Interview with Robert Hunter and Greg Anton, August 25, 1997 Zero: You Can't Keep a Good Band Down by Christian Crumlish I finally arrive at Hunter's home in Marin, having botched the directions twice, where he's graciously granted me an interview to talk about Zero, a band with whom he's been writing songs since the early '90s, and his collaborative process with Greg Anton, Zero's drummer and co-founder, and the rest of the band. As I turn into the living room, I see, sitting facing me on the piano bench, back to the piano, the imposing presence of Anton himself. Without making any promises, Hunter has produced Greg, and stands back now, beaming. Note: (In the interview, Robert Hunter's words are indicated by RH, Greg Anton's statements by Greg, and my questions by xian.) Money, Mandolins, and Marin County Musicians Before we started the interview proper, Hunter's advice to me to transcribe the interview soon afterward, and his reminiscence about interviewing Blind Melon for Creem, reminded Anton that Banana, a former Zero keyboard player (and currently the rhythm guitarist in Steve Kimock & Friends), was looking for an old custom-made mandolin he had pawned years ago. Hunter goes off to get his precious Scott Wood Gibson-style F-5 mandolin: RH This mandolin is Banana's? Greg Yeah. RH I'll never get another F-5. Greg Banana's been playing with Grisman and he played Grisman's mandolin and said to himself, "Oh man, I need my right mandolin!" He asked me to find out if you're real attached to it and ask if you'd be willing to sell it or trade it for something. RH If it's his mandolin then I've got to give it back. Jeez, that puts me in a bit of a quandary. I'm very proud of the instrument, but I don't play it much and he would and oh, god! Greg Well, think about it. RH Well, no. You know how it is. Money aside, that's his mandolin. It got into my hands circuitously. xian Aren't ethics a bitch? RH Yeah, they are. I don't see what else I can do. When I gave a way that A-4, I missed having a mandolin, so I went down and bought this. I figured it was my karma to get a good F-5, you know? Greg And I guess he got it when he was way back in the Youngbloods or something. RH I'll see what I can do, damnit. Greg I'll see how serious he is about it. If he's really serious about playing this stuff. RH I can't keep it. If I played it all the time, which I don't.... I work it up every once in a while, play with Nelson and Rothman at the office Christmas party once a year. I don't see what else I can do. I don't play mandolin enough to deserve to have such a fine instrument. That's kinda where it goes. It's his. It's his, and money doesn't really cut it. Who's Been in Zero All Along? xian How do you think Zero has managed to continue being Zero all along with some of the personnel changes? Do you think it's just that certain people have been there through the whole time or is there something about being Zero that you can bring a musician in and they can learn to be Zero too? Greg I don't know how to answer your question. It's been a core. RH It's been you and Steve. You and Steve are Zero. Sitting in with Zero, an Acid Test of Sorts xian This electric fiddler who had once sat in with Zero told me that being between you and Steve on-stage was a very scary place for a musician to be. I think he meant that there was such a ferocious groove that jumping in the middle of you guys was a terrifying prospect. Greg Most people who've sat in with the band, and there's been many, many of them, get that "deer in the headlights" thing. I was just talking to Howard Danchek, our sound man, about this. There's a whole bunch of big open spaces in our music all the time, and most players aren't used to that. For us, what is not played is as important as what is played. We're very respectful of each other, musically courteous, not trying to play as many notes as possible. We're trying to play less and less, and let the thing float along. So when somebody sits, there's so much room that they're often overwhelmed and they'll start playing all over the place. Over and over again, a guitar player, say, will sit in with us, and when they hear a space they jump into it as if, if it weren't for them that night, we wouldn't have a solo! As if we wouldn't be able to pull it off without that one person sitting in that night. I think that Steve is one of the best guitar players playing right now, and I think Martín is one of the best tenor players playing right now, and Chip is one of the best B-3 players playing. We're really lucky to have these great, great soloists in our band. Hammering Away at that Understatement Thing xian At a recent Maritime Hall show (August 15, 1997), you guys did a Tangled Hangers and almost got through the whole song without ever really stating the main theme. Sure, it came up a lot, but it was hinted at, and sketched at, and not played. You just sort of danced around the melody