January 2010
16 posts
“Angry Charlie” at WTUL 1/27/10
Ted and Tess doing Wildlife Sculpture on WTUL. A...
New Giant Cloud
O boy the new Giant Cloud EP is available. We love this band, they’re great.
http://amiestreet.com/music/giant-cloud/old-books-ep/
Their new live video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMZvSdCeH4E
Milwaukee's 88Nine Top 100: #11 →
Uncut
Below is the full text of the interview we did with Andy Gensler for the New York Times T Magazine that turned into this article. Once you get the full context, you’ll see how much Andy and the liberal left-wing New York drive-by media spun the story to suit their ends. K where’s my radio talk show.
NYT T Magazine Interview: Full Text
NYT: What neighborhood in New Orleans did Ted and Grant grow-up in? And
what high school did they attend? How did they first meet/start
making music together?
Grant Widmer: I grew up in Lakeview and Lake Vista. Ted and I met in our first year at Jesuit High School. Ted was really good friends with Ian Neville who was also a classmate of ours and the two of them had a band together. When I met them they were both already excellent guitar players. Today of course Ian is known for his guitar-playing with Dumpstaphunk and The Meters and the Neville Brothers. He is an amazing guitarist. I didn't take up guitar until I was about 13 or 14 so I was pretty motivated to get better because I wanted to be good enough to play with them. I'm still working on that. Actually at some point Ted and I stopped trying to get better at guitar and just focused on writing simpler parts and songs. Ian, on the other hand, is very talented and can play circles around almost anyone. But we all got along great. To this day Ian is a very close friend of ours.
Ted Joyner: I grew up in Uptown New Orleans on Napoleon Ave. Then when I was 15 we moved to Camp Street by Jefferson Ave. I met Grant at Jesuit High School on Carrolton Ave. we were actually in the same home room our 8th grade year. But we didnt really start hanging out until biology class in 9th grade. We were partners for the fetal pig dissection.
NYT: New Orleans, to many (including myself) is the greatest music city
in the country – if not the world. It eats, breathes, sleeps music –
which New Orleans artist, sounds, events most influenced you and your
music?
TJ: Growing up we were really into the Meters. But I think I realized sometime that I wasn't very good at writing funk songs. They remain one of my all time favorite bands. But I think for anyone growing up in New Orleans, yes, you're surrounded by music alot. Thats not to say you could point to any specific elements of Generationals' music and say "that part's very 'new orleans-sounding' " But growing up around alot of live music, I guess does influence your decision to try to make music yourself.
GW: I'm really impressed and influenced by some of the producers, engineers and arrangers that worked in New Orleans in the 50s and 60s. Allen Toussaint is up there with the best producers ever. He produced Lee Dorsey's "Working in a Coal Mine", "Mother-in-Law" by Ernie K-Doe which is one of the great R&B songs ever. He wrote and produced "Ruler of My Heart" for Irma Thomas. To me, these stand right there with the absolute best, as good as Phil Spector, Quincy Jones, Sam Phillips, all the Motown things that are so much more famous. Wardell Quezergue is a New Orleans producer and arranger who did some untouchable songs. "Groove Me" by King Floyd and "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight are his arrangements. Both those records are phenominal. I want everyone to listen to "Mr. Big Stuff" on youtube right now and just appreciate that for a minute. Also Cosimo Matassa is a legendary engineer in New Orleans who really invented the sound of records that made the city famous. He engineered Fats Domino's "The Fat Man" in 1949 at his studio on Rampart Street and a lot of people think that was actually the first rock record ever. Little Richard recorded "Tutti Frutti" with Matassa in 1955. That production style is something we've hinted at in our recording with Dan Black but it's still only a reference, we will never be anything like those guys. But I am so impressed with them. Rock and roll goes way back in New Orleans. I definitely respect a lot of people from New Orleans for their music, specifically Art Neville, James Booker and Professor Longhair, but New Orleans music is very much about virtuosity and musical skill and improvisation and that's just not what we're about. We're just not that good. So I usually find more inspiration in the idea guys like Quezergue and Matassa.
NYT: Almost every Gernationals review mentions Phil Spector Tom Petty,
the Beatles, Kinks, Byrds and other sorta retro-60s/70s classic rock/
pop, how did you get exposed to that kind music growing up in New
Orleans? Are they missing any major influences?
GW: Tons: Squeeze, Talking Heads, Dire Straights, Electric Light Orchestra, Van Morrison Moondance, Nick Lowe Jesus of Cool, all of Elvis Costello especially This Year's Model and My Aim is True, The Replacements Tim and Let it Be, Everything Aimee Mann has ever done including Til Tuesday, XTC, Michael Jackson. My dad had thousands of records of every kind of music. He is a voracious music fan. I like plenty of newer things too. The Oranges Band's The World and Everything In It is my favorite album and probably the album I've listened to most in my life. Rarely does a week go by that I don't listen to it. Dan Black, who is our producer, was a founding member of the Oranges Band and engineered that record. I was into that record before we knew him and when we eventually met him it was such a kick to be able to ask him questions about it.
