Thanks For The moe.mories -
My Brief History of Jamband Big Brothers, moe.
by Carol Wade

What do you get when you take the broad, golden sprawl of the Middle Plains, the grey merge lanes of any one of fifty Interstates in the middle of Winter, a sassy dash of slick city lights, and a healthy dose of moist, constant, grassroots movement? What do you call a band that's part Meat Puppets and Hot Tuna, part squealing Hot Wheels, and the cozy rattle of tin cans in a 'just married' refrain? If you've been keeping alert, despite your own "fantastic individual revolutions," you'll know: it's moe.

Here in 2001, the punctuation-specific rockers, rather than reinventing the wheel, are quite simply continuing on in their own magnificent groove. Such a statement might seem bland, but it's actually the purest praise: some uncles are right when they say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." moe. is a band that has taken its taste of the world, and tailor-made a tongue to fit that titillation. Knowing just what and who they are from the very start has made the Buffalo-born five-piece one of the most popular touring bands on the ever-growing, endlessly-evolving improvisational rock circuit.

moe. today are just exactly where they want to be. Brought to the fore by an in-your-face explosion about a decade ago, Al Schnier (guitar), Chuck Garvey (guitar), Rob Derhak (bass), and Jim Loughlin (drums) gurgled out of the loamy Upstate regions of New York, at a time when the burgeoning jamband scene was wrapped in the throes of the "phlow" of a weird bunch of post-Grateful Dead Vermont claptrappers. Like moe., "that other band" was hitting the trail with similarly bizarre, ornately orchestrated forays into hippie-revisionism, enthralling the masses that had chased dancing bears, and turning them to piously piscine puddlers. However, moe. were still coming up, and the turf was theirs to master at their pace. They had the power of patience, providence and pitchers of draft beer on their side. The uprising was quieter, and remained untelevised.

moe. have reassembled the fragments of that silent, sonic boom, into their own modern-day musical equivalent of a sweet rural bungalow, one part Mom and Dad's garage, two parts treehouse, and plenty of rock 'n' roll barn. The band are right where they want to be: developing monster tunes which brought them their share of rich revelers, scribing new anthems with which to woo the masses, and gazing with crooked grins over what can only be a kingdom built from pure, solid work. No hype, no fashion, no jingo: just moe. Such a marvelous dwelling has been designed for one thing, and one thing only: sitting back and simply laughing at the world, and all its many jokes.

Even the slightest suggestion of moe. speaks of "home," wherever that may be. The watery dome inside your favorite snow-globe, the side of the road just outside of Hoboken; no matter where you go, to moe., it's really all the same. Where you're going doesn't seem that important, but rather, where have you been, and do you remember it all? Memory and moments and the passage of time are where moe. have been going since their first self-produced release, "Fatboy," way the heck back in 1992. I was a lame high school senior back then, and wouldn't begin eating up the sounds of jamband culture for another two years (first with the aforementioned VT raiders).

Soon, I graduated, and made my way north, to a town that would prove instrumental in my discovery of all things jam, and all things moe.. Oswego, NY was arguably the perfect hub of early jamband culture. Set at the simmering State school crossroads of Buffalo and Rochester, Syracuse, Utica and Albany, Binghamton and NYC, the wayside bars and dive-holes of the Central New York port city cultivated the wicked styles of jamband outfits still blazing the trails today. Out of the many (including VT's "Big One"), moe. in particular grabbed my attention, not only by way of their openness and self-effacing charm as "a mere buncha guys." Their savagely on-point riffing, reminiscent of the best and boldest in jazz funk, high-quality, thigh-slappin' bluegrass, thunderous hardcore noise experimentations, and the most fun you can have going to a show (sans the barrel o' monkeys), were reasons enough to place them smack in the middle of my map.

Denying the "other guys" their place at my forefront, I went full-on moe. Like any good moe.ron, I collected tapes, frequented the band's then-pioneering e-community (the still-hummin' MOE-L Internet Mailing List), and saw as many shows as I could before graduating from SUNY Oswego in 1996. Speaking of home, I went back to my own, and realized that, due to moe., I'd made many, many friends, seen many places, and had been unutterably changed. It was probably due to the intimacy of the shows I'd seen, the cozy familial reliability which not only snug semblances of state-to-state security.

By that point, the band had released another self-produced album, Headseed, along with a live effort, Loaf. They'd seen the rigors of a major-label signing (to Sony/550 Music), a highly unconventional 40-minute single (the epic instrumental, Meat) as their first major release, still-endless road-warrioring, and even a rash of fairly seamless personnel changes. Spinal Tap had nothing on moe., with drummer Jim Loughlin giving way to Mike Strazza giving way to Chris Mazur giving way, finally, to the highly versatile percussion powerhouse, Vinnie Amico.

