Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
How to describe The Love X Nowhere? Let's let the critics speak:

  "The term 'Indie' doesn't do justice to the Love X Nowhere's lush
  blend of pretty and trippy."

                   -- Bill Picture, SF Chronicle




  "The Love X Nowhere is a trippy, headphone-friendly experience that
  combines glimmering indie-pop a la Cocteau Twins with the cinematic
  elements of classic Pink Floyd."

                     -- Jimmy Leslie, Oakland Tribune
  

    

Our next guests, Gabriel Leis, Adam Perry, and Brett Chulada, are members of
the popular San Francisco-based band The Love X Nowhere. Our moderator for
this conversation is Steve Silberman.

We usually ask our guests to supply us with some personal background from
which we glean details for an introduction. In this case, their backgrounds
are so rich it's hard to know where to begin. Therefore  we're going to ask 
our guests to start out by introducing themselves. 

Welcome, Gabriel, Adam, Brett, Steve. Glad to have you here! Can we please
start with you taking turns to tell us a bit about yourselves.
  

    
Born in New Delhi, India to a beatnik father and an itinerant mother. 
Grew up in 2 countries, 8 states, and about 64 towns until high school
age, when I moved to Marin to live with my father.  His friendship
with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead produced the gift of my first
guitar, a beautiful Alvarez Yairi which is now on loan to my writing
partner and bandmate Brett Chulada.  Heavily influenced by the musical
history of San Francisco and Northern California, as well as the
natural spirituality that is running thick in the air of the shadows
of Mt. Tamalpais.  Undyingly devoted to the urban experience, and
firmly ensconced within San Francisco’s Mission district.  Blessed by
the heavens with True Love, in the form of Mendonecian Summer Makovkin,
daughter of Sasha and Sue, dancer, artist, illustrator, and
print-maker.  My sword of fate may be broken, but it most certainly is
drawn.
  

    
That's beautiful, Gabriel!  Welcome.  I love the music you guys have 
recorded, and was lucky enough to see you play at the Independent a while 
ago.  I am really excited to talk to you all.

Here's my boilerplate intro-du-jour:

 Steve Silberman is a senior writer for Wired magazine, covering brain
 science, culture, how technology is changing society, music, biology, and
 other Big Picture issues.  As a young writer, he studied with Allen
 Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others at Naropa University, where he
 became Ginsberg's teaching assistant.  In the early '90s, he authored
 "Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads" with David Shenk, and he has
 co-produced and contributed essays for numerous CDs, box sets and DVDs by
 the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and other groups,
 including the Dead's "So Many Roads (1965-1995)."  He lives in San 
 Francisco, and is a long-time conference host on the Well.
  

    
It's rather hard to follow Gabriel's mystic Beatnik world-traveler,
true-love story, but here I go:

Born in Pittsburgh, PA to a Xerox technician and a secretary (aka
"working mother"). Grew up in Pittsburgh, worked as a music
journalist, played drums and sometimes bass in Pittsburgh punk bands as
a teenager and studied poetry (under the far-away, loving, critical
eyes of mentors Steve Silberman and Charles Potts) at the University of
Pittsburgh ("Pitt") until suddenly moving to San Francisco at age 21,
where I became a preschool teacher, touring rock drummer, and the first
member of my family ever to live outside Pittsburgh. Like Gabriel and
most of TLXN, I am "Undyingly devoted to the urban experience, and
firmly ensconced within San Francisco’s Mission district." Blessed by
the heavens with a love for baseball (and hockey and football) that
sees me simultaneously overjoyed at the beginning of this year's MLB
season and on the edge of my seat for the first round of the NHL
playoffs.
  

    
Born in Eugene, Oregon to loving parents, who moved shortly after to
Salt Lake City (one of a few non-mormon families, my folks raised us as
Unitarians).  Father played guitar and sang, not professionally but he
has a beautiful voice.  Went to high school in Davis, CA.  Been
singing since the sixth grade when an influential teacher noticed an
enthusiastic voice coming out of his weekly class sing-a-longs.  With
this initial push i stuck with singing in school choirs and in high
school participated in award winning choirs under the guidance of
Richard Brunell.  We performed in New Orleans, Disneyland(!),
retirement homes etc.  Hundreds of performances.  I was also involved
with the Acme Theatre Company under the guidence of David Burmester, an
english teacher at my high school.  The Music and Theatre departments
at my school were no joke.  Where most high schools focus on sports, we
had just as much, if not more, attention on music and theatre.  This
is all really boring stuff...