TJ: I'm sure we started hearing them the same way kids living in any American city hears them, from our parents.
NYT: What made you want to use analog equipment when recording Con Law
with Daniel Black? Have you recorded digitally before? What was that
like?
TJ: We had recorded with Dan once before with our old band. I just really enjoy working with him and he's an analog guy. I also appreciate the finite nature of tape. It sort of prohibits the "being-able-to-do-a-billion-different-takes-and-saving-them-all" attitude you have when you do it all digitally.
GW: Daniel spent a lot of his youth recording albums. From the time he was 15 he was the guy in Baton Rouge who you would go to if you were a kid and had a band and wanted to make a record. He recorded on 4-tracks then eventually he graduated to a 2-inch tape machine when he studied recording at American University in college in the 90s. He's just always been an analog guy. The recordings we all like and try to emulate were almost all recorded the same way. We first worked with Daniel on Heroes and Sheroes, the last record of our old band The Eames Era, which is when we first learned how to make a record on a tape machine. And we just really took to that style. For one, we like how it sounds. You can saturate tape and the distortion actually sounds warm, unlike a digital rig. You can alter tape speeds to do things like thicken a drum track by slowing it down or add a sheen to a vocal track by speeding it up just a little bit. Also, tape forces you to decide immediately if you got what you wanted. We have recorded albums on computer rigs before, and there's a tendency to just record everything ten times, keep all ten takes and try to decide later which ones to keep. Which almost never works.
NYT: Your single 'When They Fight, They Fight” became something of a
blog hit, what was it like seeing it spread across the cyberworld
music media? Did reactions surprise/amaze you.
GW: It did? It's hard to tell. I'm aware of a handful of music blogs, but I'm still learning about a lot of them so I have a hard time telling how far the ones that feature us are reaching and how many of them there are. It's always a thrill when someone features your song on their blog. It's completely amazing, I appreciate all of them. I'm positive that in a few years, blogs are going to be throwing every single showcase and party at South-by-Southwest. The bloggers I've met have been very cool too. Genuine music fans.
TJ: It's been alot of fun of course to see people enjoy that song. Prior to this I was unaware of the website hype machine. My friends will email me when we pop up on there. But I was even happier to see how many different songs people would say were their favorite. 'When they fight' gets singled out alot, but songs like 'faces in the dark', 'exterior street,' and 'angry charlie' get called out pretty often too. Which is basically the goal when making the record.
NYT: How’d if feel to have the Boston Phoenix call you the best band in
Louisiana?
GW: Totally deserved! Louisiana has shit for music, always has! We were not aware of the Boston Phoenix at the time but that was a nice thing for them to say. Louisiana has some good bands. The funny part was that none of the local press here knows who we are. I remember getting some blowback from a local reporter about it but he had no idea who we were or what we sounded like so he couldn't really argue.
NYT: And what’d you make of Pitchfork’s review?
TJ: As always, it's an honor even to be trashed by Pitchfork. No, they weren't particularly mean to us. I think we managed to squeak by relatively un-injured.
GW: What's Pitchfork? I'll run a search for that on AltaVista.
NYT: How was it adapting Con Law’s songs to your live 4-piece band?
GW: Very difficult. We really could've used about 10-pieces. But we're really only set up to travel with 4 or 5 so we had to truncate a lot of parts and adapt a lot of songs into a different presentation. It's an ongoing process and it's certainly presenting a challenge but it's been fun.
TJ: Its been probably the most challenging/fun part of the process of starting the band. Pretty much every run of shows we do is an on-going experiment in trying new things out. Some of the songs we tweak a bit here and there and then others change around alot for the live show.
NYT: Are Katie Clark and Tess Brunet now permanent members of
Generationals?
GW: We wish. We just don't make enough money to have this band be a full-time job for anyone, so people have to do other jobs when we're not touring and that doesn't always mesh well with touring. Katie had to stay behind on the last tour to do her other job, but Tess is about as permanent as we've had in this band. She's one of us for as long as she wants.
NYT: How did you recruit/find them? What bands have they
been in?
TJ: Tess Brunet was in Deadboy and the Elephantmen previously. It has been great having her. I'm still surprised we snagged her. Grant and I knew who she was from her old band long before we met her or got up the courage to ask her to play with us. She's a big deal.
GW: Katie's boyfriend's roommate is a friend of ours who introduced us to her. Generationals was her first band but she's played instruments for years. Chris Watson of Park The Van Records introduced us to Tess Brunet earlier this year when we were looking for a drummer. She was the drummer in Deadboy and the Elephantmen which was a very cool band from Houma, La. They split up a couple of years ago and she had been making music and waiting tables in New Orleans for a year or so before we got her.
NYT: And how has it been working with them?
