moe. returns to the stage this weekend at the Magnolia Music Festival as a prelude to the group’s extensive fall tour. So we’ve dipped into the archives for this April-May 2003 feature on the group by Executive Editor Dean Budnick.

Gather around everybody, moe. guitarist Al Schnier is about to invoke the J word.

In explaining why the band opted to record its new release Wormwood as it did, building a studio album from live tracks, he notes, “One of the reasons we did it this way is we’re a jamband and jambands have been plagued when putting out studio albums. I think both Dither and Tin Cans are great studio albums but do they capture the essence of a jamband? Definitely not. There are a few cuts here and there that capture that spirit but you could listen to those albums and not guess we’re a jamband.”

This is bold talk. Not just in characterizing the band’s previous two studio discs as great (very, very good might well suffice) but also in self-identifying moe. as a jamband. To this end, the group is willing to acknowledge what others are not. The term is anathema to some of moe.’s peers, in part because of the reaction it often elicits from the uninitiated. Indeed, one notable group made a point of accompanying its last studio album with press materials explaining that it was not a jamband.

The thing is, Schnier’s right. moe. fits the bill. Perhaps more significantly, moe. was a jamband before such a term even existed, and on top of that, it had a role in defining the term by pursuing a path and creating an aesthetic. And Wormwood is a manifestation of moe.’s willingness to embrace its inner jamband.

Disparate Elements

It all goes back to Buffalo. Here, as the band coalesced in the early ‘90s, it drew on a variety of idioms for its live shows. Nowadays many young groups in the jamband scene feel a palpable pressure to incorporate a range of styles, to move glibly from blues to bluegrass to electronica. moe.‘s sound, however, developed in the absence of such framework, as the group gravitated towards Buffalo’s alternative/punk realm.

Bassist Rob Derhak remembers, “We liked to play ska and funk music and we opened up for bands like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. But at the same time we liked classic rock, so it was a weird combination. We didn’t have horns but we wanted to do ska tunes and we wanted to do guitar solos over them. That was where we were coming from – a ska/funk-based jam-sort-of-band with the attitude of punkers.”

The group negotiated this expanse in part because it approached its music rather casually. “At the time,” Schnier recalls, “this is what we did on the weekends. This is what all our friends did; everybody played in a band. It was the equivalent of working on your motorcycle or having a muscle car. It was our hobby, we were all into it and that was cool. The bands we played with were everything from honky-tonk Americana to straight-up punk bands and we all just played together and it worked. That guided what we were doing.”

Indeed, moe. caught on almost in spite of itself. The group’s animated live shows featured mostly original material that fused styles with a stagger and swagger along with an increasing improvisational component. Schnier had done his share of Dead shows so he was comfortable with this approach, although the band also extended its arrangements for a pragmatic purpose: Buffalo bars stayed open until 4am and moe. needed to fill three hours with music. Jim Loughlin, who played drums with the group from 1992-1995 (and later rejoined in 1999) remarks, “In the beginning, most of the jams were more percussively oriented. The first one we stretched out was ‘Dr. Graffenberg,’ which was essentially a ska song and in the middle we had a section with a fun groove and then it would pick up for a skanky guitar jam. But it wasn’t a very melodic solo; it was more percussive because no one was as proficient on their instruments as they are now.” Indeed, during these first few years, moe. did not gain renown for its improv, and area residents who wanted to see jam rock frequented the Dead cover band Sonic Garden, whose lineup then included current moe. drummer Vinnie Amico.

moe. began to draw in a new constituency following a 1992 Halloween gig with Sonic Garden at Buffalo’s Broadway’s Joe’s. The band’s local following soon paralleled the national fan base of the Meat Puppets (another influence from this era) who had started to draw hippies and punkers alike after the release of Up On the Sun (1985). Guitarist Chuck Garvey raves, “They were punk and country and complete crazed psychedelic freaks. You could tell they were eating peyote and making crazy punk music. That’s awesome to me; they were absorbing a lot and kind of directing this beam. I love bands that take disparate elements and make something really cool out of them.”

