campaign to see if the Mets indeed have a better season than last year.

U-Melt will be playing the Northeast in a few weeks before spending the summer tour throughout the country. The band recently released the stellar The I’s Mind, which shows off the band’s compositional prowess.