Glide’s Chris Calarco was able to catch up with Marc Brownstein, bass player for The Disco Biscuits and Conspirator when Conspirator played Portland, Oregon on Wednesday February, 9th. After some BBQ Korean Tacos Calarco sat down with Marc, one of the most enthusiastic and accessible musicians you will ever meet. Every time you see “laughs” in parentheses, you need to imagine Marc’s raspy, New York Jewish chortle that resonates throughout a room. Marc talks new school, old school, and everything in between.
How did the national Conspirator tour come about and how are things going?
Well, the Biscuits decided to take a year off from touring and I have always wanted to give a full Conspirator tour a try. The Biscuits are big and I’m out playing in front of hundred people a night, its totally different! Its not fun playing small shows with the Biscuits anymore, it feels like failure. But with Conspirator it feels like a fresh start! The Biscuits aren’t so big, even being one of the biggest jam bands in the country, that there aren’t a lot of tough nights. On a scalable level, every band has been going through the same exact thing. For every big success there is a night that doesn’t feel quite as good. Conspirator tour has been so fun with these guys. We are always making music. Before the show, after the show, sharing ideas and coming up with new ones.
Sounds like you are drawing inspiration from making new music or even playing intimate shows again.
You know what I’ve discovered? I’ve discovered that the reason I do what I do, is because of the music. It’s not for the people, it’s not for the fans, it’s not for the money, and it’s not for the glory. The reason I know that is because being on a Conspirator tour in Montana is very inglorious! But it’s equally as fulfilling as playing Camp Bisco or Red Rocks. It’s you and the music; your fingers and the strings. It doesn’t matter if there are a hundred people there or ten thousand people there, it’s really the connection I am looking for. If there is a connection between you and ONE other person, that’s what inspires me. Even when I am playing in front of ten thousand people there I’ll connect with one person’s persons energy and use that put that energy right back into the music.
In that sense does playing these small shows remind you of the early Biscuit days?
Definitely! In a big way! Back in ’99 it was about connecting with ten people. If ten people walked out saying “that’s the best thing that ever happened its amazing. Now there’s thousands of people going back to listen to what those ten people heard and saying holy shit! If you think about 2/19 (1999) and the M.E.M.P.H.I.S. or like what was the one in Vegas?
2/19 was Vegas. (2/19/99 @ Legends Lounge – check it!)
Right! Or 2/11/99 in Alabama. Tuscaloosa –if you think about those shows where M.E.M.P.H.I.S. was developing into what it is and Pygmy and Basis were developing into what they’ve become – the feeling that was created in there is what it’s all about. It’s just about the music – I’ve said it all along that its just as exciting to sell out a hundred person room as it is to sell out a three hundred person room as it is to sell out three thousand. The chemical reaction that you get in your body from the serotonin increasing, from the adrenaline rush is the same. Playing music is a dopamine high.
Do you feel there have been times when you were playing music for others reasons beside the purity of the music? Like the glory or the rock star-ness of it and your coming back to the core of it now?
No. I’ve always known why I do it, but it’s cool to be in another or a different situation where you can be reminded that at the very root of it all it’s just you and the music. For me, I know that because I’m in the studio everyday and I’m just as happy after a good day in the studio as I am after a good show. My life for me now, for everybody I think, is how do I get through a day being happy and feeling rewarded and feeling like I’ve accomplished something?
So what’s the answer to that?
Making music! Or being with my kids! They’re equally as enjoyable to me – creating music is my whole thing. Now we’ve built a studio on the bus for the Conspirator tour so we can do both. We can be creating music from scratch and playing it at the same time. That’s a whole new level of productiveness that I am reaching, a whole new level of work ethic that I’ve never had before. Now I’m not wasting any time.
In that last two years, I’ve made a lot of music that is unreleased. The Biscuits new album, the Biscuits hip hop album, McKenzie Eddy’s album. I think its going to be exciting over the next year or two, as it gets released, for people to see what I’ve been doing, or what we’ve been doing.
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As you are doing all this how do you see the music you are writing evolving genre-wise and what types of music are inspiring you?