Different clothes (some fit, some don’t)

More than a decade later such musical pluralism also remains a moe. hallmark. The group further embodied this on its winter 2003 tour by dropping in new cover tunes each night. This practice evolved from Schnier’s suggestion the previous fall that the group learn all the songs on the first Cars album and play a different one at every show ( “We ended up playing [Tori Amos’] ‘Cornflake Girl’ instead, that’s how things happen.” ).The artists whose music the band interpreted during its four weeks of shows in January and February ranged from Sublime ( “What I Got” ) to Tammy Wynette ( “Stand By Your Man” ) to Radiohead ( “Karma Police” ) to the Eagles ( “Hotel California,” in Los Angeles after Garvey’s “West LA Fadeaway” suggestion was tabled) to the Flaming Lips ( “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (part I)” ). The group is particularly proud of the Radiohead and Lips covers, two bands whose singular sounds elicit encomiums from the band.

The arrangements varied. Some, such as “Yoshimi” and “Karma Police,” remained faithful ( “It’s real fun to try on those clothes for a little while and make believe we’re in a different band or something,” Garvey relates. “Out-of-band-experience is always fun, it’s like kinky role-playing.” ). Others, such as “Stand By Your Man” or the Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” were looser attempts to evoke the essence of the songs. One or two others fell apart on stage nearly to the point of impiety, such as Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son.” This composition, picked in part for its location (much like Nirvana’s “All Apologies” or Hendrix’s “Manic Depression,” both of which moe. covered in Seattle) was a challenge to learn at soundcheck. “Rob didn’t want to do it,” Garvey explains, “because there are a lot of lyrics and a lot of sections but we felt the moment would be lost once you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

This of course is the kind of joke the band appreciates. Indeed, another of moe.‘s defining traits is its humor, typically a self-aware chop-busting sarcasm that bridges the gap between band and fan as audience members correctly surmise that the banter on stage mirrors the group’s badinage off it. Drummer Vinnie Amico still signs autographs as “#5,” a throwback to the days when he first joined moe. as its fifth drummer in 1996 and the band repeatedly identified him solely by number. And then there’s “Bullet,” a Garvey song off Wormwood more commonly known as “Assfinger.” He reveals, “I wrote the song and I was having trouble coming up with a title. There was an incident where someone had a romantic rendezvous in a semi-public area and the details involved some strange romantic maneuvers, so we were calling this person Assfinger. One night we finished the song, everyone applauded and Rob walked up to the mike and said, ‘The name of that song is ‘Assfinger’, ha ha.’ Well the next night there were a bunch of dudes down front screaming for ‘Assfinger’ and of course within the moe. camp it caught on like wildfire, much to my dismay. At that point I couldn’t even think of a new title for it because no one would listen to me anyway. It’s like getting a nickname – you can’t choose your own. So the song was nicknamed and it stuck and it was a bummer. But for the record, I prefer to call it ‘Bullet.’” Indeed.

Back to the covers; not only did they offer an increasing contingent of touring moe.rons a certain taste of something new every night but they provided the band with an opportunity to examine these enduring compositions. This has long been an area of interest and emphasis, as the band honed its compositional skills apace with its improvisational development. It was a direct result of moe.‘s song craft that the group signed with Sony’s 550 Music in 1996, becoming one of the jamband scene’s earliest emissaries to the mainstream. It was not a comfortable fit.

As with many young bands, the major label deal provided an immediate sense of legitimacy. But when asked how long it took for disillusionment to set in, Derhak snorts, “About ten minutes… I remember going to dinner with our A & R guy and everything seemed cool to me and then when we were walking back to Sony he took Al aside to tell him how he wanted the album to go. I looked back and realized how uncomfortable Al was with the conversation. When I found out what he had said, I thought it was bizarre, first that he was singling out someone when everything was completely democratic and also him telling us how he wanted it to go and not asking us how we wanted it to go. That was when he grew horns.” Over the next few years the band never quite seemed in accord with Sony, on issues from picking an initial song for 550 to get behind (the label pushed for “Guitar” which moe. began working on in the studio but ultimately scrapped though it ended up appearing on Schnier’s alt-country Transamericans album seven years later) to the word “fucking” in “Plane Crash” (Sony wanted the band to record an alternate version without the expletive or remix the lyric hip-hop style, playing it backwards but the band demurred). Despite two well-received discs (No Doy and especially Tin Cans and Car Tires ) the band never achieved the label’s artistic goals (defined rather narrowly as mid-six figure sales) and Sony dropped its option on the group.

It was during this era that the band also experienced some frustration with the limitations imposed by the jamband tag. Schnier looks back: “We did have other aspirations or at least believed we could branch out and step outside of this scene. After you beat your head against the wall enough times though, you’re like, okay my head hurts. Especially with Sony, we were not catering to the mainstream but we really believed that we could be a part of it. In the end we came to the conclusion that the mainstream is not ready for jambands. I think lot of it has to do with the coolness factor, the perception of it. The fact of the matter is we probably have a bigger scene than the electronica scene, it’s just not as fashionable. We’re not wearing clothes that are as nice or as cool and maybe that’s what it is, maybe we better start dressing better.”