So, at 15 I tried acid and my experience brought a deep need to
express myself.  I learned how to play guitar and began writing songs. 
I was always more interested in coming up with my own ideas rather
than learning other artists' work.  Rock music posessed my soul.  After
graduating I went to Sonoma State University and immediatly began
playing and forming bands.  This was my only interest in school,
leading me to drop out after a few semesters.  I stayed in Sonoma
County for the next 5 years playing with my band "Immersed".  After
that fell apart I moved around a bit, landing in San Francisco and
forming "Sad Sad Fun" and eventually joining The Love X Nowhere
(TLXN)...which brings us up to date.
  

    
That's our singer/guitarist Brett above, by the way. He and his
brother (Michael, who is also in TLXN and plays keyboards) are
borderline allergic to computers, but he managed to sign into my
account today and write that intro.
  

    
Welcome, Brett!  It's great to see you guys here.  TLXN is such an
ambitious band -- you guys are not afraid to play big, go for the heroic
magnitude and oceanic emotions, and you're all so musically gifted.  
Seeing Adam play drums reminds me of watching Art Blakey or Stewart 
Copeland -- guys who were obviously born to play their instrument, most at 
ease and most articulate in that swinging groove with so much *power*.  
The vocals and lyrics and guitars and vision of what music can be are all 
aligned in TLXN.  Good work.

I'm very psyched about the upcoming Well party --
http://www.well.com/conf/party/ -- and anyone reading this can get hear 
your music at http://www.myspace.com/thelovexnowheresf or the Apple Music 
Store.

So, I'm curious guys -- what inspired you each to play music?  What were 
the first things you heard that sounded like "you" and encouraged you to 
develop your skills to this level?
  

    
Adam asked me to clarify that I have not seen TXLN live yet.  I was 
describing a performance of his that I saw with his previous band, Sunfire 
Pleasure.  But I do enjoy the TLXN recordings I've heard so far, and hope 
to see you guys in the future.  Carry on.
  

    
Personally, my introduction to music starts with my father, but it's a
double-edged sword because he actually tried to keep me from pursuing
music as a career. On one hand, he has played guitar (usually the same
beautiful, mint-condition Gibson SG he's had since 1968) for five
decades and spent his teens, 20's and 30's playing and singing in dance
bands, wedding bands, etc. but never played or wrote original songs or
played outside Pittsburgh. It was always covers. And he never owned
many albums, let alone many hip albums, but when I was just 4 or 5
years old I remember finding his copy of Led Zeppelin's fist album and
spinning "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" over and over and over and finding
out that their drummer had died "in a pool of his own vomit," which
seemed somehow terribly sad and cool at the same time. Anyway,
listening to Zeppelin and Van Halen and AC/DC on Pittsburgh classic
rock radio (better known as Pittsburgh radio) as a grade-schooler was
when I knew I wanted to be a drummer in a rock band when I grew up. I
started playing the drums at age 9, and immediately both of my parents
warned me never to take playing in a rock band seriously. They said it
would interfere with homework, they said it would get me in the wrong
crowd, they said it would get me involved with drugs, they said it
would prevent me from doing well in school and ever graduating college,
they said it would interfere with ever taking anything else seriously
enough that I'd consider it more important than playing music. And they
were totally correct on all accounts.
   I started my first band -- Mind Riot -- as a 12 year old and
performed at parties and school assemblies, all punk covers, never
originals. My big hero was Stewart Copeland and realistically (although
I played in the school jazz band) I learned to play the drums by
putting on headphones and playing along to the entire Police boxed set
("Message in a Box") that my brother bought me for Christmas in the
sixth grade. Later I'd join a punk band in high school as the bassist
by playing along to Paul Simonon's bass parts on all the Clash albums.
       At 16 I recorded an album for the first time and started to
play in punk clubs around Pittsburgh like Club Laga, The Next Decade,
Millvale Theater -- all of which are now sadly gone. Just before I
moved to San Francisco I got pretty into Miles and Coltrane and the
Grateful Dead and Zappa and played in an instrumental indie-jazz band
called Whitford (http://listen.to/whitford) that recorded a self-titled
album I'm pretty proud of still. 
    After ending up in San Francisco a few years ago at age 21 I
started playing in jambands, jamming with jazz groups in North Beach,
and starting to tour the West Coast for the first time with a group
called Sunfire Pleasure. In 2005 I got a few chances to play with some
of my heroes -- members of Phil Lesh's band and Bob Weir's band Ratdog
-- and did a really rewarding tour with Rob Barraco, David Gans, Barry
Sless, Klyph Black and David Nelson under the name Guilty Pleasures. I
even got to jam with David Nelson of the New Riders and Martin Fierro,
who played sax on some of my favorite Grateful Dead albums. That was
just before I joined The Love X Nowhere, which has been rewarding not
just musically but also personally. At it's best TLXN is definitely a
mixture of all the music I like: it's rock, but it's also equal parts
lush, dark, intense, precise, jammy, washy, unpredictable, spiritual,
dangerous, dreamy, hopeful and menacing. Plus I got to dress up in a
full bear costume at an Indian wedding. How cool is that?
    Recently we did 13 shows up and down the coast in 13 days, and boy
that was a trip. We've only been together about a year and a half, but
just getting to play most of the premier clubs in San Francisco --
Independent, Dunord, Bottom of the Hill, Slim's, 12 Galaxies, Rickshaw,
Hemlock, etc. -- has been exciting. 
   But to answer Steve's other questions:

