The highly idiosyncratic yet surprisingly catchy experimental rock band Deerhoof has been called "one of the most original rock bands to have come along in the last decade." And that's not coming from some dude's blog, that's the New York Times talking. Yet though they've been around since the early '90s, describing their music is still vexing, so we'll kindly refer you to their website, where YouTube clips abound. It's also in your best interest to attend their free performance this Friday night at the Prospect Park band shell, that is if you like your summer nights spiced up by unpredictable sounds.
Part of Celebrate Brooklyn and the Wordless Music Series, Deerhoof will be playing on a double bill with Metropolis Ensemble, who'll re-conceptualize Stravinsky’s monumental The Rite of Spring through "the lens of the latest sounds and technology from electronica." We recently spoke with Deerhoof percussionist Greg Saunier about the gig, his band's forthcoming album Offend Maggie, and his dainty drum kit.
You recently played with The Roots, right? Oh yeah, about a month or two ago in Philadelphia. That was really fun. Normally the way a band gets invited to play at a concert is the person in charge contacts their booking agent and then their booking agent tells their secretary who contacts your booking agent and then eventually a one sentence email asking if the band is interested will eventually make it to you. In this case, we got a letter in the mail signed by ?uestlove. It was a full page, philosophical letter describing what he wanted this concert to be like. The whole way it was presented to us was completely unusual and, frankly, seemed a little over the top to me. But of course we said yes; we’d played with The Roots before and seen them so many times. They’re such a great band and a big inspiration to us over so many years.
But the crazy thing that happened was that once the day was actually here and we were playing the concert and every band was in a different style and the audience seemed to be getting into it and all these different musicians were hanging out backstage talking about music – it all actually turned out the way ?uestlove described it in his letter! It wasn’t over the top, it wasn’t overblown; a magician like that can really make things come true. It was a magical day. And The Roots themselves were – I mean, they played three times that day! And the last set they did was maybe an hour and a half long in typical Roots fashion: one long medley with no breaks at all and totally relentless energy that just seemed to increase as it went along. It was really, really amazing.
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings played – I’d never seen them before – and they made a big impression. When we play we have a tendency to be a little bit spastic. We get onstage and we get a little excited, maybe because of adrenaline or something. And it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been playing a song a certain way, as soon as we get in front of people it’s twice as fast and twice as loud. There was something about seeing the Dap Kings play that was really kind of devastating to watch because they were so disciplined and every person played so quietly but the overall effect was so powerful and driving and so intense that it was like going to school or something that day. It was amazing.
Speaking of your live show, what is happening at Prospect Park Friday? [Laughs.] What is happening? It’s a free show in the park. Most of my friends that have families and stuff who always make excuses about how they can’t come see my show because we come on at midnight or something – they have no excuses this time. It’s free and kids are allowed. We’re going to play in the band shell and then the Metropolis Ensemble is going to play in the band shell. They’re doing their own new arrangement of the piece Igor Stravinsky is most famous for writing, The Rite of Spring. I don’t know what to expect from that. I’ve always loved this sort of much-maligned musical sub-genre of classical covers, where people who aren’t necessarily traditional classical musicians end up doing their version of an old favorite
And The Rite of Spring is a piece that actually has been arranged for different kinds of groups so many times; even Staravinsky himself made a bunch of different arrangements. The piece was originally for large orchestra and then at some point I think his copyright ran out so he went and changed it so that he could renew his copyright and still get income from it. But he also made a version for two pianos, and he made a version for one piano and two hands. Since then I’ve heard rock bands make versions of it; I can’t wait to see what the Metropolis Ensemble has come up with but I don’t have the slightest idea what it’s going to be.