the whole time. Every time I hear you do a tune I've heard you do before, you're building on top of what's already there, and the song gets thicker and thicker in my memory. Greg Yeah, well that's what's happening on the stage too. See, that's the advantage of the history of having a band. That's a very common compliment we get: that we sound like a band. It's one thing to get six equally accomplished players together, but we've been playing together for so many years. Some songs we've been playing for years and years and years, so we ourselves have played the "head" so many times that we play around it and don't actually come out and state it. It's very understated. xian It forces you to come up with something new about an old song. Greg Right, Exactly. And that's what's fun. That's what's challenging. If we're ever going to play this song again, and we've been at it for ten years, let's try to do something different with it. Do Songs = Instrumentals + Lyrics? xian I think the most obvious question I could ask is, "How different is it to have so many more songs, with lyrics? The audience seems to believe that a song and an instrumental are really different beasts, but when I listen to a tune like Catalina, I think that if you, Robert, hadn't come along and put words to it, it would have fit well with a lot of instrumentals I've heard Zero play in the past. RH They did it as an instrumental before I put words to it. xian Is that right? OK, so I'm not totally off base here. But it must change something, the dynamic of the song. There's at least another musical voice, in this case literally - Judge's voice - you have to accommodate, right? Greg It's been a big difference. It's put some structure to the thing: sooner or later you're going to get to a chorus and everybody knows it, everybody in the audience and everybody in the band. I remember when we first started putting these lyrics in. I was really blown away about how integrated it felt. It just felt really natural. We'd be going along, playing, and then here would come a verse or a chorus, and it seemed like the words made sense with what we'd been doing up till then, for all those years. It just somehow worked. xian That makes me also wonder, Robert, what it was like for you - I guess it's the other side of the same question - walking into a band that already had a musical train rolling down the tracks, jumping on like a hobo with a sack of lyrics, and fitting in so well. Was there some trick involved there? Was there a different muse that had to inspire those words? RH Let's just say there's probably a different muse that inspires each and every song, if you want to use muse that way. I'm not trying to copy myself. Whatever Zero was doing, I just wrote for that. Beyond that I can't even tell you what I do. You know, if it sounds right and it fits the characters who are doing it, then it's working and that's sort of automatic. xian Have the songs so far usually come to you with a melody and a structure before you put lyrics to them? RH Yeah, they did, pretty much. Greg Yeah, I'll just give you some chord changes and... RH To me it's not the changes so much as having them played. Greg's real good on the piano. He lays stuff down and I know what that beat is going to sound like when it finally gets on stage, because he's the drummer. He plays piano with a lot of drummer consciousness to it. Or I'll get something like Spoken For, which was completely arranged. I remember Steve's guitar playing on that thing seemed to tell me what that song was about. That was an unusual experience, a very high experience, writing Spoken For. Greg I remember Hunter called me up and said "Come on over, man, I've got a new invention." I said, "an invention?" and he said "Yeah! It's not really a song and it's not prose and it's not poetry, so it's brand new. It's an invention." And it is! That song is like nothing else that that I've ever heard. I'm real proud to have put that on the record. Instrumental + Lyrics = Song Greg I'll give you an example from when we started that shows how Hunter was sensitive to what was going on. We had played together, years before. Then we kind of lost touch for a couple of years, and we ran into each other at a party of a mutual friend. He asked me, "How's the band?" and I was kind of lamenting about not being hugely successful, blah blah blah, and he said, "Well you can go on being one of the most respected bands around town by other musicians, or you could do some songs and maybe take it to another level." We had just made a new record, Nothing Goes Here. I gave him that record and said, "See if anything appeals to you." He took the outro from Nancy Germany on that the record, and he wrote Chance in a Million. Now, I had just been sitting at this party drinking beer and going "oh boy, it's so tough, the music business..." and he comes up with this song that talks about a "chance in a