Tea Leaf Green Interview
 
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By Jess Hopsicker

I first caught Tea Leaf Green last year at the moe.down, and saw them once more after that. Though I wasn’t a fan right off, it always lingered in the back of my mind that I rather did enjoy them. A bad trip, days and days of festival later, I had felt as though I reached my jam capacity. “Another jam band man? An interview with Tea Leaf Green? Um... later, just let me rest my stomach first,” I replied to the editor as he presented me with the advanced copy of the of Rock ‘n’ Roll Band DVD and soundtrack. The street release date was Halloween and I had gotten it mid September. Media kits always made my day and this package would have been like Christmas, especially after exhausting my music supply. Sadly, the summer had been enough, the back of my brain felt badly for leaving it on the display counter until recently.

Since the acclaimed album Taught to be Proud, released in 2005, Tea Leaf Green has sponged up America soaking up a rather hefty fan base. The band was heralded by the media as bards, youthful gypsies and road warriors, as they picked up friends through sold out shows in many major cities. The touring schedule was more than extensive, and even included the prolific Fillmore Auditorium in the band’s hometown of San Francisco. The bay area spawned the sage-like group The Grateful Dead. To even be recognized in such an industry would prove be an incredible feat in and of itself. Since then they have proved their mettle. The title track to Taught to be Proud won the “Song of the Year” Jammy award.

The band, comprised of Trevor Garrod on keys, Ben Chambers with the bass, Josh Clark on guitar, and Scott Rager on drums, are known for their precision with improvisation and the alchemy between energetic instrumentals and light yet meaningful California vocals. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Band soundtrack and rockumentary directed by Justin Kreutzmann son of the Dead’s Billy Kreutzmann takes place at The Fox Theatre in Boulder Colorado in May 19th. Released on SCI Fidelity records, the documentary is coupled with interviews and offers a first-hand look at the band on the rise. It proves that they aren’t just any other jam band. It had been described with accolades like: meat and potatoes, apple pie with a whiskey chaser, and a slice of rock and roll. Throughout the country they have traveled winning over skeptics, perhaps it was my interview with Trevor that brought me over to the dark side. Among other things, he candidly explained that it wasn’t all “meat n taters.”