The email I got said you guys were going to ‘offend Brooklyn,’ which I assume is a reference to your forthcoming album Offend Maggie. I thought it meant you were going to be playing strictly songs off the new album. [Laughs] I never said we would offend Brooklyn; I don’t know who came up with that. We’re going to play new songs and old songs because we have time for both. But it is kind of fun to play new songs actually. We’ve already played them a little bit; we just came back from Japan. And on tour there we played a few of our new songs and in a way it’s very scary because it’s sort of like the real test. If it seems like people are liking it then it’s not because it was familiar to them. It’s purely because they like it in that moment. And of course, if the audience suddenly goes dead you think, “Hm, maybe this wasn’t such a good song after all.” So it is like putting it under the guillotine.
I remember when we were playing in Nagoya, which is maybe the fourth biggest city in Japan and where they make Toyotas. We were playing there and I had this incredible experience where we were onstage playing this one new song of ours that’s called Basketball Get Your Groove Back. And about halfway though the song I looked up from the drums – which I occasionally do – and remembered that there were people there and I looked out at the audience and saw people singing along! [Laughs.] I’m like – wait a second, how is this possible? Nobody’s heard this song! Did the album already leak? How were they able to study this beforehand.
So I went up to this person I saw mouthing the words completely in rhythm and completely accurately during the concert and I asked her, “How did you know this song? What’s going on?” She said she’d never heard it before, it was just really easy to learn, so when she heard the first verse she’d already had it by the time the second verse came around.
Speaking of your drum kit, it seems really tiny from the audience. Is that an optical illusion? [Laughs.] No, I’m actually twelve feet tall. I suppose my drum set is kind of small because it doesn’t have very many parts in it. You mentioned The Roots earlier and that choice was largely an inspiration from ?uestlove again, from when Satomi and I went to see The Roots maybe ten years ago. I saw the drummer back there playing a pretty stripped down drum set and yet it seemed like he was sort of the star of the show, even at that time. Of course since then he’s a legend everybody knows. But he and I have joked around a little bit since then because his drum set has gotten bigger over the years as he’s become more famous. But right around that time I was thinking to myself that I wanted to take pieces away from my own drums and try to make it smaller, so when I saw him playing such a small set that it made me feel okay with it.
What’s the motivation for that? I think for me it’s almost like it forces me to have to be a little more creative, I think. Because, you know, if you have a lot of different sounds at your disposal, then any time your music is getting boring you can hit one of the new sounds. “Oh, I’ll just rake my drumstick across this bell tree here.” You know, “I’ll pull out the gong and bash that for a while.” So it makes me have to try and think of some interesting idea to play or make some interesting statement with the drums even if I don’t have a lot of sound effects. I don’t know. It’s actually a little hard to explain. I’m not sure why I like it… I guess part of me deep down thinks that our music is actually really simple and it’s meant to be simple and it’s meant to be easy to play. And easy to cover. And it doesn’t require anything special or any unusual equipment to play Deerhoof songs.
Before you release the new album fans will be able to download not a song but a musical score to one of the songs. And then they’re invited to record their own versions? Yeah, I think we’ve figured out what song we’re going to that for. The problem right now is I’m trying to decide whether to write the score normally or do it in guitar tabs or both. Or if I should write it out by hand or find some computer program and make it all nice and neat. What do you think I should do?
Do it with drawings. [Laughs.] That’d be funny but then it wouldn’t sound anything like the song.
Where did you get the idea to do this and turn it over to people? In a way it relates to what I was saying a minute ago. I think that our songs aren’t necessarily so hard to play and I thought that maybe it would be fun, you know? Nowadays everybody at record labels is freaking out about leaking all the time. And sometimes bands will leak them on purpose as a promotional tool. And I was thinking we could leak one on purpose, but just leak the composition. So if anyone does participate there will be these versions on the website before the album comes out so you’ll already know the song if you listen to those. So I think it was kind of a funny way of getting to know the song without hearing the album. We’ll see what happens. Maybe nobody will send in any versions or maybe I’m wrong and our songs are really hard to play! In that case our website will just be a big empty black screen. But we’ll see – it’s a hypothesis with no evidence to support it!
Photo courtesy Daisuke Shimote