One can understand how, on some level, this concern may have been a distraction to the band, and by the end of this period, some felt moe. sounded a bit stale and wondered if it had plateaued. The group recognized this criticism and worked to reinvigorate its live shows. One response was the return of Jim Loughlin who added zest on a range of percussion instruments (plus flute and acoustic guitar), a move which also led the band to reassess its songs (Amico’s addition in 1996 had the same effect, as his background with Dead material improved the flow of the improv. After Loughlin reentered the mix, Vinnie began to play “a little less and less is usually better. The two of us together have a solid, heavy-duty groove that’s deeper than one of us playing a little more.” ). Along with this came a renewed focus on segues, as Schnier explains: “Nothing irks me more than when you can tell that a band just stopped playing one song and then started playing another without really pulling it off. We’re trying to create a seamless web between songs, and sometimes it can take a long time to get from point A to point B but it’s a worthy excursion. Some of the most exciting moments of the night come out of that because it’s unscripted. It forces us into new territory.”

The Cure

This terrain extends to Wormwood. Again, as with the nightly covers idea (and frankly much within the moe. ambit) the band’s intentions shifted along the way. As an underlying principle the group acknowledged that its latest batch of songs had been written for the live setting as part of an effort to keep its shows vibrant to the extent that the group could not necessarily winnow down these compositions for a studio disc (as the band had done on its first post-Sony effort, Dither ). moe. initially thought it would create a road album of new material, akin to such celebrated efforts as the Dead’s Europe 72, and Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty. Then Derhak suggested that instead, the band should record its live performances and then use those basic tracks as building blocks (an approach employed to a lesser degree on the Dead’s Anthem of the Sun or Frank Zappa’s Shut Up ‘n’ Play Yer Guitar ). The band would also incorporate some of the music that it improvised in concert to carry it from one song to another. So the bass player “made up a flow chart with three basic songs in the middle and fifteen to twenty songs circling around it on this giant piece on paper with several ways to segue into another. From there I worked up set lists where we could take chunks from each set and put them together with chunks from other sets. It sounds insane.”

The band implemented the chart over two weeks of shows during the summer of 2002. The drum tracks served as fundament, a situation that Amico found to be “very similar to being in the studio in that I have to nail my tracks anyway; there was just a little more pressure to nail it live.” Beyond that, the band needed to exert some control to develop an inventive segue and yet recognize when it was time to drop out a beat and move on to the song. The band met the challenge of balancing creative freedom and restraint before a responsive live audience (a wildcard factor in its own right) as all but one segue on Wormwood comes from the live tracking.

At the end of the tour, moe. entered the studio only to discover that this was a classic case of not knowing how much it didn’t know. The band spent the first days simply storing files on the computer, an unanticipated, time-consuming predicate to the project. Then the individual musicians came in to lay down ideas, with another member always present for “moral support or abuse or just to have a different set of ears to say that might sound like it works but in the grand scheme of things, is it going to jibe with everything that has to come after it? It was a building process.” This course was complicated further by Derhak’s charge that "every song and every segue feel like its own track, unlike a live album where you may hit a song that was obviously coming out of another song. I wanted the whole album to be continuous and have a feel that is tied together but at the same time not have any one song or section sound like it’s lacking something.

Wormwood mostly satisfies Derhak’s standard. Some of the tracks do feel a bit like interstitial material, with others, like “Wormwood” or “Bend Sinister” developed a bit further. Still, the disc as a whole has an absorbing, ebullient vibe to it and perhaps above all else it does indeed flow, which is rather impressive given the fact the individual songs draw from the wide swath of genres that continue to exhilarate the band. Indeed, it occupies a liminal state, again fulfilling the bass player’s original intent: “I didn’t want to make a live album, all I wanted was somehow to steal the soul of a live show and put it on a studio album.”

The group was able to reach this achievement as a result of all that has come before, not only on the stage but also in the audience and within the domains of label execs, radio programmers and media critics. It enables Schnier to state with aplomb, “I think what we’ve done is come up with something that captures the essence of moe. and what we do live but places a new light on it, puts a studio spin on the whole thing and really bridges a gap. I think we’ve come up with a cure for the jamband studio album plague. There may be side effects though; you need to speak with your physician about this.”