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A "Basis" of Biscuits Jams: Jon Gutwillig
by Rob Turner

(Editor's introduction) The Disco Biscuits are currently generating some of the biggest buzz in the scene. Their trance-fusion (or Bisco) really seems to have captured the interest and imagination of many fans. On New Years Eve they debuted their rock opera, Hot Air Balloon. Rob Turner (our new Road Trip of the Month editor) recently enlisted the Disco Biscuits to perform at his Surum Kenya Scholarship Fund Benefit (along with Uncle Sammy). A number of weeks earlier he sat down with Biscuits guitarist and principal songwriter Jon Gutwillig This interview touches on a number of issues, including jam philosophy as well as the recording of the group's Encephalous Crime, which is about to be re-released with a bonus live track. The Biscuits are currently on the road. For more info and tour dates visit www.discobiscuits.com.

RT- Since the band is in the process of re-releasing Encephalous Crime, tell us a little bit more about the recording of that album.

JG- Right now we do a lot of little gigs all over the place. Back then we were doing a lot of little gigs all over Phili. We were trying to play as many nights of the weeks as we could but nobody had heard of us and we were particularly terrible in those days. We jammed out really hard but didn't really know what we were doing. When we went in and did Encephalous Crime we had played the songs so much live that we went and in and decided to re-open up the creative channels on the songs. We decided you do the album overdub style, production-style. We put down the bass tracks and then scratch guitar, scratch keyboards scratch vocals. After that we went over the guitar, the keyboards, the vocals. Sometimes the scratch tracks would stay, depending on how good the recording of the scratch track was- Magner's solo in "Trooper" for instance was a scratch track.

We just went nuts on that album. There are like 56 tracks on Stone Waltz- eight guitars. It was crazy.

RT- Why did you add live versions of "Pygmy Twylyte" and "Basis For A Day" rather than studio versions?

JG- "Basis" is a live song. It was too live to put in the studio. And "Pygmy" we got because we brought equipment up to the Wetlands for the August 7, 1996 gig and recorded the whole show. The "Basis" stood out and the "Pygmy" came along with it because people were psyched to have a Zappa tune on the album.

That was actually Mark Sarisky's idea. He was one of the engineers on the album. He wanted to put a cover tune on the album and we were pretty against it but he was so unbelievably for it was ridiculous. I think it was just because he was so sick of listening to our shit that he wanted to mix another type of song (laughs).

RT- Your current management team is the same team that has worked with Metallica, Anthrax, Ministry and many others. Tell us how that came about, how did you meet Jon and Marsha Zazula?

JG- Relix had called us in to play a party at the Wetlands and we were psyched because we were a pretty scrappy bunch of losers. We were also pretty excited that it was at Wetlands; we all grew up around New York. So we put together this crazy set together. It was a parenthesis set where every song is a pair of parenthesis- we have left facing parenthesis and right facing parenthesis- the way it works is that the first song ends the set. That was theoretically what we wanted to do and of course it ended up changed due to artistic reasons. That tape is hugely famous among Biscuit tapes for some odd reason.

Anyhow, after that gig we went on the road and I was supposed to contact Toni Brown but I spaced it for a month and half. Then I got on the phone with Les Kippel to say hello. Then he said "Do you want to meet one of the moguls of the music industry?" I was like "Yeah, why?" And he goes "Do you want to be one of the biggest rock stars in the world?" And I was like 'I don't know." And he said "Do you want to sell out stadiums in Munich, Tokyo, Copenhagen?" And here we were just coming off pulling seven people at Club Toast. I was "What are you talking about Les?" But he said "This guy Jonny Zazula, you need to meet this guy, he's a big dog."

So I called him. Jonny is an old school Deadhead. Metal was Jon and Marsha's baby in the eighties and then they decided to get back to their roots. That first gig was in May. Marsha couldn't make it I remember but Jonny was there and we decided to put a hard-core ending on "Jamilia" because Jonny was at the gig. That ending to "Jamilia" has stayed but the reason it's there is because of Jonny.

So after the show we were talking to him and he said "I can't do anything until Marsha comes to the show to see you play, because no Marsha, no working together." Marsha came to another club in Phili, one of the worst clubs in the world, and we were walking out of the gig complaining about everything. But as it ended up we had talks for a few weeks and decided to make it work.

The next thing I know Jon gets us on the phone and says 'This Encephalous Crime, it's not you guys anymore, it's where you guys were a year ago." This was May 97. And he was right, during that year we'd been playing four gigs a week and we'd learned how to keep things together and interesting. So he wanted to make an album to reflect where we were at that time.

