It’s Tuesday October 7, 2008, which means two things for Deerhoof fans. First, you’ve all no doubt grabbed your copies of Offend Maggie, Deerhoof’s new studio album. Secondly it means that I’m posting the second half of my interview with Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier! Missed the first part? Catch up before we finish it off.
Last time we heard about his Rolling Stones love, this time he shares his thoughts on the Roots and small drum sets, Hella and Zach Hill’s deflated drums, and why there are so many drumless sections in Deerhoof songs.
Oh, and how he’d like to meet his Spinal Tap-like drummer death, of course.
My Favorite Drummers: Greg Saunier from Deerhoof (Part 2)
YANP: Who are some other drummers currently making music that you enjoy?
GS: Are you trying to imply that the Rolling Stones aren’t currently making music? [Laughs]
YANP: [Laughs] Well the last studio album was like in what, 2000?
GS: I just got Shine a Light from Netflix and I think that’s just the most amazing movie. And right before you asked that question, I was promising myself that my next answer wouldn’t have anything to do with the Rolling Stones.
YANP: [Laughs]
GS: I can’t help it. … I wouldn’t even know where to start. I love drummers and I love every kind of musician. In a way, it’s the same as what I was saying about Keith — I love talking about them like I know them, by the way [Laughs]. But one of the things I do feel lucky about is that some of my favorite drummers now are actually people I know: people that we’ve toured with or people that we see play…
YANP: Well, I was going to say, you guys have opened up for or toured with bands with some of the greatest drummers going: the Roots, the Flaming Lips, Radiohead…
GS: ?uestlove is definitely one of my favorite drummers and actually, again, it definietley goes beyond the drums in his case. He’s one of my favorite overlal musicians and musical philosophers. I relate very much to his attitude towards music and the meaning of music and the point of music — if there is one. I shouldn’t say that I relate to his attitude, I should say that I admire it or even envy it. That’s something that the Roots always exude to a degree that you don’t hardly ever find with bands — that the music matters.
For me, I’ve always felt like it’s very hard to convince yourself that music matters. Speaking of drummer’s guilt, I’ve got musician’s guilt. I’ve got the guilt of having devoted my whole life to something that doesn’t cure any diseases or build any houses or feed anybody…
YANP: But it doesn’t hurt anybody…
GS: Well that’s true too, though it can be debated based on how hard you hit the snare drum!
YANP: [Laughs]
GS: When they play — and I’ve seen them so many times — it wipes the slate clean and renews from scratch, for me, the sense that music as a human activity really does have a role within human existence. It really does play a part. It needs to be there for who knows what kind of reason. It needs to be there and it does something. And maybe not every human being, of course, some people like music more than others.
And the way the Roots play, the way ?uestlove approaches their music, it has a … I don’t want to say “universal” because I think that word gets misused a lot when it relates to music, but it has a very broad concept of music. When they play, they do so many cover songs and they do so many songs that are influenced by music from around the world, they do things that sound new and things that sound old, and they put it all together in this huge story. Every set they play is like this huge medley that spans the globe or it spans the history of human attempts at putting sounds together. That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the feeling of it when you’re at the concert.
I’ve heard him DJ before and it’s the same kind of thing, it’s just all over the place. Yet it seems to have this kind of bizzarre mystery logic to it. His horizon is so far and his musical mind is so large that it’s willing and able to encompass just about any kind of music that anybody has tried to do in any point of history. That’s what makes me get the feeling from them that music isn’t just me wasting time goofing off in a rehersal studio when I could be doing something valuable. It’s the history of all human culture. Singing, or putting sounds together, something that isn’t quite speech but also isn’t quite visual art, dancing, math or physics. It’s somewhere in between all those things. It’s just always happened everywhere.
But ?uestlove has been a huge influence on me and on Deerhoof as well, almost since the beginning. Maybe about two or three years in was when we first saw the Roots play. It was me and Satomi, it was before John was even in the band.
One of the things I loved about the Roots… I didn’t know ?uestlove’s name at the time, but I saw this drummer up there and his drum was so tiny! I just thought that was so cool. At the time I had been playing an average sized drum set and was just starting to pare it down. I had just decided that I wanted to remove elements from it. Seeing him play was such a reinforcement of my confidence in wanting to try and do that. So I ended up over the years going further and further with it. Now I play a really tiny set.
Backseat Sandbar has helped put together a fundraiser for Barack Obama in Louisville. I’m going to go ahead and say that Obama will not take Kentucky, but at least we can pay for a few ads in Ohio…
Jim James at the Water Tower
Thursday, October 16
3005 River Road
Louisville, KY
Guests: $150 per person donation to Obama
Premier Seating: $500 per person donation
It might be called Merriweather Post Pavilion and it might be out in January. Until then, enjoy that Animal Collective at Pitchfork bootleg I posted a while back.
Big thanks to Matt for pointing out this new Lucksmiths news.
The Lucksmiths will be releasing their new album First Frost in November. To celebrate, they’re streaming three new songs over at their Myspace page. “The Town and The Hills,” “Good Light” and “A Sobering Thought” are there for your enjoyment — so go enjoy!
For someone who loves to wear his Slider T. Rex shirt, I’ve still got some work to do in Marc Bolan’s discography.
Just this past week I saw The T. Rex concert film/documentary/art nonsense piece Born to Boogie and was amazed that no one had suggested it to me earlier. The meat of it is Bolan playing a concert in England, which alone makes it worth a purchase, but the best parts are all the stuff with no audience.