"What were the first things you heard that sounded like "you" and
encouraged you to 
develop your skills to this level?"

Stewart Copeland was the first drummer I heard that made me think:
that's how I want to sound, that's the kind of feel I have for music,
and that's the style I want to play. I want to be precise and write
great parts, but I also want to have the natural, swinging
improvisational feel of a jazz drummer (Tony Williams and Elvin Jones
in particular) and be able to treat each song like a set of paints I
can use differently each time I play them, conveying something
different on the canvas each time. "The Bed's Too Big Without You,"
"Driven To Tears," and "Message in a Bottle" definitely gave me that
feeling. And of course "Spanish Key" from Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew"
album, maybe even moreso...but that's a feeling created by virtually
complete improvisation by a group of players. So yeah, I'll give it a
rest now. ;-)
  

    
What a wonderful answer!  Thank you so much, Adam. And I can totally hear
Copeland in your playing.  I saw him with Oysterhead and it was 
like hearing a Norse God manifest himself in sound.

>  played in an instrumental indie-jazz band
 called Whitford (http://listen.to/whitford) that recorded a self-titled
 album I'm pretty proud of still. 


Yeah, I remember hearing it.  You guys were good.

> my first band -- Mind Riot -- as a 12 year old

That's so great.

>  Recently we did 13 shows up and down the coast in 13 days, and boy
 that was a trip.

Adam, Gabriel, and Brett:  What do you like/hate most about life on the 
road?
  

    
Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan.  That was my greatest inspiration and
the idea of a folk hero was my version of rock star.  Around the time
I was learning I was very in to sixties rock music as well; Rolling
Stones, Greatful Dead, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane
(Jorma Kaukonen was my guitar hero, Embryonic Journey anyone?),
Quicksilver, and all the rest.  I also had teachers that were friends,
and friends that were teachers that greatly influenced my development
as a guitarist.  As a songwriter I found my own way, because from the
day I started playing, I also started writing.  After an initial period
of guitar basics, I pretty much refused to learn other people's songs,
and focused on writing my own.  The up side was that I was developing
a good songwriting and lyrical sense, the down side was the my guitar
playing remained kinda rudimentary without the influx of ideas you get
from figuring out how other people do it.  Anyways, that was 16 years
old and I have come through and learned from many other musical
influences and phases since then.  I think that I wrote some pretty
good songs early on, and that gave me confidence to continue and the
belief that I had something to offer as an artist.  For me this was
tempered by a lot of insecurities about my skills as a guitarist and a
singer.  I didn't really develop my own style and learn how to use
either of these instruments properly until well in my 20's.

Touring....

