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

Aspiring To the Limitless: Galactic's Rob Mercurio

by Dean Budnick

---

One of the more compelling tour packages of the past few months originated within the jam band scene. Summer Sessions featured Galactic, Gov't Mule, moe., Phil and Friends and String Cheese Incident. Towards the beginning of that tour, Galactic bassist Robert Mercurio called in to discuss these shows and answer some other questions about his group. Galactic will resume touring on October 13th for six weeks of shows which includes two nights (and Halloween) at New York's Irving Plaza. For more info visit the group's website, www.galacticfunk.com.

DB: Let's start off with Summer Sessions. It is still relatively early in the tour but have there been any standout nights?

RM: Atlanta came together really well because I think it was one of these cities where all of the bands are really popular. There was this one night when String Cheese closed and they played "Hey Pocky Way"and we all got up there. Rich was dueling keyboards with Kyle. Houseman was singing and there was a nice vibe up there. Ben was playing sax and three of us were hitting tambourines and cowbells and stuff like that. I really dig everyone getting together. Warren Haynes has been all over the place sitting in with everybody. Going into this thing I wasn't sure how it would turn out but the way that everybody's been working together has been really nice.

DB: How well did you know the other three bands before the tour started?

RM: I had never met any of the people in moe. before. String Cheese we had met pretty extensively and they had come to New Orleans for Jazz Fest. We also had done some dates with Gov't Mule on last summer's Widespread tour. So we knew two of the bands and were real comfortable with them. The members of moe. have turned out to be super cool guys too.

DB: Have you seen any of their sets yet?

RM: Oh yeah, I've been checking out all the music. There's really not that much else to do. You can get real sick of hanging out on the tour bus so I've been checking out a lot of music.

DB: What's the scene been like backstage?

RM: One of the coolest backstage scenes was in Memphis. Stanton has this mini drum kit that he sets up everyday backstage and our guitar player has this little amp, and the bass player in String Cheese has this little amp, and everybody set up and we had this freeform jam session- not on stage but just hanging out backstage. Then when we came off stage after our set we just started playing: us, some of the guys from String Cheese and some of the guys from moe. It was just a little campfire scene. It's funny, we're all pretty much playing the same clubs so we're backstage talking about touring and the experiences we've had. Gov't Mule, they're a little older than everybody so they've got the greatest stories of all. Everybody's hanging out on everybody's tour buses and there's no ego thing at all, which is great because this is how the tour was set up, with nobody in particular as a headliner, just rotating every night. In fact we've tried to keep the order of bands something of a secret so that people will come out early. In Atlanta the tickets were printed with the bands in alphabetical order so it looked like we were headlining but we actually played second. So we were out there doing our CD signing and a lot of our fans came up and said "when are you guys going on?"And we had to say "uuhh, we just went on.”

DB: In terms of inviting other musicians to come on stage with you, how has that come about?

RM: It's been pretty informal because everyone's just been around and into it. For instance last night fifteen minutes before we were about to go on I saw Rob from moe. backstage and I asked him if he wanted to come out with us, and he said "sure, cool.”

DB: To what extent did he know your music?

RM: I don't think they'd heard us much either.

DB: So is it difficult in that situation?

RM: We picked a relatively easy one so he could follow and I taught him the bass line ahead of time a little bit. But he definitely changed it up and it was really cool, it went to different places than it would have if I was playing.

DB: I know that many of the musicians out there are really psyched to be playing with Phil Lesh. But when you were growing up you weren't into the Dead, you were more into Fugazi, Minor Threat and that whole DC hardcore scene, right?

RM: Yeah. It's funny. Really nobody in our band is all that familiar with the music of the Grateful Dead. To us, maybe our equivalent might be getting ready to perform with James Brown. But to these others bands Phil Lesh is a major idol, and they are all learning the tunes and they're all excited.

DB: So have you ever played on the same bill as James Brown?

RM: About a month ago we opened up for him at Lincoln Center in New York. That was really cool. It was a part of the JVC Jazz Festival. We flew up for the weekend, hung out in New York and met James Brown. We checked out his soundcheck, he checked out ours and he was there for our set. It was really cool.

DB: Jumping back to Fugazi, do you see any continuum between their music and your own?

RM: It's funny because Stanton our drummer used to listen to a lot of punk rock when he was growing up. We definitely have aggressive moments like that. Maybe not in the studio recordings but more in the live concerts where we just go back into our seventh and eighth grade garage band modes. When we first met Stanton he was playing in this hard rock group called Oxenthrust, and he was just a basher. He'd just be slamming on the drums. It's funny because now he uses so much finesse, and he's really into jazz, and getting more out of the instrument then just slamming it. But there are still moments and influences and all that stuff.

DB: Did you meet Stanton when you were down in college?

RM: I actually met him at a jam session. It was just me and a guitar player friend of mine. He said "I've got this drummer coming over today, do you wanna get together?"So I came over and we played a bunch of Hendrix tunes, and just kind of jammed. At the end of the rehearsal he said "Man, that was fun."And I said "Well I have this guitar player and keyboard player that I've been playing with if you want to come over some day."He said "Sure,"so we got together and we played all these Meters songs and it was just great. Stanton loved it because he was playing in this Oxenthrust band at the time and he said "Ohh man, this is what I really love but I can never find anyone who wants to do this.”