We made Uncivilized Area live in the studio. Everything is scratch tracks that you hear. What we were going for was the best sounding live tape. We had Rob "Wacko" Hunter produce it. He used to be in a band called Raven where he played drums every night wearing shoulder pads and a football helmet- I mean what was he thinking? Sammy is sweating his brains out and he doesn't wear anything.

RT- Tell us how and when the band started incorporating techno?

JG- Aron got the machine in the beginning of October 97. We did this Halloween show at a fraternity because this was still before the point where anybody was interested in putting on a Halloween show with the Disco Biscuits. We all got on stage and were a bit messed up. I remember Brownie started playing this bass line, and we all starting riffing over this bassline which creeps up in "Run Like Hell" every once in a while. We jammed over it for forty-five freaking minutes. That was the show where Magner first broke out the techno machine. He was just playing with the knobs, reading the directions. I was sitting there "oh my god, what are we doing? Where am I right now?" Brownie's like "this is a great bass line." Sammy was in the back in love with his monitor.

Then there was this show 11/18. The rotation from "Vasillios" into "Aceetobee," it's a whole side of a tape. As soon as I heard that tape I played it for the band a hundred times in a row. I think it's a quintessential tape to understand what we were going for at that point in every Biscuit jam. We listened to it a million times and Magner got pretty good at his techno machine and really understanding it. At his point he knows the machine, can manipulate it and play it like a guitar, which is what he really wants to do, play guitar. I think in that jam all the weird sounds aren't from his techno machine they're from his piano-keyboard but its really smooth from start to finish. Nobody blows any notes, everybody makes smart decisions, and that's what makes a great jam. If we had it on 24 track I would release it as a disc just because I enjoy listening to it. Anyhow that jam is what turned into a little bit of a philosophy for us, for that style of jamming, that trancey-techno jam which we do a lot on "Basis." It's not a "Mr. Don" which is a different style of techno jam. Although we may sound like we're doing the same shit in any particular instance of time, the overview of the jam, the big picture, the theory behind is different. And it turns out that going from "Vasillios" to "Aceetobee" the key changes and rhythm changes involved naturally create that kind of jam. It wasn't intended to be any kind of jam, it just ended up that way. That's why the "Mr. Don" jam is different because there are key changes involved and certain steps from point A to point B. It's not necessarily that we just jam out a chord progression until we feel sick of jamming, there are little steps along the way that make it more interesting for us.

RT- Do you listen to much of current techno stuff?

JG- I don't listen to that much music right now. It has to do with two things. First, I am trying to put in a lot of music so I want to keep my concentration on the music we're inventing. The other thing is I have two stereo systems and then we have one in the van so those are the only three stereo systems I ever listen to and they all sound like shit. The van one sounds like crap and the two in my room sound like crap, and if you up them together in all the combinations, and I've tried them all, they all sound like crap.

RT- It seems like the band is just starting to move into some nicer rooms, how have you responded from a musical standpoint?

JG- I don't like to move into a bigger club until we can play bigger than that club consistently. So now we're just going to search out the nice sound systems around the country and move to them. Of course those rooms don't want you to come until you can bring people in, but lately more and more people having been coming out to see us which is great because my job becomes twice as much fun as it was before. The people get to hear a better show as well so it works out for everybody.

RT- As you move into larger rooms how do you strike the balance between those fans familiar with your materials who want the big jam songs and the newer listeners who might be interested in hearing a few more shorter songs?

JG- I'll tell you, even the biggest jam freaks can suffer from overjam, and even the band can suffer from overjam. It's sort of like being on a football team and the jam is the running back. The jam is really what's going to plow people and you know that and it's good. But there are other songs that you write and there are melodies and grooves in those songs and these are also things that we've created and we're proud of. You just don't want to play "Basis" at every gig and jam it for 45 minutes, although we did that for a year. What we learned was that sometimes people want to take a breather and have a beer and talk to a friend. Also, if for some reason they reject the jam like a heart implant then they're going to leave. Also, the band can't jam at that intensity all night long or else it levels off. The right thing to do is to design the sets so that when the band is going to hit a point of big intensity there happens to be a really hard jam song there and it works out. So I subscribe to the hump theory of set design, which is like an opera where they'll give you a huge climax song and then you'll get an aria and then maybe a comedic tune and then maybe a serious song and then you'll get a climax again. The set has to work the same way. Of course there are lots of hump theories- recently we've been doing big hump in the middle and then a very long taper at the end.