Michetti has influenced me a lot. When McKenzie and I started working together we were doing a lot of Massive Attack oriented downtempo, female vocal led electronica, over the last month or two, playing with Michetti and some of his new songs which are, I don’t wanna say, dub step, but more in that realm, “pop – step”, its in the “step” realm. (Laughs) Some of it has “wobble” bass, some of it doesn’t. I said the word “dub step” on Facebook and it set off a three-day war between fans! I understand it’s not for everybody and I don’t want everyone to freak out that I made a dub step track but I think people are being closed minded about one element of it, the wobble bass. People think it’s too heavy and it’s too in-your-face. But for me it’s more about the drum rhythms and the super slow tempo, whether there is wobble on top of it or not. Right now Conspirator is playing a couple dub step songs that don’t have any wobble in them. So they aren’t really dub step, they are more melodic, more what the Biscuits do – the way I write normally but over a new rhythm. It’s just like if I am writing over drum and bass – I’m still writing the same melodies in my head – my writing style comes through this or that rhythm, its still me! With McKenzie’s album, as we’ve gone on, I’ve started to make the stuff a bit more club-banging electronica, stuff is slower but because it’s slower it hits harder.
I’m getting to where I’m confident as a producer. Damon (Dash) asked me to make some remixed and I was thinking to myself “I’ve never done one”. He gave us acapella tracks and we did 20 remixes in a month because we now know how to produce! Then he asked me to produce McKenzie’s album and I didn’t know if I had enough time to do it and I had to ask myself hard questions about whether or not I believed this project was gonna be great. Then I said yes because who am I to be saying no to an opportunity to produce somebody? The fact that someone was interested in my songwriting enough to ask me to write their album – wow.
For McKenzie we are co-writing and I am producing. She writes vocals, which is perfect because that’s not my forte but I am making all the music. It’s perfect for me. It’s a whole new medium for me and I am able to use my 15 years of writing songs – mistakes and successes – I know a lot about songwriting and I can apply it to someone else. I always thought songwriters never get any of the glory, they don’t get to perform the song, but what I’ve learned recently it’s just as rewarding or even slightly more rewarding when you are writing it for someone else as when you are writing it for yourself. The process of saying YES to something you don’t know how to do is the greatest method of learning in the world.
Now I have the confidence. I got on the bus the other day and played this beat I was working on and Adam Deitch (Break Science), twice Grammy nominated, he was playing with John Scofield when he was 19 years old for god’s sake, the guy is an accomplished, seasoned drummer and producer. He produced “My Gun Go Off” by 50 Cent – that was huge hit! He walked in the back and said, “What’s this?” And I told him – “aw its this thing I am working on” – and he said, “This is YOUR beat?” And he’s like “JESUS Brownstein – you’re a madman producer!” When you get someone who you look up to so much, looking up to you – that’s what we have going for this Conspirator tour now – a lot of mutual respect between a lot of musicians who aren’t always together. We all way look up to each other! It’s an interesting situation. Sometimes you think that when someone looks up to someone else, there is maybe someone looking down. But there is no looking down! Nobody has an ego in Bozeman, Montana on a Monday night! Its humbling, its great. When you go through a humbling experience, it resets you to human.
It sounds like you are going back to the inspiration of the small shows and the early years but you are moving forward with this incredibly powerful new technology and writing in such a different way. Back when you had that first initial burst of inspiration with the Biscuits –
We did it all acoustically with instruments. Now we are doing the whole thing, making music completely electronically. The chord progressions are still relevant but it’s a different vibe. You aren’t gonna rewrite the same song. Look, I could sit down with a guitar and a bass and write a song right now – and I am confident that it will be beautiful – with humility – I am confident that I can write something like “Therapy” that will connect with people and be acoustic and be a rock song and I am definitely still doing that. “The Bridge” is the best example of that. I think it’s a beautiful song. The Biscuits played it three or four times in the spring last year and a lot of people still want me to play it. It’s a rock song.
I mostly don’t do that now. I write a lot of songs. For the Biscuits I wrote “We Like to Party”, “Feeling Twisted” and “Portal (to an Empty Head)” and “Naeba” and these are old school style Biscuit songs, with jams, trance beats, drum n bass beats and for two years before that I wrote “Caves of the East”, “Mirrors”, “Rivers”- hip-hoppy, trip-hoppy, slower based Biscuit songs where I was expanding the electronic thing into a slower tempo. Instead of playing “M.E.M.P.H.I.S.” or “Wet”, I am gonna do it over some hip hop beats with some electronica elements and that was really the beginning of me learning how to produce electronic music. Then the following year I went back to writing my old style because the fans were begging for that. And I love it. “Portal”, “Feeling Twisted”, “We Like to Party”, I think these are some of the best songs I’ve ever written and the fans seems to love them but I really enjoy writing the electronic stuff too.