million"! xian Does having lyrics give you a way to connect with an audience that maybe can't follow music that's purely instrumental? Greg I don't know. RH We'll see.... Greg We're not trying to do any kind of formula. We're just doing what we feel like doing. The Five-Minute Song Challenge Story xian Isn't a song on the new album, Ermaline, also built off the outro of another song? Greg Hunter was in the studio with us where we were recording, and I said "Stick around and check out this next track. We're trying to play Home on the Range with a whole different groove, and we need some help, maybe with some phrasing, or more words or less words to make it fit." He said "OK," so I put the track up. The track was up for about a minute when he said "The hell with this." He said, "Turn off the vocals," and he grabbed a legal pad and a pencil and started writing like crazy. The track played from front to back, five minutes or something, and he stood up and said, "Give me a microphone." Then he ran into the vocal booth and laid down the vocals himself for Ermaline, a brand new song to those changes. Then you know we redid it a little bit and Judge put the vocals down, and that's where Ermaline came from. It was just written (snaps his fingers) right there on the spot. It was amazing. I saw the lyrics written and you can hear the lyrics on the record, and I don't think there was much more than one or two words crossed out on the whole piece of paper of lyrics, it just came that fast. Nobody could believe that. xian So where'd it come from? RH Well, I boasted that I could do it and then I had to make good on the boast. "You get one time through this track." xian It also seems that the name, Ermaline, seems to relate to other classic rock and roll tunes, with names like Maybelline, Nadine, and Evangeline. RH Let's just say that when you're writing that fast, you don't have time to consider what your influences are. (He and Greg laugh.) To Road-Test or Not to Road-Test xian Do you have to make an effort not to lapse into Home on the Range when you're playing Ermaline? Greg I try to do different stuff on the drums. We all try to do different stuff with it. We played it last week twice, once in Santa Cruz and once in San Francisco. In fact, I've been planning to bring Hunter a live version of Ermaline, because it's the reverse of what usually happens. We played it for the first time in the studio and now we're trying to perform it, and it's just really come into its own this past week, in my opinion. xian Most of the songs in the past have been road-tested before they get on the album. Do you feel different this time, like you're coming out with stuff that's more naked because it hasn't had time to grow hair on the road? Does it feel different working from a studio version as your primal version of the song? Greg It was intentional. We worked out the stuff on Chance in a Million, mostly me and Steve on my little home studio, and Nicky Hopkins, and if you go back and listen to those [demo] versions of Catalina and Home on the Range and Chance in a Million, they're so fresh. It's this theory that freshness works. We wanted to take something brand new, and play it for the very first time in the studio, instead of getting it together on the road. You see, when playing live, you're doing some kind of projection thing for the audience. It's kind of a knee-jerk reaction. You do this, and everybody goes, "Yahoo!" and so you do it more. That translates live but it doesn't necessarily translate onto the tape that way. One song on the new album, 8 Below Zero, we've never played that live. xian Yeah, I was going to ask. I've never heard that song played. Greg We've never played it except one time in the studio. We were talking about it the other day, that we'd like to play it live, and we will. We're going to try to work out something that works, but we've never even tried it. I look forward to playing it. RH Hey (to Greg), when you do do it live, please add the first verse, because that's the setup. It will work without it. On the record they did a little bit to shorten it, took the first verse off. It's just set up about Washington Square, and the weather, and the emotional tone it sets, and then it gets into the lead. Probably wisely, for what it is, they shortened it a bit. New York Stories xian The album seems to have a lot of New York in the lyrics, at least in that song and in Pits of Thunder. RH Yeah, I wanted to do some New York stuff. xian I think it fits. Maybe it's the funkiness, but Zero always sounds like a city band to me, like a street-smart band, so that New York, urban, street scene thing fits like a glove. Maybe it's just my stereotypes of funk. Greg We do a lot of blues, you know. The roots of a lot of the music is blues. A Genre is Just a Label xian A lot of your music, Hunter, seems to have grown out of folk, out of the language and sometimes the structure of folk