Deerhoof Interview

The last quater of the 2006 was jammed full of musical highlights, a few of which I thought I may as well mention. First off, The Twilight Singers made good on their promise to play Belfast with a hot and sweaty show at the Limelight in November. Greg manfully battled a sore throat to roar out the likes of "40 Dollars" and "The Killer" which Mark Lanegan joined in for spine tingling covers of "Live With Me", "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" "I'll Take Care Of You" and some stuff off "Bubblegum" Thank you sirs! Next up was Jeff Tweedy from Wilco playing solo in Dublin. They guy is just super talented, he held and room of 800 people spellbound on his own for and hour and a half. Nice have that "pin drop" silence between songs, with plenty of drunken banter in betwixt. Drunken audience that is Jeff was sober. Lots of Wilco and a few Uncle Tupelo tunes, nice. Then it was the ATP Nightmare Before Christmas festival in Minehead. Curated by Thurston Moore, the line up consisted of all his favourite genres rock 'n' roll, punk, hardcore, noise, improv and weird psyche jam bands. The Stooges, MC5, The Melvins, Dinosaur Jr, Gang Of Four, Deerhoof, Comets On Fire, Deerhoof, basically all the stuff he has championed over the years. If he coulf have had The Minutemen, Nirvana and Pavement on the bill I'm sure he would have. He did have their bassists, though Mike Watt with The Stooges, Kirst Novoselic with Flipper and Mark Ibold replacing Jim O' Rourke in SY. Highlights for me were getting to see the Melvins play twice (lots of bands had to do two sets as the venues were quite small) with Coady Willis from the Murder City Devils on extra drums. That was drummer heaven. Dinosaur Jr were also awesome, ridiculously loud and just flat out rocking. Sunday was "Michighan Meltdown" day, kicking off with hardcore vets Negative Approach who were intense, before Awesome Color, Wolf Eyes, The Stooges and MC5 tore things down. Watching Iggy scream the lyrics to "TV Eye" from just feet away was incredible and the place went ballistic for them. After that I was a sodden wreck and I didn't think anything could get me to dance any more. But then the MC5 played - wow! History in the making I think. Such was the strength of the bill, I didn't get to check out stuff that was new to me and clashed meant I missed Comets On Fire, Be Your Own Pet and loads of other. The whole noise scene was out in force which I find to be a little intimidating, listening to tapes of some paranoid shut in sticking forks into wall sockets, just ain't my think y'know. Other good times were our hardcore disco, our chalet gallery and the water slides. Anyway, it was a class weekend so I thought I'd post this interview I did with Deerhoof for AU a few months ago. They were another of the bands who were good enough to do a second set after hundreds of people were locked out of their second stage show threatened to riot, in a polite, indie kind of way of course...

Photo by Claudia Rorarius

Deerhoof – your new favourite band... (Alternative Ulster September 2006)

Check your myspace friends. What are they listening to? There'll be a name that's cropping up with increasing regularity. That name is Deerhoof. The San Francisco three piece has slowly become one the most popular acts on the undergound rock scene thanks to an incredible word-of-mouth buzz and riotous explosion of sound that has seen them play with noise fiends, indie rock stars and hip hop behemoths alike. In Dublin to warm up the boards for Radiohead in front of ten thousand people at Marley Park as well as headline their own sold out show at the Music Centre we caught up with sleepy yet super friendly drummer Greg Saunier to find out how they done it...



It seems like Deerhoof have become very popular lately, largely through word of mouth, someone sees you play tells all their friends, buys a CD copies if for someone else and so on...



Definitely! It's not 100% word of mouth, we have a label and a publicist and we're always in touch with her. It's not pure accident, we do try to have some funny way to get our music heard, but the fact that it's a lot word of mouth makes me happy of course because it seems genuine when someone says they like the band. When I talk to people at shows a lot of time they feel that they found Deerhoof on there own, it wasn't pushed on them. Something that makes me very happy is how gradual it's been, it hasn't been that we suddenly got popular. Since the beginning of the band we've always been more popular than I thought and more people would come to the shows than I thought. If I new 2 people were going to come, 7 would turn up and when I was really happy that we got 40 people we got 70 and last night I was expecting zero people, the place was full! I'm always surprised that more people are interested than I think and that’s a pleasure that is denied a lot of bands who become instantly successful, in a way they're really lucky but they don't have that constant feeling of things always being slightly better than you thought they'd be and having many of your dreams start to come true slowly over a period of years. So we don't feel burned out or jaded at all, we still really enjoy playing and recording music, I'm still always so excited to wonder what's going to happen today, we've had so many wonderful things happen.



The Deerhoof sound is a tricky thing to pin down. They recently covered The Beatles and My Bloody Valentine which is a good place to start but only tells one tenth of the story. It’s a joyous mix of noise, pop, garage, electronica and psyche rock that has evolved over the course of seven albums and numerous EPs propelled by Greg’s ridiculous drumming style. How did your style develop?



Hey, I'm not ridiculous!
Ridiculously good!



Oh! I started playing drums in around third grade, learning the snare at first then the bass drum so then by the time I got near a full kit, I was just dying and I'd just go crazy on it.
Then when I moved to San Francisco I was so obsessed with The Melvins, it was just after they had moved to California so would play there a lot so I'd just try to rip off Dale Grover. So it's evolved from there.



A reshuffle in the Deerhoof ranks was recently forced by the departure of long term guitarist Chris Cohen. How has that affected the band?



