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Are you excited about having another kid? As busy as you are, I don't know how you found the time to stop and breed.
Well, there was that one time last summer! I'm overwhelmed, to tell you the truth. I love the way the other two came out (daughter Patsy, by his first marriage, and three-year old son Luka), so I'm pretty excited. But now the workload ... you'll never be able to say, "I can't do it. I want to take some time off.— It would be good to take time off for the family, but then if I can fit in a quick show—I'm already setting up these shows for before and after the birth in Europe. We're going to Denmark to stay with Sofie's mom to have the baby, for the duration of the summer. That's why we're doing this addition on the house. The kids will wind up getting my music room I guess, which is kind of ironic because one reason I bought the house is because the room sounded so good!
Let's talk about the current tour. You ain't gonna get rich taking a seven-piece band out on tour.
Oh. OK. Here's the deal. We roll the coin over from tours, so John, Joey and myself don't make any money from Giant Sand gigs. We throw any coin we make back into the band, and I get to make that call because of my "honcho" status. That being said, they make their living off their other gig, and I make mine solo, and we both do pretty good by that now. So we just make sure everybody else gets their coin when they tour with the band, and we spend the rest of the money on logistics. You can talk to John or Joey about their own reasons. Mine stem from this odd, elaborate slicing of freedom that seem to occur more now than ever.
So that was part of the tension that was lurking in the background for you guys for awhile?
In the beginning, I was hampered, then, by the rudiments of rudeness dealt from obsession on Joey's part: "OK, I got something else to go by now, and I can just leave all this shit behind and I'm out of here." I thought that his tact was in need of a buttkicking, the way you would a younger brother and who you know inside and out! Things just didn't need to be so sloppy. But on the upswing, it always felt like a family and you could get away with those notions and responditures because of how tight everybody really is, and how you can call each other on your shit. The biggest, ah, crunkle, was agenda clashings; that was then, and now, things have been worked out to a point where they're better than they've ever been.
Did you guys sit down and have heart-to-hearts, or did it just work out naturally?
See, you got John-speak, and you got Howe-speak, and then you got Joey, who pretty much didn't speak. All that has been rectified and now there's a brand-new Webster's book of Giant Sand terminology. [laughs] We all kind of understand now more than ever that it was a good rerouting of the word and a tuning of the engines that seem to have run the machine for so long.
I've talked to you about these tensions before. It sounds like that age-old cliché: a failure to communicate.
Yep. And not enough time given to rectify. But also, my stance comes from an elder figure, 10 years the senior, very much the little-brother/older-brother syndrome.
Let me play devil's advocate here: The last year or so you've gotten a lot of good, extensive press, especially in overseas magazines. But before that it seemed like it was Calexico getting all the attention. Did this kind of balance the scales for you, ego-wise?
You know, all that stuff never mattered much. It's always just a side effect. Any form of fame is just a side effect to the workload here. So it's always somewhat entertaining and educational.
Maybe not so much fame, then, but more an extended chorus of people in the press saying, "Hey man, I like what you're doing." I remember how before Chore Of Enchantment came out, there was a long gap.
But that's because I was totally tethered to the V2 contract and couldn't do anything else. When we set up that contract, we did it in such a way that John and Joey were free from it. They used the time to gain momentum with Spoke/Calexico. And I was completely vexed with the V2 agenda. Then when (guitarist) Rainer (Ptacek) went down, things got unforeseeably bleak. To turn around and lean on the inner circle for support—they were just gone, John and Joey.
That's how things got so hard around Chore. And they ended up with it being probably the best record I've ever been a part of—but me not wanting to do another record like that. That's why this new record—which was the first time we'd gotten together in the studio in a long time—was to see if we could still have some fun doing it or if we should just retire the whole episode. That's why the covers started jumping out. That wasn't foreseen. I started throwing out a couple of covers for fun.
I recall you calling me up needing a tape or CD-R of Sabbath's "Iron Man."
Yeah, exactly. You were there when it was starting. And we just had a good time playing.
There's some twisted stuff on the new record, some of the funniest things that have ever come out of your mouth as well.
Yeah. "Man's got no corpuscle." That's evidence to what kind of stuff still lies there in the camp and is there to be mined if we choosed to keep picking at it. See, the thing had to be Chore-less this time around.
You mean along the lines of "this is my personal vision that informs the songs I have written, blah blah blah"? Taking that pressure off by doing other people's material?
Yeah. It's more of a responsibility when you're the writer and you're recording something you've written and you know that up until you mail the tape off you can change anything you've written. That's always sticking at you. It's why Friends Of Dean Martinez ever happened within the band. I wanted to get away from it more and I wanted someone else to carry the load and I could be just a player. That's kind of what happened with this record, because not being a writer of the songs I could step back as just a player and applicate myself, the way John and Joey did, all equaled up again and having more fun playing.
How many takes or rehearsals for the stuff on this album?
There weren't! A few of them we'd been doing on the road, so we were bringing them back up to see what they could do for us. As it stands right now, if this was the last record we ever do—that's why it was called Retirement—and it could be, and regardless of what anybody thinks or says, it is the last record. Because there is no "other" record unless you're lying to yourself about your future; all you know is what you've got, and this is the "last" record. So if you celebrate that moment, it is a form of retirement and it's a great freedom. This place called Giant Sand has become this place of desire more than a place of necessity where we needed it to stay alive and eat and make an income for us all to survive. Now, since we do that with our other endeavors, it's become this place we don't have to be anymore but for some reason we keep going back to. I think that has to do with our evolution as players; that be-bop mentality where we have to change things every night as if we were playing the same place every night with the same people coming every night. We ARE the same people, so we change things accordingly.
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