A privileged proximity to whirling guitar maelstroms formed by the manic, frenzy-jamming Schnier, and and the element-boiling Garvey, backed by the ferocious thumping booms of Derhak, drove me onward in my moe.ronismo. 1997 saw an epic year for the band, who'd hit prime rockstar status as they hit the trail with that summer's Furthur Festival. Hobnobbing with Bobby Weir, locking horns with Bruce Hornsby, and trading blows with the Black Crowes helped the band to hone a vision they'd hatched in the previous years, backed by the clout of thousands of never-been-kissed potential punters. That year marks a turning point in the history of moe., and any moe.ron who knows will tell you: 1997 is the year the Fatboy went bigtime. From that first launch, moe. solidified their place in rock history as the band Jerry may have built, but the same one Jaco turned over, and Jimi set on fire.

As all things change and will not stay the same, the major-label deal was jettisoned along the way. A band as unique and self-propelled as moe. comes to learn along the way that it's best to keep it in the family, anyway. And so the story goes: bigger venues, higher exposure, and a comfortably exponential growth in their faithful fanbase. They'd stacked themselves up to just under the heels of the "competition," forming an essential top-level to the shuddering pile of jambands who'd "made it," and were still surviving and mostly thriving, on their own terms.

moe. even possessed the maturity to come full circle, and, in January 1999, reinstated their very first skins-basher (the otherwise multitalented dynamo Loughlin) on supporting percussion, flute, bass, acoustic guitar (and the occasional washboard). Highlighting their ever-present sense of humor, moe. took that show on the road as the hilariously-named "No Hard Feelings Winter/Spring Tour 1999." And from there, the band has continued onward to please established fans and impress newer converts, who subscribe to their slow-and-steady style of doing their thing in the best, tried and true ways they know how.

And now, we've finally entered the 21st Century. moe. has always had a pretty unique and smirky take on "The Future," and we can be pretty sure they're as unimpressed with weird, plastic clothing covered with pockets, as your average joe at a service station in the middle of Montana is. They're unafraid to traverse their roots, and break out a little into outer space as well. For the CD release of their fifth release, L, in 2000, the band unearthed their single rock opera, "TIMMY" at a stiffly-brimming, near-insane sold-out performance. Rob, Chuck and Jim did an tour of bizarre departures, covers in the style of schizophrenic silliness, called "Ha Ha The Moose." In the here and now, the band has just released their sixth studio album, with the band's characteristic ironic tinge once again embracing the CD's title, Dither.

Far beyond the word's definition as a "waning vestigial vibration" or "fearful vacillation," the release rises from silence with sounds uncharacteristic for a "rock" record...the eloquent scratch tactics of the turntable cut-master, DJ Logic (a friend made by moe. in their wildly experimental wanderings through the 1999 summer festival circuit). "Captain America" cooks up images of superheroism gone wobbly, the kind of safe indecision that keeps Middle America from folding onto the coasts. "Faker" taps into moe.'s appreciation for sarcastic observation and homespun balladeering with an acerbic twinge, asking that you "get your jaw off the ground." "TGORM" is the rippingest tune on the album, with laser beams, acoustic interludes, monster kickin' chords and the very moe. refrain, "The more things change the more they stay the same / the more things stay the same / the more I go insane".

There are marked improvements in everything moe. could have put a polish on, Al's ever-rugged vocals, the often uncontrollable soar of Garvey's exhortations, the range and "thud" of Derhak's bass. The woozy lilt of "So Long" is a wash of bongo-furious orchestral dreaming, like Wilco meets Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Joni Mitchell at the rest stop. Influenced by the multitracking mastery of the album's producer, John Siket (whisked out from under the now-resting laurels of the popular minstrels from the Green Mountain State), the album packs a sound-environment wallop second-to-none. Capping off the band's range of warbly, backwoods porch-rocking, to a feisty Celtic-style romp through the urban jungle with "New York City," the album "ends" on a note that suggests there's something to be said for living in your old-school paper sack: "Opium won't you smile on my brain? / Flowers and fog / You've got me feeling no pain."

Actually, in a final ironic twist, "Dither" doesn't really end there. Some seventeen minutes into the opiate haze at the album's end, the first track, "Captain America" blasts in again, out of the prevailing silence. There's still no rest for moe.'s wicked sense of reality, which has taken them in ten years where many jambands were too lame to travel, and sustain. One of their older anthems, "Roll," predated today's current "scene" fascination with take-out "ecstasy," revelry, and otherwise somewhat forgetful, absentee boogie-ism.

Roll away the hard and crusty surface of the Earth
To reveal the chewy center that the maggots have unearthed
I'll be waiting there for you my friend with a case of ice cold beer
We can watch the Armageddon from our comfy easy chair.

moe. has nothing against forgetting, but when they do they do it with style, almost a kind of poise. The rocking chair squeaks, the baby cries, the girlfriend shoves playfully, and all is well. What, me worry? Why fret for the future, when there's always something to laugh at, look back over your shoulder and throw a smile? They're moving up, growin' up (sorta) and growin' out (though not in the hair department these days), and are moving onwards, and ever upwards, as always. In their hands are copies of their personal rule book, "How To Do It Your Way, And Take Nothing Too Seriously." If you're up for catching, and don't mind a bunch of regular guys giving you the time of day, moe. is still tossing a pretty mean fastball, if you're willing to meet em' halfway.