JH: It seems you follow a pretty aggressive tour what keeps you inspired?
TG: What seems to inspire the tour schedule?
JH: Well, touring and being inspired to tour...
TG: Well you know it was something that I always wanted to do when I was kid growing up. Now I kinda got myself in it, and right now it’s a way we pay our bills. So we keep on going and keep on going. Its fun, we travel around the country, and always see people. At this point we come around and we’ve been every place so many times that we have our friends and we look foreword to seeing different people in every different region. Otherwise you got to get up every morning and go to work.
JH: Right right
TG: But I gotta get up and go to work in a different place every day.
JH: At least it isn’t just about paying bills and you are doing what you love.
TG: Yeah. I kinda say “work” facetiously at this point I haven’t had a real job for so long that I just might as well call it that.
JH: Have you always had an aversion to a real job?
TG: Well, I grew up on a farm so I spent a lot of time working for the family farm, the field and the like… And that’s some real work, you know. From early on, I was like “man I needed to find something better to do than this.“ For a while, when I got out of college I worked in an office until I decided that if I was going to that I’d actually have to kill myself.
JH: Really
TG: Yeah. This is pretty much the only thing I really want to do. Or feel like I can do. That’s the end of that story.
JH: It does look like your having a lot of fun.
TG: Well, I really do try to have a good time. If you’re not having fun you really just have to rethink what you’re doing with your life. If it’s not fun, the flip side to that is absolute misery. You’d be far away from your friends… You give up a lot of personal freedoms and choices if you start looking at it like that. If you don’t want to be playing you actually end up feeling like you have to play. You can’t call in sick or anything like that. It can really easily become a miserable time if you don’t remember to have fun. I’ve always felt that it’s a matter of personal choice if you enjoy yourself or not. If the other guys in the band start to feel down I always say, “You can always just get a real job.” That seems to turn everyone around and puts things into perspective.
JH: That it does. Do you feel a certain amount of camaraderie with your fans and that seems to help too.
TG: Absolutely- absolutely, we don’t really have a good barrier between our fans and ourselves. We are a very inclusive group if you come out to shows enough you probably can end up becoming one of our friends. We listen to everybody’s opinion, we have a really cool forum on our website where a lot of people discuss certain things. I’ll log on every once in a while to see what they’re saying. Oftentimes there will be some good advice, like what songs to play. And we’ll be like yeah we should play that song and that kind of thing. So yeah, there is some good camaraderie between our people and us.
JH: The keys seem pretty central to your sound. How do you keep them up from with so much energetic guitar work going on around you?
TG: Well, the way I see it, there’s pretty much two voices about the rhythm section, there’s the guitar and then there’s me. We try to compliment each other. I tend to think musically in two voices a lot, kind of a counterpoint, like back in baroque- sort of classical periods where you can have two melodic parts intertwined with each other and that has always been my goal. A double melodic thing that sort of compliments each other. It’s just a weird sort of accident of our biology that Josh and I understand each other in a strange way. We both, Josh is the guitar player by the way - we understand music very differently. I’m much more bookish and knowing what kind of keys and mode or whatever it is and he’s just on the outside ripping it. I have no idea actually what the hell he’s thinking in his head, or how he’s imagining the music. For some reason we kind of end up in the same spot despite coming from totally different directions.
JH: As a band you guys seem pretty close.
TG: Yeah, well lived in the same house together too so-
JH: That helps too right?
TG: Hehe yeah...
JH: It appears your bringing the element of rock and roll into the jam scene; do you think that has to do a lot with your success?
TG: Um … oh man, we’ve always just tried to do what we can. It just kind of came out as rock and roll. It’s where our roots are. None of the other guys in the band geek out over jazz. We’ve just- our roots are classic rock so that’s what we bring to the table. We don’t have a plan like lets try playing this dub sound or whatever. It’s just the music we know how to play. It’s kind of been somewhat of a joke for us. People ask us what kind of music we play and we always just say rock ‘n’ roll, and it kind of pisses people off. They’re like “well what does that mean?’ and I’m like, “I dunno, its just the music that we play, you can call it rock ‘n’ roll if you want. ‘ As far as our success, there’s a lot of people that appreciate the rockiness- who knows who knows… all I can hope is that it makes us successful because we can’t really do anything else.
JH: Some listeners feel as though your heading towards an MTV sort of fame while others feel as though it’s more like the Dead.
TG: Yeah well, I’ve never really been able to picture myself on MTV, no matter how hard I tried. If I ended up there I’d be profoundly surprised. I mean, does MTV even play music anymore? We’ve kind of come around the Grateful Dead in a strange way. None of us were really big fans growing up or anything, I’ve went to a few concerts when I was really young, older sisters would take us. But I've never really spent that much time listening to them until lately. If you play music in the Bay Area long enough you’ll end up around the Grateful Dead. They are just monolithically Bay Area music. Over time we’ve just became closer and closer to The Grateful Dead people, so much as Justin Kreutzmann who made our DVD we just put out. He’s is the son of Billy Kreutzmann. I’ve come to get to know their music or at least their songwriting and their catalogue. I’ve really come to appreciate it. There are not a lot of similarities in the way that they have written songs to the ways that I’ve thought about writing them. It’s kind of by accident, in so much, that the Grateful Dead had a very huge folk influence in their music; as just ripping off old folk songs and interpreting them and its something that I have done as well so I enjoy that and I really appreciate them. As far as their career and their business practices are concerned, you couldn’t find a better model. I guess we lean more toward The Grateful Dead, but more towards the way that they handled themselves in the business realm. I’ve always joked with the punk rock people, the punkers who hate The Grateful Dead, I say to them that in a lot of ways The Grateful Dead is like the first punk rock band as far as being anti-establishment. They did everything themselves and stuck it to the man every chance they could. In the same way the punk rock movement did, in some ways better. So there.
JH: And what do you have to reply to those out there that say once you’ve heard one jam band you’ve heard them all.
TG: Well, I can say that in a lot of ways they’re right. In this scene, it’s a struggle to come up with your own sound. The scene is ill defined and fledgling. If you went back ten years you’ll be really hard pressed to find the use of that word in common usage. It’s really a new word, and so right now people kind of define it as “sounds like Phish.” So right now we’re working on expanding the definition, maybe we’ll just get rid of the word. Maybe it will come to mean more things. To me its more like jazz, or the tradition of jazz where it’s improv over change. I don’t think there’s a huge distinction, jam music leans more heavily on rock ‘n’ roll music where jazz leans on show tunes, you know.
JH: Is there anything on the horizon that you want to talk about?
TG: Well, were looking forward to our New Years Eve show in Philadelphia. First time we’re gunna play New Years Eve outside of California. Yeah, kinda excited about that. Then we’re gunna go on the jam cruise, which I’ve heard was very fun from everyone that’s been on it. Those are the things that are coming up, but as far as the next year is concerned who knows. More touring, hopefully we’ll record a record soon.
JH: Excellent, keep having a good time and keep paying your bills.
TG: Absolutely.