Lobsterfest 2014: deerhoof
By Megan Fair, Copy Editor
Hard to press labels upon, unpredictable and wildly entertaining. These phrases hook together to describe the ongoing 20-year legacy of noise pop outfit deerhoof. The group’s DIY efforts and constant reinvention has garnered fans and praise from St. Vincent to the Flaming Lips. What a sweet miracle it is that deerhoof was willing to take the job of headliner for our annual Lobsterfest. What an even sweeter miracle it was that Greg Saunier of deerhoof gave ACRN over 30 jovial minutes of his day to talk about everything from the creative process to the art of making a tour great to the rejection of the status quo.
Deerhoof has been a band for 20 years, which is a very impressive career. Has the creative process changed over the years?
Greg Saunier: The creative process seems to expand so that...when we were first starting, it feels a bit like you can barely do anything. You can barely figure out how to do anything, because we were doing everything ourselves. We were writing and playing it, but also recording it. We didn’t have anything besides a four-track cassette machine and [laughs] a microphone my bandmate got at a garage sale and like some broken Walkmen headphones. Which, if you plugged that into a four-track it sort of worked as a microphone.
We were on really really low status as far as our equipment collection, and you know, just starting, just getting to know each other. Realizing that, ‘Wait, I was really into the Rolling Stones, but he was really into Pink Floyd, is this really gonna work? We don’t like any of the same stuff.’ He had like duct tape in his hair as a fashion thing he was doing, and so we were hard pressed to even finish a song. It felt so scattered and new, exciting! But not very controlled.
If we found something we agreed on, we felt very lucky and we stuck on that. Over the years, it’s gotten to where the creative process...it’s in constant motion. So, after many years of doing the band, the band became more bold or risky as far as what kind of creative ideas we might try, we might entertain. In the early days, you know, I might not have suggested a piano ballad, or we might not have done something where Satomi [Matsuzaki] drums for a song, or we might not have attempted an 11-minute song. And I feel like now, there’s no telling what kind of song might appear.
All three of my bandmates and I are writing or coming up with ideas for songs all the time. They’re often pretty surprising; I think over the years they get more surprising. Everybody’s got a little bit more nerve to show some idea that at first they thought ‘Well, this doesn’t really fit in deerhoof, this isn’t quite indie rock’ but now it’s like nobody cares anymore and they just show the idea. Often those are the ones they like the best and we end up doing.
How about the band dynamics?
GS: The band dynamic has definitely gotten better, more relaxed with each other. It’s like, when you make mistakes, in a band or any kind of group of people, it also sort of breaks the ice. If me and one of my bandmates have some really silly argument over something--and this can easily happen when you’re on a long tour and you’re into the third week and it’s like the way that person drinks water is ruining your life [laughs]--then you make a fool of yourself and have some fight about it, and later you can laugh about how silly it was and it’s another thing you’ve learned about each other and experienced with each other that you’re not afraid of anymore.
I really feel quite lucky; this particular bunch has been so willing, even when we’ve had disagreements or we’ve had things that made it seem like it was just too hard to keep going or to make another record or have to do another tour, be with each other for 24 hours a day for weeks. We just go through and one by one solve every little problem we feel that we’ve been having. In a way I am kind of proud that we’ve held it together for 20 years, because in 20 years there’s a lot of chances when, if somebody gets fed up, they could want to give up on it.
I think we’re having more fun now than we’ve ever had. We just got back from a European tour, and I think it was deerhoof’s best tour yet. We just feel totally wild on stage, and we laugh a lot when we’re around each other, particularly when we’re playing because everyone is so funny.
If you’re in a band, and you’re young, I’d recommend that you don’t give up [laughs]. 21 years, I have no idea! Past that point, it might be a total bust, but I must say year 20 has been the best year yet.
You’ve received a great deal of praise and attention from NPR to VH1 to the New York Times--
GS: And ACRN! Let’s not forget. This is extremely proud! The pièce de resistance, the cherry on top!
I’d like to think so!
GS: [Laughs heartily]
When you’re receiving that much attention, do you feel any pressure as you approach new albums? How do you feel about it?
GS: That’s a really good question! You make it sound like we’re, uh...I don’t know who else wins awards. You make it sound like we’re Meryl Streep or something, but the fact is, that if we’ve been getting praise, you’ve gotta remember how long of a time that’s been spread over. What you aren’t taking into account is there’s just as much criticism as there is praise, and the other 99 percent, and that’s all going to change after this article, but total indifference or no one’s ever heard of us.
[Laughs] When we go to the airport, like when we just flew to Europe, and Satomi walks up with her bass, ALWAYS the person at security is like ‘Oh! I play bass too!’ and wants to open it up and look at and ask ‘What kind of music do you play? What’s the name of your band?’ And we say the word ‘deerhoof’ and the conversation just grinds to a halt, their face turns to stone because they’ve never heard of us.
They look at us and just assume we’re famous because we have that air, we have swagger, we’ve got the look, but as a matter of fact, few among TSA have ever really heard of our band. However, that doesn’t reduce the pressure from TSA or really from anybody else when we’re recording an album.
It’s funny you should ask [laughs] because we just recorded right before this Europe tour. We all want to Portland to Ed’s house and were practicing in his basement for these tours, and we figured we’d try some new song ideas we’ve been thinking about, and we ended up recording everything. We just need to put the vocals on it and finish mixing it. That’s what this conversation is interrupting; [laughs] it’s like we spent a week and a half recording real casually, but the previous year at least was spent with the part we’re talking about, which is the pressure of it.
