Dec/Jan Issue: Home | Editors | Features | Columns | Photos | Regional | New Groove Road Trip | Tour Journal | Venue | Levels | Ghosts | Homegrown | Inaudible | CDs | Charts

Al Goes Transamerican
by Dean Budnick - budnick@fas.harvard.edu

The Al & the Transamericans January 9 gig has been changed...
1/9/99 Joyous Lake - Woodstock, NY (Dana & Todd from The Ominous Seapods will open with an acoustic set.)

This is a rather busy time for moe. guitarist Al Schnier. Along with the band’s new album (which has been ubiquitous in our charts), Al is a first-time father (listen for his new composition “Blue-Eyed Son”) and is about to head out on a four city tour with his new project, Al and the Transamericans. Be sure to check them out:

January 6 Pontiac Grill, Philadelphia, PA
January 7 Wetlands, NYC
January 8 Middle East, Cambridge, MA
January 9, Joyous Lake, Woodstock, NY (note: This is a change from Valentines)

The following conversation began with some quality Transamerican talk but moved on through a series of topics including songwriting, the Captain & Tennille, Randy Rhoads, Bob Weir and of course the music of moe.

D- What can audience members expect when they come and see you play with the Transamericans?

A- It will be slightly different than moe. The music will be less chops-oriented and a bit more song-oriented. It will have more of a down-home feel to it.

D- What inspired you to put together this project?

A- Mostly the music I’ve been listening to lately. I could say it started twenty years ago when I started listening to Neil Young, Bob Dylan, people like that. But more recently in the last three or four years I’ve been listening to Son Volt, Wilco, Golden Smog...also a lot of bluegrass and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. I really have newfound appreciation for a simple song. Many of the songs we’ll play are timeless classics, just wonderful, with poignant lyrics over simple chord progressions. There’s a wealth of them out there and I wanted to have a chance to pay some of them.

D- Had you ever considered bringing any of these to play in moe.?

A- I have but we don’t really have time for cover songs, which is too bad because we have so many songs that we’d love to do, love to cover. But the way our schedule is, we aren’t really afforded the luxury of working on cover songs because we have so many unfinished moe. songs to get to. Cover songs take a backseat to the originals. The other problem is that in moe. when we try to play any song that is too specific to any one genre a lot of times it comes off sounding hokey. It sounds like four suburban white guys who shouldn’t be playing country songs or blues songs or shouldn’t be attempting jazz tunes. That’s why everything we do is a hybrid, amalgamation, completed morphed version of various styles of music. I think that’s how we developed our sound, by emulating styles and mining them and pairing them up in weird combinations.

D- Speaking of songwriting. I’m curious, on moe.’s Sony releases, all songs credit the lyricist and then the music is credited to the band collectively. How and why did you make the decision to do that?

A- Well that seems to be our m.o. these days. It makes life a lot easier. I think on Headseed we tried to determine who was responsible for writing certain songs. In a lot of cases it’s a no brainier. “St. Augustine” is Rob’s song, there’s no question about it. He came up with the chord progression and he wrote all of the words to it. A song like “Rebubula” on the other hand is a group effort, even though it started with a seed that Rob had come up with. In “Rebubula,” Chuck and I came up with so many of the guitar parts which are really central to that song. And the arrangement we all came up with together. So much of that one we all worked on, so it really would not be accurate to say that it was Rob’s song. Now “Akimbo,” for instance, that’s a case where Rob and I had two different things that just happened to work together. Most of the guitar parts are from a song I was working on and it happened to have the same key and the same groove as a song that Rob was working on, so we combined the two and came up with that. And Chuck was just goofing around with lyrics at the time and singing while we were doing it. Normally what happens is the person who comes up with a chord progression or the foundation for a song, has the right of first refusal in coming up with the lyrics and being the lead vocalist as well. With that song, either Rob or I would have had dibs on it but Chuck was coming up with something during rehearsal and I just said run with it because your voice sounds great on this, so he came up with the lyrics. There are other songs where I might come up with the verse, chorus, all of the parts and then somebody might come up with a signature part. So we figured it was best to acknowledge that we are all largely responsible for the music that we are coming up with and we left it at that. The person who usually did come up with the song does get to write the lyrics so I guess you do get your credit there.