It's odd because, in actual time, it's really recent that he left, it was only in June but in terms of what's happened since he left both for us and for him, it seems like ages. We miss him of course but the first shows we played since he left, were opening for the Flaming Lips, the Primavera Sound Festival in Spain in front of thousands of people, then 6 shows opening for Radiohead in California! It was a silver platter handed to a band that's basically starting from scratch, it's like starting a band and thinking "hmm, what should our first show be?" It's completely nonsensical! And between then and now, we recorded a new album, which we're mixing now on our laptop. And Chris it that time has finished his album, found labels to put it out, he's on tour right now but for him and for us we've been so busy. We weren't saying "on no, what are we going to do?" we had a whole summer of shows booked so we just had to get in there and come up with something. That's always been the way things worked in Deerhoof, things will just suddenly change. That’s how the band formed. The band I was in, that was just ripping off The Melvins broke up very suddenly, the singer and guitarist decided they didn't want to do the band anymore and left the city. The two of us that were left, me and the bassist Rob were like "Huh? What will we do? We've got shows booked in a week, what's a bass player and a drummer gonna do?" And we were the members of the band that new each other the least, and the only songs we knew were the bass and drum parts of our songs, now minus the vocals and guitars. So, we really quickly tried to come up with a way that these songs could work with just bass and drums.



Which is of course all the rage now...you were pioneers…
Ha-ha! Not quite, Lightning Bolt hadn't yet formed, they formed about a year later, but the band Godhead Silo had and we were like "they did it so we'll be ok" So for the first half a year we were a lot like Godhead Silo.



Was the band called Deerhoof at that point?



Yes it was. We did a lot of free improv too, me and Rob had been listening to a lot of AMM, Derek Bailey and we thought it was very cool so it was this weird mixture of drum and bass parts from these Melvins style grunge songs and I would take over the vocals and try to take very uninteresting parts and make them interesting by making them super exaggerated, to take this music that was very bland, and make it as expressive and over the top as possible…



Sounds like Lightning Bolt to me…
Ha! I think that kind of concept is still alive in the band, that way of taking music where the content of it may seem kind of silly but putting an undue amount of expression into it and making something great.



Do you find your trying to do that again in adjusting to Chris leaving?



Yes, he was playing bass towards the end, on most of the songs on 'The Runners Four', so Satomi has ended up playing bass or some version of his bass parts. I think John has had the funniest time though, he's really busy, trying to play to two guitar parts at once. We're lucky I can't think of any other guitar player who could do it, he can switch between them so fluidly, his control is essential to us being able to play any music at all. Also we don't mind rearranging the songs, and making it stripped down and skeletal that's interesting too. It's interesting when the Rolling Stones record a song in the studio and it's very stripped down and just guitar, bass, drums and vocals then they go out on tour and there's nine horns, and backing singers and percussionists the whole nine, and it becomes this whole other thing. But it's another thing, if someone plays a song solo, that to me is an incredibly cool sound and it's just as exciting as blowing it up, and adding a million layers. More often than not Deerhoof has been complicated on record than live, it's hard to resist putting a load of extra sounds on there but live we try to strip it down a lot.



You seem to strike a great balance between melodic, pop sensibilities and experimental noise which is difficult to do, most bands go one way or the other, is that something you strive for?



It's not that specific. Early on we may have thought about it more, I might have had conscious thoughts about it like "maybe I'll pretend I'm Dale Cover playing in AMM, what would he do if he were just doing free improv" We're all of varied backgrounds, I went to music school and am very trained musically whereas Satomi has no musical training, she never played a note before Deerhoof. John had played in bands but his musical interests were very different from mine. What all we like in music, is just about everything. It's not like John likes metal and I like jazz and Satmoni likes showtunes, we all like some metal and some jazz and some showtunes, to the point where it's not even possible to differentiate genres like say someone who worked at a record store would have to. If your in a band and thinking about music all the time and it's your obsession, the idea of different genres its like the kindergarten stage of exploring music. When you're at the point where for years on end you've just being playing and thinking about music, it's like when I'm speaking to you I'm not thinking about the alphabet, I'm not thinking about the letters being used to form the words coming out of my mouth, I’m thinking about the ideas i'm trying to get across, just like we might be using notes and things that might refer to other genres but it's not being done in a conscious way. That's one of the most beautiful things about Radiohead and why they've been one of my favourite bands for years is that it's the same for them. It's a very fluid, borderless musical universe they're working in, it's not that they're putting in classical instruments to be cute or funny or reference a certain genre but it's part of the sound world they inhabit and their creative mind is not going to compartmentalise like that. If you're dreaming up a song you're not going to say "I'm not going to put violins in your dream, because I know you're a rock band" They allow that limitless palate to come through. That's something I admire about them that I'd like to imitate.



So what's the new record like?



Gosh, as you've probably guessed by now I'm not the best person to ask about musical genres. This may sound pretentious but we're trying to make it sound not like anything you've ever heard. You can't avoid that but we wanted to make it so your first reaction is not "it sounds like so and so" but a really intense, pure sensation and then maybe you go back after a while and can pinpoint where it comes from. That's another thing that bands who get really popular straight out suffer from, we don't have one thing that we're known for so it's not difficult to branch out and do something else. Recently I've taken to asking random people "what should we do on our new record" and the one thing they say is "do something different, surprise me" We're incredibly lucky to have that licence. If there's any kind of marketing machine behind Deerhoof it's not "tone it down and make it more close to what's successful" it's "go further, the further out you go the more successful it will be"



Yep, that's were the smart money is. Time to get with the 'Hoof