Sadly San Francisco has no standing rock scene, each band has to
create their own.  Hence the clubs will only allow you to play about
once every 4 to 6 weeks, because realistically that is all the scene
will support.  So the best part of touring is performing every night,
and really mastering the performance part of it, not just the music.

The worst part of touring is the food, and the sad realization that
the corporations have won.  There is a (town) called Patterson just
south of the I5 interchange when you are heading down to LA from the
Bay Area.  You see the exact same town a thousand times on the road,
and it's depressing.  It's also hard to be away from my wife who is my
best friend, and my dog because I'm hers.
  

    
Yeah...on the road we come up with many, many Mothers of
Invention-esque in-jokes...but the best is probably the running gag
(aka sad reality) that every small town (aka strip mall) we stopped in
along the coast was called Patterson. They all consist of Starbucks,
McDonald's, Subway, etc. and the architecture is nearly identical. You
could be in small town New Jersey, Texas, Idaho, Maine, or California
and it's all Patterson. So every time we needed to stop for food, gas,
urination, etc. someone would say "is there a Patterson around here?" 

But loves/hates on the road?

Hate: The bad food. Not getting to sleep in your own bed (or sometimes
any bed at all). The lack of exercise (sitting in one uncomfortable
position for hours). Making real connections with people and then
having to get back on the road and perhaps never see them again. But
hey, sometimes you meet a beautiful country girl who works in a diner
in Tacoma and she gives you a great smile and you forget how much you
miss home. Or am I quoting a Neil Young song?

Love: getting to play music every night and become a better, tighter
band. meeting new people and experiencing places you've never been to. 
  

    
As an aside, I just learned from Gabriel's post that he's a huge Bob
Dylan fan. The only hint of that I'd caught before this was on the
recent tour when I quoted a line from "Visions of Johanna" under my
breath ("jeez, I can't find my knees") and he recited the next line
immediately. 

Dylan was not only my introduction to songwriting (yes, I have been
writing crappy folk songs on guitar since I was about 18) but also my
introduction to the Beat generation (I heard that Ginsberg had been
Dylan's manager for a time and then I wrote a thesis on Ginsberg in the
11th grade), which was my introduction to <digaman>, who inspired me
to move to San Francisco, which eventually led me to The Love X
Nowhere. It's all about Dylan in the end, although I rarely listen to
the early Dylan anymore. "Time Out of Mind" has virtually been the
soundtrack to my life since I first heard it about six years ago.

Then again, I got into *Dylan* via David Bowie's "Song For Bob Dylan"
when I was 14, but that's a whole 'nother file drawer.
  

    
I'm anxious to learn what was the first thing Brett heard that sounded
like what his vision might be.
  

    
sound and vision?  looks like you just opened that file drawer...
  

    
That's great, guys.  I figured there must be some Dylan connection to the 
name "Love X Nowhere."  Do you want to talk more about the name a bit?

> Jorma Kaukonen was my guitar hero, Embryonic Journey anyone?

Indeed.  "Water Song," too, and a million others.  Still making albums 
too, God bless 'im, though I haven't picked one up in a while.

> After an initial period
 of guitar basics, I pretty much refused to learn other people's songs,
 and focused on writing my own.

Hmm.  I'm not sure what I think about this.  It obviously worked out well 
for you, but quite often young writers will say to me, "I don't read 
anybody else's poetry/novels.  I don't want to be influenced."  And that 
always strikes me as a very bad sign, because then the kid ends up 
thinking that what he or she is doing is very innovative, when actually 
it's more derivative than it would be if the kid was conscious of the 
influence.  But maybe it doesn't work that way with songwriters, and you 
certainly do seem conscious that you have influences.

> Sadly San Francisco has no standing rock scene, each band has to
 create their own.  Hence the clubs will only allow you to play about
 once every 4 to 6 weeks, because realistically that is all the scene
 will support.

I was going to ask you guys about this.  Why do you think this is?  Is 
there simply not enough density of regular show-goers (possibly caused by 
ticker prices, general malaise, etc.) to support a rock scene?  How do you 
think SF compares to other cities in this regard, say, Portland or Eugene 
or Boulder or....?

> So every time we needed to stop for food, gas,
 urination, etc. someone would say "is there a Patterson around here?" 