I think its cool to be in that position. With all due respect to Pretty Lights and Bassnectar who go for a certain sound and go out and play that sound every night, when they are writing new songs you know what style they are gonna be. With all due respect to Bassnectar, he is the biggest grassroots rock star in our country, Pretty Lights is right there too and they are both good friends. Organically, without any marketing, Bassnectar is doing arenas, he sold out the small arena in Denver (1st Bank Center) that Phish played, sold out the Asheville Civic Center but its fun for me to be in the position that nobody knows what tempo my next song is gonna be in or what style it’s gonna be in, not even me! I could pretty much tell you that for the next three weeks to a month I am gonna be writing a lot of bangers! (Laughs) I’m just learning how to do it – its not dub step. I’m not a big fan – I recognize it’s taking the country by storm, I want to learn it. Now that I am learning it, it’s so fun! Its fun to make, its fun to dance to. Barber has devoted himself to making dub step as his side project and that’s great. This week with Conspirator we made a dub step track, a G-Funk track last night! Like Scott Storich style (Dr. Dre’s writing partner), the Nate Dogg style…you know? We are gonna play it – its G Funk! We made it in the exact style –
And that’s the thing that I don’t want to lose in Conspirator that I think is special. I want to keep playing a wide variety of electronic music styles. We aren’t editing based on genre. It’s so cool to see Barber’s genre of choice blow up especially since he’s embraced it since the beginning. I am WAY late to the game on it – way late to the game. I’m late to the game on everything. I don’t want to be on the forefront. I want you to vet the shit first, make sure it’s for real, and when we are 100% sure this is going pop, I am gonna jump on and talk about how I found it! (Laughs)
Listen, I had three babies! I didn’t have time to worry about Rushko and Caspa! I had kids. Radiohead’s the same. I let it go for ten, twelve years. But I called it. In ‘99 I said….”In 2006 I am gonna start liking Radiohead”. I wasn’t ready for it then, I had my own shit going on. And then in 2006 I saw Radiohead and was like “WHAAAAA THE FUCK!!” (Laughs). I was blown away. I remember when Tommy Hamilton used to be really Radiohead inspired, I wasn’t scoffing at it, but it just wasn’t my thing. I’m late to the game. I’m a late bloomer, with girls, with everything, with music, it continues throughout my life. (Laughs). I like to let things marinate. Phish was the same way –
That’s not true. You were seeing Phish pretty early, what ’92?
That’s not true. (Laughs) Yeah ’92, ’93 is when I got into them but people were pushing it in ’88, ’89 and they were saying, “come to Wetlands to see Phish!” and I was like “Yeah. Bag it. Tag it. Not into it!” (Laughs) I’m gonna go see Blues Traveler! (Laughs)
When did you first decide you wanted to play music for your life?
I was candy flipping at a P Funk show! (Laughs) And there were sooooo many bass players on stage. I felt the market must be good! (Laughs) I said to myself, I can do this! I was so high, but I felt it deep inside. I wanted it. That was the moment where everything changed for me. It was Penn. At Hill Field. I went home after and played “We Got The Funk” for 17 hours straight! Deb, (Marc’s wife) who I just met, came back to take care of me – she found me laying on the ground somewhere at Hill Field (Laughs). She fell asleep on my bed and when she woke up I was still playing “We Got the Funk” (sings the bass line) and that was definitely a defining moment. I thought, if worse comes to worse; I could just be in P Funk! (Laughs) Seemed like anyone could, dance around in a diaper!
It had been building though. I will date it all the way back to when John Lennon got shot. I wrote an article, you can check out. Damon (Dash) has this new magazine called BlueRoc Magazine and they are in the Adidas stores. There’s an article I wrote in the first issue that just got published about how John Lennon being shot was a defining moment in my life.