music, although a lot of other rivulets lead into the stream. And "folk" isn't the first word that comes to mind when I think about Zero or their sound. Is that just a musicologist's distinction that's meaningless because it's all just music or rock and roll? RH I don't know if it's meaningless but I don't examine myself from that point of view. What I liked about folk is that the lyrics lasted, made sense, and they made sense for a reason, whatever that might be. I never had much use for lyrics that only kept the rhythm or only had a nice tag line. I just never concerned myself with that stuff. So I'd say that the sense in good folk lyrics, in good old-timey lyrics, has come through, and that's what I consider a good song to be, but I also understand I'm working with rock and roll, and you can get a lot snappier. xian You can't have 20 verses each with twelve lines? RH You can.... I do. (Greg and Robert laugh.) How Lyrics Work Live xian Robert, you performed Pits of Thunder at your last Fillmore show and you were halfway into the first verse before I connected it to the versions that I'd heard Zero doing for the last few years. On the chorus it's unmistakable, but even there you take that chorus with a very different feel from the way Zero does it. RH I did it to favor the lyrics. xian It was nice because I actually hadn't discerned them before. Until you've heard a song a few times or in a few different contexts, it's hard to learn the words. Getting Zero's latest album just last week, I finally understood what the lyrics were about for some of those songs. RH You only need to catch a few lines on a song. I've realized that over the years. With a stage-performance type song, the lines aren't cumulative. Each line is a song, almost, in its own right. The audience will get this one, and then while they're thinking about this, a couple of more lines pass by before they "come to" again and stop thinking about that one. Or they're grooving to the music and all of a sudden a line will jump in. So you've got to stack the deck that way, and you can't depend just on story content. Stage Myopia xian You mentioned that you don't take to songs that have just a hook, but some songs need a hook, don't they? I've been in the audience where people did not know the song Pits of Thunder when it started, and when it re-coalesced again out of some incredibly spacious jam or some percussion thing, everyone's singing along with the chorus. Greg Really? xian Oh, yeah. Especially down close, where it's not a mosh pit-- it's a hippie audience-- but it's kind of a pit down there, lots of people making eye contact, and there's a kind of feel that the song is narrating the events. You must have noticed that the song does get a great response? Greg No, I never really noticed that. RH He's back behind those cymbals. Greg Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I can't really tell what's going on out there. RH I can't either. As a soloist performing, I can't really tell what's going on. Except for in Portland, playing during the day. I could actually see the audience, at Furthur. That was one of the few times I've been able to see my audience, see what effect I was having. I don't know if I like it or not. I did like it that day. Greg Yeah, it's a myopia or something that happens. I've noticed that. People, a lot of times good friends, have said "I came to your show, and you were looking right at me, man. Didn't you know I was there?" It's kind of a survival necessity, in order to do your work. It takes such concentration right then just relating to those people on the stage. RH You're probably interacting but you don't know it, because if you know you're interacting, then you're doing something other than performing your song. You start being mirrors on mirrors: me watching them watching me watching them watching me, that you can finally forget your lines and blow your chords. You've got to concentrate on your music. We're an Accessible Band xian I went to one of those Steve Kimock & Friends shows and I saw you pop out of the backstage area at one point. I wonder if that gave you the feeling of being in an audience? I think that's something that fans appreciate, the way they may run into Martín hanging out in the audience before a show or just the sense that you guys aren't up on some 20 foot stage. You seem like real people. RH You've got to make a button that says "Martín Told Me to Shut Up"! You'd sell a lot of them. xian Yeah, I went to one of Martín's Sunday gigs at New George's. We got there early and I was shooting some pool with my friend Nick and Martín came by and leaned over as I was making a shot. It happened to be a good shot, thank goodness, and he went "Oh man!" and I said "You gave me good luck!" and he said "Oh shut up." Nick turned to me and said "Martín Fierro personally told you to shut up!" (Greg and Robert laugh.) Greg Yeah, you've got to be careful with