D- D you think there’s a quintessential moe. song?

A- I think you might be able to come up with ten songs that really embody all that moe. is about but to pick one would miss the mark because there isn’t any one song that covers all that we do. Maybe something like “Seat Of My Pants,” which goes through many styles of music and is a pretty involved song. There are so many songs...“Rebubula” is a good representation of what we do but fails to include the shorter poppier aspects or the country or bluegrass stuff we do. I mean with Hootie and the Blowfish you could pick one song and say “this is Hootie, this is what these guys sounds like.” There are some bands where you could get away with that but for us it’s a little bit more difficult, which is good.

D- Do you think that the music in moe. is bound by genre, albeit some type of hybrid moe. genre? By band expectations? Fan expectations?

A- moe. is not entirely bound by those things. Well we certainly define those boundaries for ourselves. It’s ironic because we never intended to have any boundaries whatsoever and that has sort of become almost limiting because we’re not expected to have any boundaries. People expect even within one song for us to be all over the map. Not just within the course of one album or the course of one show but each and every song needs to be a little bit crazy somehow. It needs something to be a little bit left of center for it to be entirely moe. There has to be something sarcastic about it and there has to be some crazy guitar part that we’ve written but we can’t really play yet. So in a lot of ways it’s hard to go back to writing a simple or genre-specific song.

That’s part of what led me to put together the Transamericans; I want to take the time to come up with a whole band with different instrumentation. The other thing is that in moe. we really operate as a democracy, almost to a fault, where we sometimes belabor things to the point where nobody wants to vote on anything anymore because we’ve considered every option on the planet, touched on every possibility and then nobody really cares about the issue anymore. In this case its my band, I get to be the boss. I mean I enjoy playing with the guys in moe. a lot and we have a pretty good group dynamic that seems to work for us. We’re friends; we like to spend time with each other; we call each other up even when we don’t have to. But then again it can be frustrating when you think that your idea is right for a song and it shoots off ninety degrees from that based on what somebody else in the band wants to do. But in this situation with Al and Transamericans, this is my band and I told everyone that when I put the group together. Actually everyone is psyched to do it because they all play in these other bands that have these democracies of sorts and they were psyched just to show up and play.

I’ve been doing everything myself for this and I plan on following through. I booked all of the shows. I’m acting as manager. I’m acting as tour manager. I’m going to be driving the van. I’m trying to take care of every little bit of this myself. I really want it to be my project. I didn’t want to take anything away from moe.- so this really is me, doing my own side project. Plus, I like the whole notion of doing I myself. I look at Mike Watt doing his tours and there’s something really cool about the fact that he still sells T-shirts from the stage at the end of the night out of a big garbage bag. They load in and load out every night, he drives the van, they do fifty shows in fifty days and that’s the tour. There’s something very cool about that which I really respect.

D- Speaking of Mike Watt, have you listened to a lot of Minutemen or firehose?

A- Yes, firehose in particular made a huge impression on me when I first discovered them. I would say at least myself, Rob and Chuck we are all profoundly inspired by them in a lot of different ways. We used to write a lot of short instrumental tunes that sounded like firehose tunes. I think those guys are incredible, they were a top-notch band. It’s funny, in college I turned on so many different people to firehouse: people who listened to the Dead and guys who listened to Metallica and Rush. firehouse really seemed to have this universal appeal to anyone who was really fond of good music. I love them. I guess I discovered firehose before the Minutemen. I had always picked up their albums in stores but never really got into them. Then one day I found an album where they covered Meat Puppets songs, so I picked it up. It’s a totally different sound than firehose, the songs that D Boon would write were more progressive than what firehose were doing but I liked them all the same.

D- Speaking of firehose and SST bands, you told me the other day that moe. was thinking of doing a show at CBGB?

A- Yeah we were going to play two or three minute punk versions of moe. songs. I think it would have been cool. I would still like to do it, even if we can’t do it at CBGB’s. I think there’s good handful of fans who would love it. That’s one thing I love about our fan base, there’s definitely people who can appreciate that side of the band. And if we were to go out and play a whole evening of Dead cover tunes there’s definitely a lot of people who would like that. If we wanted to go out and be a Rush tribute band I think there are people who would like that as well. I like the fact that we can move around that way.