GW: They're great! It's nice touring with them too because they tend to balance out the bad smell.
NYT: Generationals have toured from Missoula to Tuscon to Salt Lake City
and played Voodooo, Monolith, and Austin City Limits and beyond – what
were some of the highlights and low-lights of touring?
TJ: Getting to play at Monolith and seeing Red Rocks amphitheater was incredible. It is truly one of the coolest live music venues that exists on this continent. And then getting to open for Broken Social Scene was surreal. It was a huge honor. Getting a pat on the back and a "great show, man" from Kevin Drew was really cool. Touring has been throughly fun thus far. I can't complain about how our tours have been. Even the low-lights are all highlights in retrospect.
GW: All were highlights, no low-lights. The Park The Van CMJ Showcase at Union Hall was my favorite show maybe ever. It was a great night. Being on tour with Pepi Ginsberg and The Spinto Band and Floating Action were huge highlights. Being on tour with the other people in this band has been the musical highlight of my life.
NYT: Which films have you work in New Orleans and in what capacity?
Any good stories, anecdotes, star sightings?
TJ: I have worked drawing sets on Final Destination IV and The Expendables which is a Sylvester Stallone movie that hasn't come out yet and some other smaller projects like made for TV stuff. Say what you will about the Final Destination franchise but the fourth one paid for our album to be made!
GW: I was a set dresser on the pilot episode of "K-Ville" which was a short-lived Fox show about crime in New Orleans. That was a crazy job. That was shot in the winter of 2007 and there was still a lot of debris from Katrina all over town. We drove around with the set decorator all day and rooted through heaps of refuse for set dressing. I remember sifting through debris in the 9th Ward looking for set dressing. Broken street signs, pieces of broken furniture. It was surreal. The movie that paid for my half of the "Con Law" recording budget was "12 Rounds" with John Cena. I was a props assistant on that one. Cena is a funny guy. Last summer I was a props assistant for a few weeks on "The Expendables" which Sly stallone directed and starred in. Somehow I found myself in the rafters of a soundstage with two sniper rifles trained on Stallone in a scene. The little infra-red dots that they always show on the target's chest in sniper scenes? That was me. Some major pyrotechnics were going off in the scene too so I had to get it perfect. Also I have never shot a gun or held a rifle in my life so I really had no business holding these guns, it just happened that everyone else in the prop department had to be on the floor to deal with the explosives. So Stallone ran the scene in a rehearsal and was not impressed with my sniper skills so he yelled at me in front of the entire crew. I didn't know if I was going to laugh or piss myself. But we got the shot. I came through.
NYT: What was it like having your old band, Eames Era, have song son
Gray’s Anatomy,” “One Tree Hill: and MTV’s “I'm From Rolling Stone.”
How did that happen?
GW: It was fun. That definitely helped us to be able to tour. We've always had a good group of people representing our music for films and TV and things like that. Those shows had excellent music supervisors.
TJ: It helped out alot. Gray's Anatomy alone bought us a van to tour in at the time. To this day I don't know exactly how those sort of deals go down aside from just someone hearing one of your songs and deciding it would work in a scene of their show or film or whatever. I prefer not to over-think it.
NYT: I read that your name references the supposed generational divide
bandied about during the McCain-Obama election, do you also feel that
is an aspect to your music in that is also crosses generational
divides?
TJ: No, not really.
GW: We don't consider the audience that much. This band is much more self-centered. We set up mirrors on the stage so we can gaze into our own eyes when we sing. The name is pretty abstract, it does not denote anything specific.
NYT: I read you are planning to return to Washington, D.C., to record
an EP, any working album/song titles and when will it be out?
GW: Unfortunately no titles just yet. No release date yet either but I think it will be out in fall 2010 on Park The Van.
NYT: How are the new songs coming? Any thematic -- musically or
lyrically -- trends your noticing? Any stylistic changes from Con
Law?
GW: This batch of songs is definitely closer in presentation to what they will be in the live set. We're really interested in working within the paradigm of things that we will translate to the stage almost immediately and without much tinkering. This batch of songs is a much stronger group than the first record also. We're very excited.
TJ: I really look forward to working with Dan again. We still writing a bunch of new stuff and trying to figure out our recording schedule this winter and spring and make it jive with our touring.
NYT: Other plans for 2010 ?
GW: Lots and lots of touring. We're doing a tour with Hacienda and Floating Action in February. SXSW in March. East Coast and Midwest in a support slot on a bigger tour in April and May. [that tour has not been made public yet but if it is soon I will tell you the details]. Canadians will have an opportunity to see us this year, and with a little luck, Europeans also. We have been neglecting our European fans and it's time we made it up to them. They deserve better.
2010
Heading back to the practice room tomorrow to polish up the set for the early spring touring. It’s gonna be a great year.
Spring dates, including all the tours and SXSW, will be posted here shortly. Can’t wait to see erybody out on the trail.
NYT T Magazine's Nifty Fifty: Generationals →