I don’t mean to complain. A lot of people thrive under pressure, and I think deerhoof does as well; it’s a kind of pressure you’re very grateful to have. It’s funny in our case; it’s not really a pressure to create something as great as our last record, or to live up to that hit we had in 2003, because we haven’t had any hits. Our fans actually like to be surprised, and that’s partly because they’re so awesome, but it’s partly our fault, because we made our records so different from each other. You can still tell it’s deerhoof, but in many ways they’re quite different from each other.
Once we’ve done that a few times, the expectation started to be that we change, that we do something surprising. That’s actually pretty fun, but it’s also--it took us a year of brainstorming ideas and emailing demos back and forth, and out of hundreds of ideas we were sending, we picked maybe 10 that would be something really new for us to try, something fun for us to try. The pressure can only take you so far, because that pressure really is, ‘Hey guys, do your thing! Go off into your own deerhoof universe and come up with something,’ [laughs] and really that has nothing to do, no offense, with music journalism or music analysis, or words even. It’s all about some mystery thing, that when you’re actually playing the music or making music, if you can explain it too much, it’s not as good, y’know? [Laughs]
Each member of your band is a multi-instrumentalist. Is that a decided decision to buck the status quo, or is it unconscious?
It’s not like we try to avoid anything. Sometimes what we’re doing is actually trying to emulate something, usually something trendy. Like ‘Oh! We should do a record like such and such band,’ but it always just comes out wrong. That’s why people assume we’re being experimental or trying to throw out the status quo, but the truth is we’re trying to discover a status quo that doesn’t exist, and sort of failing and no matter what, it comes out being uniquely us in the end any way.
Part of that is just having to be DIY all these years. There’s been hardly an outside voice, and our labels have never been much help either in terms of teaching us, ‘This is really what you’d wanna do if you want to get ahead, guys.’ We just end up having made all the decisions ourselves, so it just kind of turns out...you spend so much time on something that you can’t tell anymore, you can’t realize how much it reflects your own idiosyncrasies, I guess. I don’t realize until I’ll listen to one of our old records five years later, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, I get it now, I see why this is so us,’ while at the time all we were trying to do was escape us and do something different.
As a band that has toured a lot, where are the most fun shows to play?
It’s interesting in our case; I can’t really divide the world into places that are more fun and less fun and this is why: because when I’m on stage and I’m playing the drums and we’re going through our songs and I’m looking at the audience, I’ll see somebody singing long, I’ll see somebody else who has their eyes closed and they’re kind of dancing. I’ll see other people who are like, staring intently with this stern look on their face, I’ll see somebody walking out in the back [laughs]. I’ll see young people, old people. We don’t really have the uniform response.
I often don’t even have a response that I’d prefer, that I think is the right one. I think everyone, but maybe it’s just a little exaggerated in our case, hears the music differently from each other, and, like, Megan Fair might think it’s unlistenable noise [laughs], but someone else may think it’s the most saccharine pop melodies or something, but they’ll be talking about the same music.
I don’t feel like it’s our job to control other people’s response. I gave up on that a long time ago! [Laughs.] Now I think it’s pretty fun to realize how differently people can hear it.
At the same time, are there fun places? [Laughs] We just had a really good tour in Europe; I will tell you that the people coming to our shows on this tour will really have to bring their best to match the audiences we played in Europe. People knew their stuff, man. They knew the words, okay, the clapping part in this one song, and they were smiling and they were laughing, dancing, singing. I’ll just say, potentially the best place to tour is where we’re going on this tour.
Who has been the most fun to tour alongside?
You know, we’ve been lucky, we’ve had some really fun people to tour with. The Flaming Lips were incredibly fun, Wilco was fun, Radiohead was fun. Part of the reason they’re fun is that they understand that it is their responsibility to set the tone for what the tour is going to feel like. For instance, backstage, they kind of take responsibility for this traveling village, traveling circus. They could make it really fun or really miserable, and it’s really easy for tour to be either one.
And I feel like those bands really went out of their way to set a really special and fun tone on their tours. And that taught me a lot, actually. I was telling [Thom Yorke] how kind of tickled I was by the atmosphere and the personality of their whole touring group, all bazillion members of their crew were always real chatty and funny and always helping us when something of ours broke.
He said, “Well, you know R.E.M. took us out on tour and they really made us feel welcome, and they made the tour really fun, and I knew that someday, when it was Radiohead’s turn to headline a tour, that it would be our job to pass that along, set that tone."
So, I would like to think that the funnest people to tour with now are the members of deerhoof! [Laughs.] I like to think we were able to learn from the greats, and the bands that we’re bringing on this trip like Celestial Shore and Awkwafina--it becomes our job, because it’s nothing on the level of Radiohead, it’s the four of us in a rented van plus our one sound person, that’s it. We don’t have crew or caterers or guitar tech or this army of people to soften the blow of touring the way Radiohead did, but on our small scale, we think that it’s gonna be...it always is! We like bringing bands that haven’t toured very much or haven’t played some of the cities we’re going to play or haven’t played to an audience our size.
A lot of bands that have opened for us have actually soon after became more successful than us, and that’s fun to watch! They really enjoyed the tour and were inspired by it and kept it going and decided it was really something they wanted to pursue. That’s something I’ve felt good about.