D- Well obviously the band members have pretty diverse taste as well. I’m curious, what was your first live show as a concertgoer?

A- I guess the first show I ever saw was the Captain and Tennille at the state fair when I was in third grade.

D- You knew them from the TV show...

A- Oh yeah and when they were coming to the state fair my sister and I were all amped about it. My father got tickets and we went as a family. Then when I was in sixth grade my father took me to the Charlie Daniels band at the Utica Memorial Auditorium. This was in the Charley Daniel heyday, when “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” was all over the radio. It was a general admission show in a five thousand seat hockey rink. My memories of that concert, and all concerts from that time, the late 70’s/early 80’s is different than what it is today. People smuggled anything and everything they could inside the show, so there were bottles of whiskey, fireworks, it was crazy. It seemed like everyone around me was partying so much, it was this full-on throwdown affair and everybody had a great time. Then when the lights came on the place was just littered with trash and broken bottles. It seemed like a lot of the subsequent shows I saw there were like that. The next few shows I saw were Santana, ZZ Top, Ozzy Osbourne. The radio station I listened to at the time was a classic rock station and I had no problem going to see ZZ Top and Ozzy Osbourne the same summer, I liked them both.

D- Was Randy Rhoads paying with them?

A- I was so psyched I was able to see him. It was before Blizzard of Oz really hit. My friends and I had the album but “Crazy Train” was not yet a huge song. The show was Def Leppard/Ozzy Osbourne. This was before Def Leppard became a huge radio band. I wasn’t that familiar with them but I was so psyched to see Randy Rhoads play. He was the heir to Eddie Van Halen’s throne. If anyone was going to take the crown from Eddie it was going to be Randy Rhoads. My friends and I probably showed up at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, camped out, ran to the front of the stage and stood there the whole time. We held our ground until he came out. I must have been thirteen at the time. To see him play like that as a thirteen year old boy, it was going to a strip show or something.

D- How would you compare that experience to your first Dead show?

A- Before I saw the Dead I had seen a variety of different shows, primarily rock shows. With the Dead, I couldn’t believe the scene and how laid-back the whole thing was. At the same time the music got really heavy but still it was clean, it wasn’t about Marshall stacks or anything like that. There weren’t any runway ramps or explosions, it was far different that anything I had seen. Maybe the closest was the Santana show but I remembered that more as a great rock show with a Latin feel to it. But the Dead, I was really blown away by the intensity of the band and the involvement of the crowd, the way the crowd was so psyched about the band’s music. There weren’t people lighting off fireworks and there wasn’t any call and response or “are you ready to rock” going on. It seemed much more serious and yet much more casual at the same time. It seemed so much more real to me. After I saw the Dead that first time I realized that this was something I wanted to see a lot more of and find out more about.

D- In recent years you have established relationships with members of the Dead. What did you take away from performing and interacting with Bob Weir?

A- Wow. There’s a lot. He’s an extremely thoughtful, considerate, intelligent person, and he’s also a great guitar player. The stuff he does, a lot of it come from filling the role between Jerry’s guitar, Phil’s bass and the keyboards; he’s come up with chords that nobody else plays. It’s funny every time we play together I feel like this excited kid who’s eaten way too much sugar while he’s calm, much more grounded. So when we play together I want to turn everything up to ten and play it really fast and he’s more inclined to take it easy and leave some space between the notes. I think there’s such a contrast between our playing that he brings out more of that in me where I am able to sit back and let the music be. I think with moe., I have this tendency, we all have this tendency to overplay. We get so excited about the songs that it can become sort of messy at times, it’s sensory overload where we all try to fit as many notes as possible into these really tiny gaps. He referred to us being like the Dead on crank.

D- In this context how do you think that you own guitar technique or approach has evolved over the years?

A- Well, lately I’ve decided that I need to expand the palette that I use when I’m improvising. This is sort of what you run into when you’re playing and improvising three hours every day on stage. There’s only so much you can do before you’ve exhausted everything you know. In moe. we have a certain responsibility on stage not to completely explore new territory and have it suck. People are paying good money to see us these days and there are definitely section of songs where I try to do that but I can’t do it constantly. I can’t make that my forum for learning how to play the guitar, so I need to work on it now for instance, during my down time.