That's hilarious and sad.  I've noticed that too when I travel.  Even in 
my lifetime the regional flavor of places like Cape Cod and south Florida 
has been drastically homogenized into the mall culture.  I think about 
that a lot;  how will kids have a special feeling about a place when all 
the businesses are the same everywhere and the trees are gone?

> But
 hey, sometimes you meet a beautiful country girl who works in a diner
 in Tacoma and she gives you a great smile and you forget how much you
 miss home. Or am I quoting a Neil Young song?


I think you're quoting hundreds of years of the ballad tradition.

Hm, Ginsberg was Dylan's manager for a while?  I don't remember that.  
I'll look into it.

> Then again, I got into *Dylan* via David Bowie's "Song For Bob Dylan"
 when I was 14, but that's a whole 'nother file drawer.


And a very interesting file drawer.  One of the things I think is
interesting about TLXN's music is that I pick up disparate influences in
it, though I may be imagining them;  for instance, I hear some Pink Floyd
in some of the Odyssey songs, and some Miles Davis plus the Dead's "Eyes
of the World" in the wonderful epic track "Spill the Ink" on "Into the
Fire."  I like how you guys seem musically omnivorous -- prog-rock, jazz, 
Dylan, it all goes into the mix.
  

    
> ticker prices

That was some kind of economic Freudian slip.  "Ticket" of course!
  

    
Breaking news...  Dean Ween's snack tips:

http://www.chocodog.com/chocodog/ween/ween_new/waste.html

I love Ween.  And that's a whole 'NOTHER file drawer, located under the 
bong, busted pinatas, and coconut brassieres.
  

    
Great topic! Stewart Copeland and Jorma!

Hey,  these are guys playing TONIGHT at the Sweetwater in Mill Valley!

I notice there's an opening act. What time do you guys think you'll be
on? (I need to watch the Warrior's game).
  

    
To the best of my knowledge Ginsberg never managed Dylan, who's always
had someone at *least* as competent as Albert Grossman on his case. 

As for the eating-while-touring goes, the towns which got missed by
the freeways are often a good bet, although you have to build the time
to get there and back into the equation. There used to be a series of
books called The Interstate Gourmet which dealt with this, arranged by
states, because a friend of mine did New Mexico/Arizona. There was a
whole panel about this at SXSW a few years back; it's a real problem.
  

    
"Incompetent" isn't quite the disqualifying word -- Ginsberg arguably 
"managed" Kerouac and Burroughs until they all got famous -- but I can't 
imagine Ginsberg subsuming his own ego and agenda by the point in his 
career that Dylan would have needed managing.
  

    
By "competent," I meant versed in contract law and confrontation with
publishers, record companies, and concert promoters. 

I can't quite see him doing that.
  

    

Ginsberg tagged along on most of the first Rolling Thunder tour as a
sort of freelance eminence grise presence, but I seriously doubt that he
had any official business responsibilities.  It wouldn't surprise me,
though, if Dylan had jokingly introduced Allen to someone as his
"manager" and was taken seriously.
  

    
> Ginsberg tagged along on most of the first Rolling Thunder tour as a
 sort of freelance eminence grise presence

Good point.  He also contributed a few items to the tour newspaper:
'

"Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine
Jiggling yr knees blankeyed in the rain
When it snows in yr nose you catch cold in yr brain"
  

    
SWEETWATER TONIGHT!!!  TLXN ON AT 10PM

It is a real problem, because of course the food you eat affects how
you feel and think, how you get along with each other, and how you
create and perform.  No joke, the highway food can bring a band down. 
I sincerely hope we reach a point of success where touring can also
mean travelling a bit, not just getting from place to place, and hence
we can find some off the interstate, unadulteralted america.  I know
it's out there, but no one would argue there is less and less.

I think there are two main factors to why SF is the way it is.  The
first is the fractured nature of the current music scene, and the fact
that SF is a world leader in dance music.  I'd say 80% of the people
out for music on any given night are going to a dj or dance club, so
all bands are vying for a smaller pool of possible listeners.  The
other is a two edged sword.  Every touring band in the world comes
through here.  If they are only playing 4 dates in the US, SF is one of
them.  So almost every night you are competing against the best music
the United States and world has to offer.  I'm a concert going freak,
so I love it, but it does have an effect on the local music scene.