DB: Jumping back, it's interesting you mention James Brown. I would bet that for a number of other bands, their big heroes, their James Brown or Phil Lesh would be the Meters. But being I suppose that living in New Orleans you've been really fortunate to play with them.

RM: Yeah, we've played with them a bunch. We're become friends with them. I mean I still love them and if you'd asked me four or five years ago I would have said them but we have opportunities to see them all the time.

DB: Along those lines, many of the bands in this scene have been somewhat relentlessly compared to the Grateful Dead. I would imagine that Galactic has been compared to the Meters quite a bit. How have you responded to that?

RM: At first we were we were Like "yeah, that's cool. We're definitely influenced by them and we definitely learned a lot of their material."But over the years we've just moved further and further away from them although we still pay in that same vein. They do a lot of things that we don't do and we do some things that they don't do. I don't think they'd ever really ever get into a heavy metal moment or a hard rock moment but we might. We kind of experiment a little more than they do now, which just comes from playing 150 dates a year. We just have to do that.

DB: How has Galactic's sound evolved, let's say from Coolin Off to Crazyhorse Mongoose?

RM: Well to me Coolin' Off just had this one vibe, this one funk vibe throughout it. Some people really liked that aspect of the record. When we got to Crazyhorse Mongoose we really wanted to show some of the different moods and styles that we had gotten into over that two year break in between the records. So to me it has a lot more quieter moments, and a lot more different feels to it. That was just through touring, all the CDs we had listened to in those two years, and all the shows and the things that happened at the shows.

DB: Has your music continued to transform since you recorded Crazyhorse Mongoose?

RM: We're about to go back into the studio, and right now Stanton has a live sampler and five or six effects pedals, and everybody is experimenting with tones and effects, and sampling a lot more than we ever had. In the last few months the shows have definitely gone in another direction with a lot of crazier shit going on than there ever was. That was influenced in part because we did this tour with Skerik on saxophone, the sax player from Critters Buggin' and he is just this total experimental freak. He takes the sax and makes it sound like you've never heard it before- like a screaming Hendrix guitar or he'll have some crazy digital delay. So we all were influenced by that and wanted to make ourselves even further limitless in terms of tones and directions. I think it's like that with any band that plays so many shows, and here is a parallel with the Grateful Dead- you just want to be limitless, to enable the music to go into any direction that it can go. And if that is with samples, or drum loops or crazy effects on my bass then that is what I want to do.

DB: I'm curious, how have you balanced the number of songs with vocals both on a given night and also on the albums?

RM: It's pretty much set each night. We usually do between three and four a set. Sometimes Houseman will come out at the beginning of the set, sometimes the middle, sometimes he'll come out at the end. Where he comes out is just decided every night. In terms of recordings, that's really been all the Houseman tunes we've had to record that we liked and came out good enough to put on a record. Writingwise, we'll intentionally write a tune and say all right, let's write it for singing because there's a little different style you write when you're dealing with a singer. You don't want to make the rhythms quite as complex, and it's set up a little differently. We write a little more with thought towards vocals than just taking an instrumental and saying okay, let's put vocals on top.

DB: Have you experienced any pressure to have him sing either more or less?

RM: It's funny. Both ways, but there's not an overwhelming amount of it. For instance we've never heard anything from the record label about it, either way, which is cool. From among the fans, maybe once or twice a tour somebody will, say to me, I wish Houseman would sing more or less, it's not like every night.

DB: You're signed with Capricorn. Has that met your expectations?

RM: Well we really didn't know what to expect. We had been working with Fog City Records which was a one man ship. So we went there and they introduced us to the publicity department, and there were four people, and the art department, there were three people, and the radio department, and there were seven people. So to have a team was pretty interesting to us. Then again it's not like we've been on MTV and our songs are all over the radio but they've been really supportive and they all come out to the shows, and they all seem really into the project, unlike say moe.'s nightmare with Sony. I was talking with them about that. They got so much less done for them than we did for us by a considerably smaller label. That was one of the reasons we went with Capricorn.

DB: Are you surprised by the nationwide support for Galactic, which has occurred in a relatively short period of time?

RM: In part that's one thing we set out to do. We toured the west coast before we had even played Baton Rouge, Memphis or Atlanta. When we set out we decided we didn't just want to be a regional act. So on our first tour we played Vancouver, British Columbia, we played Colorado, and then we did the east coast all before we even played in the southeast. We just wanted to play every single region equally.

People ask me about this a quite a bit. I think in part this was due to the fact that our booking agency Madison House was really in touch with kids and we played a number of key festivals at key times. You also have to be real strategic in terms of when you come back and how soon you come back. Of course it important to get the mailing list out. The first day of the first tour we had a mailing list- just to keep in touch with our fans that way. I mean always at the end of the show we'd go out at the end of the show and talk to the crowd to make sure they got on the mailing list, just to add the personal touch. It was fun for us and I think it was fun for a lot of the people who came out as well. We're still in touch with quite a few of those people.