D- Was there a particular moment when you decided to do this or did it emerge from the ongoing, organic process of playing guitar?

A- It started about three years ago for me. One part of it was we had come from being a bar band to having some moderate success as this college bar band throughout the northeast. But being in that atmosphere there were a few instances where I might have been be too buzzed to play at my peak. I guess I realized that we had this responsibility to those people who came to see us. I just wanted to make sure that I was playing the music to the best of my ability. By this time people were so psyched about the band that they were driving distances to come see us and I felt that I needed to give it my best effort if they were giving it their best effort to come and see us.

Another part of it is I came to a point where I didn’t want to solo in the band. I found myself disappointed with the solos that I was taking and I was really convinced that since Chuck was a significantly better guitarist than I am or was, it didn’t make sense to us to be trading off and sharing equally this role as lead guitarist. It made more sense to me for Chuck to be the primary solo guitarist, he is such a colorful player, and I would play rhythm guitar and sing and fulfill that role. I was fine with it and the whole thing seemed so logical to me at the time but everyone else in the band they wouldn’t have it, they didn’t want me to stop soloing. Eventually it turned around. I think a lot of it was me just concentrating, focusing a bit more, taking time when we weren’t playing to learn things. I think picking up other instruments has helped as well. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Lately I’ve been pretty happy with my guitar playing. At the end of this tour I think I was doing some of the best guitar stuff that I have ever been doing, which is great. I’m glad I got to this point. But still I feel the need to take it further.

D- I would imagine that some of that will appear in the more straightforward songs that you will perform with the Transamericans. I was wondering if you would introduce the players in that band?

A- The Bass player is Jim Loughlin, who is moe.’s former drummer. He was with us for about two and a half years and then he went off and played for Yolk for three years. Lately he’s been playing with his wife Chris. Jim, aside from being one of the best drummers in the scene is a phenomenal bass player. He played a lot of jazz bass I college. I really wasn’t looking for a jazz/funk player of Jim’s caliber, I was looking for a simple pocket player but Jim is such a great musician and a friend so I decided to bring him along.

The drummer is Ted Marotta from the Seapods. In my opinion Ted is one of three best drummers in the scene. It’s funny, with the history moe. has had with drummers, before Loughlin even left we told Ted that if anything should ever happen we’d want to steal him from the Seapods. I love his playing and I thought that maybe someday somehow it would work out that he would be the drummer in moe. Every time we ever needed a drummer we would ask him bold-faced right I front of the other guys ‘hey do you want to be in our band?’ So now I finally will have an opportunity to play with him.

D Speaking of the ‘Pods, what are your thoughts on Max Verna’s departure from that band?

A- I was really concerned for them but Ted reassured me that things are going to work out. I’ve seen Todd their new guitarist play twice and I thought he was great. I guess that lately he’s been playing with them while Max is still on the stage. They’re doing this gradual transition and then on New Years they’re going to do an official passing of the torch. Todd’s guitar-playing is there, he’s a great vocalist and they’ve already started writing songs together. Ted says they’re coming out great.

D- Back to the Transamericans...

A- Rolf Witt is a classically trained violinist who loves bluegrass. He’s a perfect Swiss army knife player. He’ll be playing mandolin, fiddle and guitar. moe.’s drummer Vinnie used to play with him in two bands. One of these was Sonic Garden which is one of the best Dead cover bands I’ve ever seen. They started in the late eighties and it’s almost become an institution. There are no original members left in the band. Every year somebody graduates college and gets replaced by somebody else. It was treat to see them play. The other band was this group called Acoustic Forum which had some of the most smoking players in western New York. There were two mandolins, three guitarist, banjo, bass, two drummers, keyboards. They would mix it up al over the place.

Then we have Kirk Juhas from freebeerandchicken. He will be playing keyboards, harmonica, banjo and singing as well. We’ve got a good group of players to do this kind of music.

D- What is the origin of the band’s name?

A- I was actually suggesting Transamerican as the title of Tin Cans and Car tires at one point, just because of the nature of what we do and the subject matter of all the songs on there. And once I had that in my head it was easy to transpose it and use it for this because it’s very related. We will be doing what I consider to be the foundation of contemporary American music, plus everyone in the band has traveled all over the place