San Francisco band Vetiver's latest album, consisting entirely of hand-selected covers, Thing of the Past, will be released today, May 13!  I spoke to frontman Andy Cabic about the recording of the album, the frustration of his first guitar, and his new obsession with the mushrooms in his backyard.


M.E:  What is your first musical memory?

Andy Cabic:  I have an odd memory of a large sunlit room with light hardwood floors, very reflective and bright, and a there being a step in front of me, and as I'm crawling towards it, Buddy Holly's "That'll Be The Day" is playing.  I grew up listening to a lot of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and stuff like that, so...it's possible this was an early apartment of my parents’ or something, I'm not really sure.  It's one of those weird memories that feels like a dream and I'm not really certain of anything solid about it except for its strength in my mind and how vivid the light and the scene are when I remember it.
 
M.E:  What was the first record that really blew your mind and made you think about making music your life?  What albums formed your young musical mind?

Well, I don't know that any one record made me come to a decision to make music my life.  I just sort of played music, and looked back one day and realized music had become my life and there wasn't a whole lot else I seemed able to do.  Whoops!

Joel Gion is quite the musical renaissance man.  In addition to working amongst piles of vinyl and CDs and obsessing over fine cinema and its soundtracks, he also finds time to front his own popular band, The Dilettantes, while intermittently doing time in his old band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre.  BJM was recently the subject of a feature documentary entitled Dig, which enabled fans to get up close and personal with one of the most riotous, chaotic groups of all time.  The film comes highly recommended by this blogger.  Joel will be touring with BJM this summer, and continues to gig regularly with The Dilettantes in support of their album 101 Tambourines.  More info in the conversation that follows:

ME:  What was the first record that really blew your hair back when you were a kid and made you start to really get into music?

David Crosby has a well-earned reputation for being an angelic-faced bad boy, a drug addicted ego freak. His work throughout the 60s and early 70s was mostly within the confines of The Byrds or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. There is one record though, that to me is the standout among all the work of both of those bands, and it technically belongs to Crosby alone.
Crosby's first solo record, If I Could Only Remember My Name, as far as I am concerned, is one of the best albums ever made. It's an oddity for sure, and it seems miraculous that it was ever made. The album was recorded in San Francisco's Tenderloin in 1970/71. Sonically it's pure Cros-- heavy on the mystical harmonies, musically meandering all over the place-- but it also has guest appearances by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, and Jorma Kaukonen, among many others. One of the best parts about the record is laying back, letting the sound float around you and then hearing intermittent vocals from Joni and Neil washing in and out of different songs. Though this is a solo album, the feeling of the record is often one of hazy collaboration, of seamless blending toward a greater vision. Someone needs to write a book about these recording sessions, if anyone can remember them!

The title just seems so fittingly Crosby! It always kind of cracks me up. The early 70s were a particularly drug-addled period for him. I recently read that he was referring to reincarnation with the title, not general confusion...but if you listen closely to the lyrics they seem to often reference being overwhelmed by city life, distrust and paranoia. All of this is presented in gorgeous, hooky tracks, so you could easily miss some of the more heavy themes. On the positive side of the lyrics, there are tracks like the beautiful and hippy-ish "Music Is Love." Check out this awesome performance of "Traction in the Rain" by Crosby and Graham Nash. This was on the BBC before the record was even recorded.

My friend Sara gave me a homemade tape once years ago. She didn't really tell me much about what it was, just that she and her oldest friends loved it, and that it would cheer me up.  (Musta been feeling down that day.)

I immediately played the tape in my car and it was one of those touchstone experiences music provides that I'll never forget: a feeling of total harmony came over me. The music sounded bizarre, unlike anything I'd really heard before and yet at the same time I felt I had already heard it a thousand times, like it had always been a part of me. I found myself humming along to something I had only just popped into my tape deck.

The music the lovely Miss Sara provided me with was that now-mythic album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. At the time it was a total question mark to me.  Who in the heck made this?  And how?  I would ponder as I drove.  That tape became my constant companion, and I loved the music more and more fervently.  It sounded like it had come from Mars.  Totally otherworldly.  My imagination ran wild, and I was completely absorbed in picturing the room where this record was created, and what in the world the person who made it was thinking, how it came to be.

These were the days when not every person on the planet had the internet, and I didn't know anyone who could tell me much about Neutral Milk Hotel at the time.  The album seemed like it had been created out of time, and I struggled to learn anything about the people who created it.

If you are a gigantic music fan, you've probably already listened to and absorbed Jimi Hendrix' music to the point where you might think you never ever need to hear it again.  I know the feeling-- when I was in high school Jimi was one of the primary artists I listened to, over and over and over again to the point of oblivion.

So to you, the jaded, I say, hold up!  Just when you think you've seen and heard everything (and maybe you have, but this was new to me...), here comes the fairly recent reissue of the 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix, which was directed by Joe Boyd, John Head III and Gary Weis.  I read about it in Joe Boyd's White Bicycles, and finally got my hands on a copy of the movie. 

Producer extraordinaire Joe Boyd was heartbroken by the bumps that came along with putting together this film.  One thing he was dead on about, and what really makes this film compelling above all others about Hendrix, is that the interviews were conducted only 3 years after Hendrix' death, and both his contradictory and brilliant presence and the awe he inspired in his fellow musicians is extremely palpable.  Heck, you can see it written all over Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend's still-freaked-out faces! 


Roadies and managers are also interviewed, folks I had never seen in other documentaries.  Their memories are fresh:  a roadie recalls having to stand behind the amps and hold them up while Jimi humped and flailed away on the front of the Marshall stack; a manager remembers landing in London in 1970 to a pack of paparazzi and moving aside, only to have his arm firmly grabbed by still-shy Jimi, who didn't want to be left alone with the press.