At the same time, we don't approach the jam in an "I'll follow you, you follow me" theory. We don't approach it in an "I'll play this, you play these chords." There's no set chord progressions or anything. We don't approach any of the jams from any perspective where anybody can just lay back and maybe tune out. Each of us becomes an active participant. When we play the places we do now we can hear reach other perfectly. In fact the sound is bouncing off the walls so I hear Magner now and I hear him five seconds later as well. A lot of bands jam over chord progressions. We like to save them and drop them in and use them to direct the vibe, change the mood, adjust Magner's melody line into something different. But the jam is not about the changes and it's not about setting anything up to restrict anyone's playing.

RT- Let's move on to your role as a songwriter. When you bring a new song to the band, to what extent are everyones' parts written and to what extent does everyone work out their own parts individually?

JG- It differs but it's always collaborative. Give me a song...

RT- "Mindless Dribble."

JG- Okay, "Mindless Dribble" was a song where I wrote the lines and they weren't as good as the lines the other guys came up with. So when we rehearsed it they just changed it as we went along. I didn't notice, I was just trying to remember the lyrics. So after six or seven run throughs, it was a totally different song.. But I don't play bass, I don't play drums, I don't play keyboards. Usually when Marc and I write a song, maybe there's one beat out of eight where it's very important to have this one note on that one beat and then everything else usually gets adjusted over time, and a lot of the songs, the lines are always changing. The songs sort of grow.

There's a color behind the music depending on what key you put it in and what the lyrics are and how they're sung. Those are the ways I can decide if a line is working with another line, it depends on the color of a song. Some songs are very dull and sort of sad and others are bright and really happy. "Mr. Don" is green and "Mindless Dribble" is red. Me and Sammy had this test because I was telling him this color theory and I usually get blown off as a crazy person in this type of situation, but he went through seven songs and we had the same colors for them, with different hue variations. I don't think there's a single song in our repertoire that every single member hasn't had creative input in.

It's an ongoing process. The guitar line in "Shem ra Boo" came at the Vernon Reid gig in July last summer and we'd been playing it for five months. The guitar line I was playing before that was atrocious, and Brownie keep telling me "I hate your guitar line." I'm just "Why, I love it." He was like "It's terrible" But I didn't know because I was playing it, I thought of it myself, it was my guitar line. And you have tendency to do that stuff and other people have to break your attachment to get you to stop playing it. Sometimes it's hard until you find something cooler.

I remember when we recorded "Vasillios" for Uncivilized Area. We did it once and it ended up that Jonny came into the studio just after Magner and I made a preliminary mix of it just to see what we had on tape. We had been up for hours and we looked like crap and felt terrible and at that point we were in no position to assess what we had. He came in and said 'I love this song, it flies like some kind of weird computer bird." He flipped so we threw the vocals on. Originally we had this idea of having the jam after "Vasillios" jam into the part of "Basis" that isn't on Encephalous Crime because that song has evolved. We thought that would be so neat and tidy but when we tried it that ended being a twenty-five minute jam and we ran out of tape. It was a big disaster.

When you write songs you try to collect a wealth of material. I have melodies, lyrics just waiting for use. Stuff that didn't work in one song that I'm just waiting to use again. "Magellan" was a song where I took all of the pieces of music I had that sounded like water and I slapped them together in a hump theory. Some of those things were written when I was a kid. Some of "Vasillios" I wrote when I was twelve. That's why part of it sounds retarded because that's the way a twelve year old writes (laughs). But I never forgot it. You archive stuff with yourself for a while and then you put it out to everybody when you find a way to make it work. So there are times you can't write a lot of songs because you're archiving.

RT-One final question. A big part of the Disco Biscuit experience is seeing you live. Do you expect that you'll put out a live disc anytime soon?

JG- We would if we could find a tape that we're all happy with. From our hypercritical, ridiculously unsatisfied musical heads, if we're going to listen to a tape, it had better be the best tape of all time or we really don't want to put it down. I feel like it's just so much fun to go to the studio. Any excuse to go to the studio and trickle around on your guitar is good enough for me. Driving around and playing for people is really what we do. That's the day in and day out of it but the studio is a little bit of gold you get to deal with. It costs money and you only have a certain amount of time and it's hectic but it's the most fun thing you could do with a week. We used to do it when we were kids, set up little studios and make up songs, it was very enjoyable. It still is.