Guster: At the Intersection of Beer Pong and National Public Radio
 
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T. Virgil Parker

Most people who allocate themselves into the category of Nerd do not do so with a great deal of self-satisfaction. As a result, I always thought that if you could go back in time and give R.E.M. Paxil, they might have been more like Guster. The unending popularity of this band is that they live, write and perform from the world-view of the kid whose gym locker was always Jello-bombed, and then suddenly got ahold of Sauron's Ring of Power.

Not that they have it out for anybody much, or at least anybody who doesn't deserve it. There is a confidence in their music that precludes much in the way of bad vibes, and allows them to stake out territory that's pretty much their own. In fact, despite the full support of one of the most powerful record companies on the planet, they still prefer to do everything in the trademark Guster style, which can only be called one of shabby gentility. They take pride in tossing aside the trappings of success.

And there is a lot to toss aside. Critics, and people who have less than the usual lead exposure, can't get enough of their sound. Each album exceeds the previous one in both subtlety and popularity. This most archetypal of college bands has the best of both worlds: Impeccable Indie credentials and a global audience.


Tim Parker: The distance between Guster and their fans is basically zero.

Ryan Miller: That's a good thing, right?

TVP: Yeah.

RM: We do road journals and things like that and certainly have a reputation for being accessible. I think we even present ourselves on stage in an accessible way. There's not a lot of pretense unless it's tongue-in-cheek. We don't do a lot of Rock Star posing on stage, I hope. We're into the wearing a t-shirt that we wore to bed the night before kind of thing.

TVP: You can't be ironic and a Rock Star at the same time.

RM: What's ironic? Is Ben Folds ironic when he does his thing? I suppose it is irony. We spend a lot of time playing with convention, or calling bullshit on convention. Some of what we do is very conventional at the same time. It isn't our full MO to pull back the curtain on what it means to play a Rock show. Sometimes that will rear its head in the middle of a show and we'll try to play with it in a funny or entertaining way.

TVP: Do you think your fans have more in common with you than is usually the case?

RM: There is a sort of arrested development that has gone on in our lives. We'll go to parties after shows on college campuses and play beer pong. We're still kind of nerds, and we download music and watch the same movies. It is hard to say. A lot of times fans tend to emulate the bands that they like, or the other way around. I feel a lot of overlap with our fans, I can say that.

TVP: Your fans seen to share a culture with you in formative ways.

RM: For example?

TVP: With the Alt culture, really Gen. X, authority is automatically suspect, meaning is automatically ambiguous. That's not the entire generation, but a world-view you certainly share with your fans.

RM: Yeah. There is an aesthetic that's consistent in the Onion, and The Daily Show and a lot of films and music that have that sort of meta-ness about it.

TVP: Now that you've been doing this for a while, how does adulthood and being in a band mix?

RM: That goes back to the arrested development statement I made. Going around in a bus for eight months a year is not necessarily an enterprise, but it can be. We don't sleep on couches anymore and we have a lot of really talented people help us on the road. That does help to alleviate the adolescent nature of touring.

I don't necessarily feel like an adult. All my friends in NY are younger than me. We're married and we have mortgages and responsibilities, but I still play in a Rock band, and playing beer pong is part of my job sometimes.

TVP: I think many people now perceive adulthood as a kind of surrender.

RM: Adulthood is necessary. There are many wonderful things about adulthood. I see no reason to rush it needlessly. At least in my own personal life, it's always gotten better. I appreciate the wisdom that comes every year, and learning from mistakes, and having more empathy. I don't think adulthood is a bad word. Giving yourself completely over to adulthood is a bad thing for me, and not necessarily a quality I like in others around me.

A certain wonder, and carelessness, and unabashed creativity is a really compelling feature in people. I have friends who are capital A adults, and they're great. I don't think that will ever be me.

TVP: How are the colleges responding to your promotion of bio-diesel?

RM: Last year was our inaugural run with Adam's nonprofit, Reverb. The response was mostly good. I don't know how many kids really give a shit about what we're doing. That's to be expected. We're a band first, and messengers of good will, second or third.

We're just trying to get behind things that we care about, that are relatively apolitical like bio-diesel and cleaner energy. Most kids don't walk away from our concerts thinking that that's an important part of it, but if ten percent of them walk away with a pamphlet in their hands, that's great.

TVP: Most bands don't get better with time, but everything Guster puts out is stronger than the previous disk.

RM: There are people who don't share that opinion, we lose people every record. I don't know if popularity is a good measure, but we just had our most successful year ever. That feels good because we did it on our own terms, we didn't do something we didn't want to do. We keep pushing ourselves to make better records. That progression you're referring to is the driving force in the band.

TVP: Critics are almost unanimous about Ganging up on the Sun, even critics who don't have anything to do with the genre. Is that kind of respect important to you.

RM: I want to say it isn't, but it is important to me. I don't rely on critics but I consult them in my media decisions. Music especially. I read Pitchfork and Metacritic and Pop Matters. That's my filtering system of how I discover new music. That's actually a credible way of getting turned on to music. While critical respect isn't the most important thing, if it comes along with the other things we want, that's great.

TVP: Is it kind of scary getting praise from National Public Radio?

RM: No. I really appreciate it because the intelligence. We just had a sort of interesting run. I was reading the New Yorker- I know that sounds pretentious- it's a rich enough story that it almost belongs in there. We've started out as this not-that-awesome college band, and we've been very successful in a lot of ways. We pre-dated this whole internet marketing thing. We have one foot in this DIY grassroots touring world and another foot firmly planted in major label land. When NPR does a story on us we can get navel-gazing for a minute and talk about the journey.

TVP: You had to be one of the first bands to do the whole street team/internet thing to get where you are.

RM: I feel like we were. We took that whole street team thing and made it our own before even the internet or email was big. It was out of necessity. We had made a record that we really believed in. We'd given it to a big Boston manager who managed all the big super-hit Boston bands and he gave it to his three friends and they didn't like it. He told us to make another one in a year. We really felt that if we went out there and busted our ass, that it would find an audience. We sent it to kids who were interested and we busked in Harvard Square, and played all the colleges. That's how we got a leg up. When the internet came up we made the most of it, in large part because we're all immersed in it and all nerds. That's a natural extension of our band. All those ideas on the site come from us.

TVP: Are you surprised that the Jam people are giving the band such a warm welcome?

RM: I wouldn't characterize them as being super into it. We don't get invited to the super noodle-fests. It sort of makes sense, we're not really an improvisational band at all. There is an ethos in the band that's consistent with the Jam Band scene. There's an emphasis on the live performance. We tour a lot and we know it is important and try to make it special. I can see how we would cross over to an extent, but for Jam Band purists, where anything can happen musically from night to night, we're not that. When I see that I think it's just crazy. I'd never be able to pull that off.

TVP: You're masters at innovating, and your fans expect something unusual from you on a consistent basis. Anything like that in the works now?

RM: We're just gearing up for a tour now so we're trying to come up with things that look home-made but are effective. We've been touring on this album for almost a year, so we're going to come up with new songs, new arrangements. We always tweak the set list. That comes to fruition when we're on the road. We tried to do a video installation but it got too expensive. We don't have mega millions to play with, but if we did, we'd throw more of it into the show. In the mean time we're just trying to find cheap ways to make the show special.