First of all, I got into the car and the lady that was driving me to school told me that he got shot and I needed to verify with her whether or not it was Jack Lemmon or John Lennon. I knew that someone had been shot but I wasn’t sure if it was the actor or the rock star! (Laughs) I would get them at seven years old mixed up. How can you not? The mayhem that ensued from him dying, I was really intrigued by it. People pouring into the streets and the singing and the images on TV. I remember the images of Strawberry Fields and the images of the crowds outside of the Dakota. I became obsessed with the Beatles. Every gift for three years was a John Lennon doll, The Beatles Forever book, The Beatles lyric book, Beatle Gold. (Laughs) I told my mom that I wanted to stop doing classical piano and only wanted to play rock n roll. She said, “You can’t do it!” I pointed out that this kid, Ricky Temperburg, from our temple, was only playing rock. He’s actually gone on to be the keyboard player for the High Times Cannabis Cup now! (Laughs) He’s the go-to reggae keyboard player in America now. He was in a band called the SkaDanks, they were a ska band. Ricky Temperburg. So they got me a book called Beatle Gold, and we started plugging away at the songs. One after another. I knew then, at seven years old that I wanted to be a rock star. I definitely didn’t realize that I would be playing in front of 100 people in Montana when I was 37 years old! (Laughs)
But I found out this week. I’ll take it! I love it. I love being on the road and playing music for people. I would feel sad if I didn’t have the confidence that it would build. We are crushing it. More people are gonna come. I know how to build a band. I am starting over. With a different name. And to the Biscuit fans, who just read that line on Glide Magazine, no we didn’t break up! (Laughs) But doing Conspirator is LIKE starting over and that is very refreshing. I know from being a Phish fan you get burned out on your own band and you say absurd things like “I’m never gonna do this again” – but life is life and you through points where you need to do something else. Sometimes we over estimate how much of a break we need though. After a few months, you start to get that itch again. First and foremost I want to be on the road with the Biscuits but when we as a unit decide to take a year off I am happy to have other outlets. I finally have some space and time. I’ve always wanted to get in a bus with Conspirator to see what that would be like. I wanna know what its like to go out and play Montana. I don’t have the freedom to be able to do that with the Biscuits. We just don’t have the freedom to go to the Pacific Northwest. It’s not in our business model.
Talk about the love/hate or the obsessiveness of the Biscuits’ fans and how that impacts things.
Its definitely love/hate! The hate is just love though. Until it turns into real hate, which I am sure it does sometimes. What more could you want in your life than to have people that are passionate about you? It’s the great gift that was bestowed upon us – passionate fans! People play it up like there is more intensity with our fans than with other fans but I just don’t buy it. Everyone has somebody that is that intense about them.
Yeah, but you guys have a sort of….a sort of…
Cultish vibe? (Laughs) In recent years as people have opened their minds to other types of music – in the past people just liked the Biscuits. Period. It becomes a thing and you don’t listen to anything else. With the Internet age it’s made it so much easier to like more stuff and people are more open minded and it’s really good for us. There would be no point in throwing these huge festivals with fifty bands if people only wanted to see us! (Laughs) For us, that’s the cornerstone for us – is Camp Bisco.
So what’s the deal with the hip-hop album? There’s a Biscuit hip-hop album?
We are trying to accomplish what The Black Keys accomplished with the BlakRoc album. A fully original hip-hop album inspired by the type of hip-hop we’re into. I’ve been talking to Raekwon and I have been talking to Talib Kweli, not to name drop, we don’t have tracks with those guys yet but we have personal relationships. Damon (Dash) has helped me facilitate these relationships. He introduced me to Erykah Badu and Raekown and Talib, it’s now up to me to make the musical collaboration happen. We’ve played with Raekwon a couple times. He opened for us in Boston and in New York. We have a nice relationship brewing. He seems to really like us. He obviously is my idol. He’s the greatest. He’s the best rapper still alive. He’s the best of Wu-Tang and he’s the only one who is relevantly putting out fresh music besides RZA who is more of a producer.
We were hoping it would be all of us playing together in the studio to make the tracks live but the first four tracks were more produced. I produced them with Alex and Harry and Aron but it wasn’t he band playing live, we were producing which is a more Planet Anthem vibe versus the new album that is all played on instruments.
When’s that coming out?
It’ll be out. (Long Pause) We’ve learned over the years (Laughs) not to give dates!
Good answer, Good answer. That’s a live in the studio Biscuit album?
Yes. Live in the studio but post produced too. But it’s got the energy of us playing live. We then went to the studio with Prometheus (Twisted Records) and he used his skills, he is the brains behind a lot of Twisted, and he really taught me so much. When I was in the studio with Prometheus, it opened up my world. Sometimes the “tricks” of electronic music are a bit more obvious than you think they are. That world can be intimidating – there are just knobs and each one does something! (Laughs)
What is the status of the new Biscuits album?
Well, right now Prometheus is sending us his final edits and we have to go through them. We have been busy with this tour and the Biscuit shows before this that we haven’t had a chance to get to them yet.