“Tutti Frutti” and “Children of the Revolution” are the product of a jam session between Bolan and his longtime buddies Elton John and Ringo Starr, who is sporting some kind of proto-mullet. It takes place in what looks like a cramped rehearsal space, but the shots are still incredible — almost as much as the jam itself.
Fun fact that I couldn’t find a way to fit in anywhere: Ringo took the cover photo for The Slider. Add that one to the list of famous musicians taking cover photos of other famous albums, which, uh, I think is just The Slider and Will Oldham taking the photo for Slint’s Spiderland.
Click below for one of my other favorite moments from the DVD: Bolan’s tea party medley with a string section and nuns eating hamburgers… It’s a very weird movie.
When I got the idea to interview some of my favorite drummers, I told myself that I wouldn’t do it if I couldn’t get Greg Saunier from Deerhoof involved. While I would have been happy with sending off a dozen questions via email, Greg agreed to a phone interview that wound up lasting over an hour. On the plus side, I can confidently say that this is the most information that’s ever been compiled about the influences and theories of Greg Saunier. However, it’s a long read (I mean, it took me two months to finish transcribing it). To help your eyes, I’ve split the interview in half.
Today you get part one, which covers how Greg got started drumming, accidentally defines “drummer’s guilt” and reveals how a scratched Rolling Stones record helped from one of my favorite drummers. Then tomorrow you can go pick up Deerhoof’s new record Offend Maggie and read the second half of the interview.
My Favorite Drummers: Greg Saunier from Deerhoof (Part 1)
YANP: Hey Greg! Glad to have you involved. I don’t know if they told you much about what the interview’s about…
Greg Saunier: A little bit. They said you’re talking to drummers
YANP: Yeah, I just wanted to profile a few of my favorite drummers. I think it’s because was forced to take up guitar instead of drums in high school.
GS: (laughs) What do you mean ‘forced to?’
YANP: We didn’t have a lot of space or a lot of money, so guitar was a lot cheaper, quieter and smaller.
GS: (laughs) Well I know how that goes. We live in san francisco and the very thought of even lightly tapping on, let alone even setting up some drums in this apartment … the living situations are completely ludicrous.
You guitar players don’t understand how difficult it is for us. It costs so much and they’re so big and heavy and noisy…
YANP: and everyone complains about lugging them around on tour
GS: Not everyone! The drummer’s the only one lugging them around on tour.
And it’s like however much money you’re spending on the drums themselves — that’s only the beginning. Because in most cities the added cost of where you’re going to play them is basically a second rent.
Deerhoof, we could have rehearsal — if it wasn’t for the drums — we wouldn’t need to rehearse in a rehearsal studio. Everybody could just play their electric guitars turned way down — no problem. It’s just the drums that cause it to be so loud; so we have to pay these extra hundred dollars for a rehearsal studio.
And what do you get for all your trouble? You get “hey, you’re playing too loud” and “hey, you’re covering me up!”
YANP: I think we’re discovering a new phenomenon: “drummer’s guilt”
GS: (laughs) Yeah!
YANP: I read that you joined a concert band in the 3rd grade. were you playing drums by that time?
GS: that’s when I started playing drums. I played snare drums in the elementary school concert band. (laughs) I don’t even know if they have those around any more. Every time I hear little snatches and peaks of what the American public schools like now, it’s like “oh no, we canceled art and music classes decades ago!” You know?
I really would hate to think, just personally, selfishly, how my life would have turned out if grammar school music hadn’t existed when I was in grammar school. I mean, for heaven’s sake, that was my introduction to playing music and to writing music. And the idea of caring about music as something other than just some vague atmosphere coming out of a little radio speaker. It’s when I realized that no, this is something made my humans. there’s instruments and voices and compositions.
And I had such good teachers all the way through. My elementary concert band teacher… he was the only thing I knew at the time when I was a third grader. Looking back on it, maybe he wasn’t the greatest teacher in the universe. But by the time I got to junior high or high school, my teachers — they made all the difference in terms of me becoming a musician. I mean, because other than the reason that it’s fun, there’s not really a lot to encourage a person to play music. You know? It is really fun, and of course some people get into it with dreams of super stardom, but that’s exceedingly rare, obviously. Maybe American Idol gives the impression that it’s not rare, but just sheer mathematics, it’s obviously rare. It’s like we were talking about with the drums. I had a drum set starting in the 8th grade — that was when we started our first band
YANP: What was the name of the band?
GS: The band was called the Other Extreme. We didn’t have a name when we first started off, we only played “Honkey Tonk Woman” and I think we played a song called “Stranger” by Jefferson Starship, which was a hit at the time but is completely forgotten now. Basically we played whatever songs our guitar player had learned in his guitar lesson that week. That instantly and automatically became the repertoire of the Other Extreme.
Once I actually obtained a drum set at no small expense from my parents — although it was used and totally pieced together — Of course, it’s not like my drum set now is any less so…
I don’t even think that I realized it at the time, my parents may have shielded me from the truth, but we set the drums up in the basement and I’d go down there to play. I’d play along with my Rolling Stones records or my Who records… and basically I’d tap one note and the phone would ring. It would be some next door neighbor saying “the drums are too loud. Can Greg stop?”
My younger brother took up saxophone years later and even when he’d start playing sax it’d be the same thing; one note and the phone would ring. The only thing was that he didn’t have to go to the basement to practice so he’d be the one to answer the phone
Sexe, Drogue and Rock n Roll just posted this cool Beck recording. It’s an acoustic show he did back in 2003, which explains this cover choice. Here’s Beck turning Nelly’s hit into a crazy white boy R&B show on the piano.