that, if you hang around with Martín. Next thing you know, you're talking to some stranger, a waitress or something, and you just say "shut up"! Nancy Germany, take one (Catalina) xian I wanted to go back to Nancy Germany. Was it Catalina that came out of that one? Greg No. RH Chance in a Million. xian Chance in a Million, right. OK, but, the title Theme from-- RH Catalina came from the soundtrack that Greg did for a dramatic live stage presentation of the Pawn Broker --some very, very fine music from that. What became Catalina was in that. Greg Yeah, but actually before that it came from a thing that I was working on with Donna Godchaux. I actually I played that song on the piano and she sang along. She just scat sang. There weren't any lyrics to it. We recorded a Front Street. It was very melodic. Then we used it on the soundtrack, and then I gave those changes to Hunter, and he put put the lyrics to Catalina to it. And that's that's how we found Judge. The Catalina One-Word Judge Audition Story xian You had a talent search or something, didn't you? Greg It was unintentionally like that. The word got out that Hunter was writing lyrics for us and a lot of people thought they were the person to sing them and wanted the gig. Martín knew this guy, Judge, and called me up one day. He said "Hey man, I've got this guy that's got a set of pipes. You've got to hear this guy's voice," and I said, "Forget it, man." I said, "I have had singers coming out of my ears. I'm taking a break. No more auditions, no more, not right now." I was really burning out on it because it was a lot of people. So naturally, Martín being the way he is, he just shows up at my house with this guy. I'm sitting at the piano. I've just come from Hunter's house and I have this little shred of paper: a song with one word, basically. Martín walks in with this guy, and he goes, "Hey, Greg, you gotta hear this guy sing, man. Give him something to sing to." So I was kind of pissed off and said, "OK, wise guy. You want to sing? Here's a song that's got one word. Let's hear you make it a song." The guy goes, "Cat-alina!" and I practically fell over backwards! It was so strong when he sang that word, and I said, "Wow, you just made one word into a song!" As it turned out, it's one of the band's very favorite songs. xian It's kind of a signature tune, I think. Greg Yeah. What about the "More Instrumentals" Crowd? xian There's been a little bit of discussion on the mailing list. From some people who've been seeing the band a long time one of the regular complaints is that they want more instrumentals. They want to hear the old stuff. They take pains not to blame Judge, know, but they sort of focus on him as the guy singing the lyrics. Greg My experience of it is different. I'm always surprised to hear that comment, because we do so much playing. We play Home on the Range, which has a whole bunch of words, and no matter how many words there are in the song, we still play four times as long. We do all the lyrics, we do this gigantic long jam, and then maybe come back to the lyrics, depending on the song. There's so much playing on almost all of our vocal tunes. there's so much instrumentation built around the lyrics. When we play Pits of Thunder, there's so much playing in that, and then eventually we repeat the last verse to close the song. We do that every time. But sometimes we really stretch out, some times more than other times. xian I've noticed that. They've put some sound clips up on the Zero web site, some snippets from the album but also some live cuts so people can compare, and I listened to the Pits of Thunder, which is under five minutes on the album, right? It's very concise, though it still has that wide open groove. There's a live version from somewhere on the web site that's about 15 minutes long. Greg Really? xian And about five minutes into it, it's still the drum solo to introduce the song! So right there you could fit the album track three times into that live version of it. Greg So for people who say, "more instrumentals," that song is as long as any regular band's instrumental song would be. There's as much jamming on it. RH It wouldn't be the Net if people didn't take contrary views to what you've decided to present to them. Greg I personally like some of the concise songs, like Horses. We do a sax solo in the middle, and we do a guitar solo outro, but it's fairly brief. It's just presented as a song, as a ballad. I love playing that song, I love playing Catalina, I love playing Roll Me Over. I like playing ballads, on the drums, and I like the words, and I love listening to them. As many times as I've heard them I still like listening to them. Nancy Germany, take two (The Burning Question) xian Let me see if I can get back to just one stupid question, but it's just something that has plagued me, and it's Nancy Germany. The title of that song is Theme from Nancy Germany? Greg Yeah.