The hip-hop album will be released as BiscoRoc. Before we do that we are releasing Ski Beatz vs. The Disco Biscuits. A mix tape, in proper mix tape fashion. Ski Beatz just released an album last year called 24 Hr Karate School and we released Planet Anthem. He took the music from Planet Anthem and made hip-hop beats out of it, he remixed it. Sometimes way slower, sometimes with a different swagger. Then he got rappers as they came through on top of that. So we’ve got Whiz Khalifa, Currensy, Tabby Bonet, Stalley, and the BluRoc rappers are all on that. Then we took the vocals of those same rappers from his album and redid all the music underneath it. It will come out as a mix tape – there are some Mos Def and Whiz tracks on the there that are actually unclearable because of record label stuff so instead of going to Warner and dealing with the fact that Whiz just went platinum this week with “Black and Yellow” – he’s the biggest hip-hop star in the country right now and we have “Sweatbox”, Whiz Khalifa vs. The Disco Biscuits remix unreleased! A New Whiz verse that no one’s ever heard! It’s incredible! I’d rather give it away for free. Pretty Lights has made it the norm to give away your music. He has to because Biggie is in in his band! Now that we are gonna give away music for free I think we should put Biggie in our band too! (Laughs) Why not? Currensy and Whiz are blowing up right now and we are sitting on six Currensy tracks!
You are sitting on a shit load of music right now!
Man, I making a big transition for sure. All this stuff is great for my spirit. And god for bid should The Disco Biscuits end one day, I don’t know if or when that would ever happen, but I don’t want to only know how to be the bass player for the Biscuits. I am trying to support my family and this is what I do. I am trying to figure out, just like everyone else, “Who am I?” And all these projects are helping me answer that question. It’s so cool to have that old school spark but have my hands in all these different things.
What’s going on with the Younger Brother album you played on?
It’s coming out in March. It’s a cool, beautiful album. It’s interesting because its pretty rock n’ roll oriented. Sort of Radiohead, even Coldplay-ish in a way. It’s totally different from the other Younger Brother albums. I hope I get to play live shows with Simon and them too.
I wanted to ask about the ending to the song “Confrontation”. What do you remember about writing that song?
I was at Jon Lesser’s (our old sound man’s) house in Jersey at the beach. My fingers started playing the chord progression out of nowhere and I thought, “whoa. This is gonna be big”! (Laughs)
What about the ending specifically – there’s a mix of triumphant music with pretty dark lyrical themes. (The confrontation was a necessary act/We traded in our lives but took a million back/And in the end it seems I get what I deserve/But for one moment’s time I wish I had the nerve)
Definitely. That’s a musical technique. I forget what its called (laughs) but when you oppose the musical style with the lyrics like that. “Confrontation “is dark man. It’s a murder suicide at the end. It’s about the time when I was out of the Biscuits in 2000. I thought I had killed my band and that made me super sad, because I love the band as much as I love anything. “Confrontation”, when we play it live and everyone has their fists in the air, chanting the lyrics, no one is thinking out what the lyrics are because you are so hopped up from the music. But that song ends in a murder, suicide! I thought I killed my band and I used the song to kill myself.
Last question – talk about some of your most memorable concert experiences. The ones that stay with you.
Wow. There have been a lot. There were some last week! I remember most of our career pretty clearly. I’m like that. So many beautiful moments. Every time we play the ending of Basis it’s an amazing moment but say, something like 4/9/99 or the M.E.M.P.H.I.S. > Trooper from 2/19/99 (sings the melody line from the jam) – those moments are special when the feeling in the room is just bursting. And 2/9/99. Then there was that Dribble from 12/30/98, (sings the epically beautiful Barber line from that jam). Mind you I haven’t listened to that since1998 but I will always be able to hear that in my head. We tried to recreate that jam sometime in State College in ’99 and it totally didn’t work. Then we stopped trying to recreate jams. You gotta let those special moments be. There’s a purity to them. We have been so lucky to get another go around after Sammy left. A lot of bands quit when the going gets tough and as everyone knows, we’ve had a ton of hard times. But we are still here and we are still shooting for the amphitheaters. We’ve got Red Rocks now, it’s gonna be three years in a row! Moments like that, playing Red Rocks, are you kidding me? That’s a dream world right there. We are gonna play the Mann in Philly, and I have so many Phish memories from there, I can’t wait to do that. And hopefully we are gonna get an amphitheater show in Boston. There are so many moments still to come. We are still gunning for MSG in the Biscuits- I’m not giving up. We are so lucky to have the fans and the support we do. Without them we would have to be working day jobs. And I’m much better at music. (Laughs)
