Back in the 1940’s a pair of songwriters named Jerome Bresler and Larry Wynn wrote a tune called “Five Guys Named Moe.” The song became a hit single by blues great Louis Jordan. Nearly fifty years later a small group of college buddies in and around the Buffalo area decided to form a band and name themselves after this song title. Soon after, “Five Guys Named Moe” was shortened to just “moe.” And yes, the name of the band is lower case letters “m-o-e” with a period at the end. moe. And yes, it’s one of the goofiest names in the history of rock music but for some weird reason, it suits this group perfectly.
The five guys in moe. right now are Vinnie Amico on drums, Jim Loughlin on percussion, Al Schnier on lead guitar, keyboards, and vocals, Rob Derhak on bass and vocals and Chuck Garvey also on lead guitar and vocals.
moe. is a jam band. That’s a phrase that implies other things beside being a band that jams as Chuck will explain in this interview. However, moe. is most definitely a band that jams. To me they are the ultimate jam band. One example of what I’m talking about is a live disc they released back in 1996 called “Meat.” The disc is over 46 minutes long and only has one song on it. That song, of course, is “Meat.” And get this – the song only has one word that’s sung. Yeah, you guessed it! The word is “meat.” The rest is all instrumental jamming. Are you starting to get the idea? Some of moe.’s songs are so long they make “Mountain Jam” look like “Her Majesty.” Of course that’s a bit of an exaggeration but only a little bit.
I spoke with moe.’s phenomenal guitarist Chuck Garvey by phone. I’ll admit that this interview is rambling, a tad disjointed, and all over the place – kind of like a moe. song. But hopefully it all comes together in the end – just like a moe. song!
BH – Hey Chuck, is the phrase ‘jam band’ something you guys embrace?
CG – “We definitely embrace it because we are a band that jams. We’re an improvising rock band or you can say we’re a jam band and people get the picture. It also has negative connotations, maybe more so a few years ago, but at this point jam band has become such a wide variety of music under the umbrella of jam band, that it’s not a very accurate way to describe things. You can say jam bands are part of the live music society and maybe they improvise and that’s about it. It could be bluegrass. Is Bela Fleck considered a jam band? The Disco Biscuits are a little more techno, are they a jam band? We’re pretty much like a rock and roll band that tries to write pop songs. There are a lot of variations on what a jam band is. So we embrace it because we are part of the live music culture, or the society that plays quite often in front of a live audience. It is what it is and I think that’s where music is at right now. And it’s really just a tag for all these alternative bands that you won’t normally find on the radio or MTV.”
BH – Besides moe. some of my other favorite jam bands are the String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic and all of you are completely different from each other.
CG - “Yeah, there’s as many differences as you can possibly think of and that’s a great thing. That means basically that the music, not the music industry, but music in general is thriving in that there are so many different influences on younger bands or just the live music as a whole right now. And that diversity is something that I think is very good. And I think it’s very good for the music industry even though what we’re doing is kind of outside of that right now, especially since we have our own record label and we pay for our own recordings, and we do everything on our own. It’s very much do it yourself. You don’t have any big corporations looking over your shoulder telling you how to do things and that’s really what the freedom in this scene is all about. It’s just everyone doing what they want to do.”
BH – I understand that you’re working on a new CD now. Will it be the concept as the ‘Wormwood’ disc?
CG - “Not exactly but in the same way that we did ‘Wormwood’ with our own guerilla recording setup. We setup in the State Theater in Portland Maine and did all of our basic tracks there because it was a nice live room. It had its own ambiance and it was actually a very lively sound as opposed to going into a studio and recording the drums and having everything, you know, you kind of put this digital reverb and everything on later. This is something that jam bands, particularly live music bands, feel very at odds with because you’re kind of creating music in a vacuum whereas we prefer the character of actually playing on a stage and playing to a room, playing to an actual space rather than just trying to make everything sound good under a microscope. So in that way it’s going to be similar to ‘Wormwood.’ But right now we’re doing overdubs in a smaller studio. So it’s going to have different elements kind of put together but it’s not going to be like the live beginning of ‘Not Coming Down’ where you can hear the crowd noise. You’re not going to hear that kind of stuff on this album. It’s going to be a bit different.”
BH – Is there a release date yet?
CG - “We’re thinking it’s going to come out in January. We were hoping for October but it looks like January.”
BH – Will moe. release another ‘Warts and All’ disc, the live recordings you’ve been releasing these past few years?
CG – “Yeah actually we have another one from Des Moines, Iowa of all places in the works right now. And actually I do the art work for the covers of those, the drawings. So right now as we’re in the studio I have to get that together and do some art work at the same time. I think they’re waiting on me to get my shit together. But we have one picked and it’s in the works right now. So we’ll definitely be continuing that tradition.”
BH – Chuck, I’ve always been blown away by the extraordinary chemistry between you guys. Where does that come from?
CG - “I think it’s kind of like we made this little club and we have all of our own inside jokes and just the kind of things you have with friends from high school or college where there are just a couple of guys who have been through a lot together and for better or worse you’re brothers. Definitely there’s a sense of humor thing which is a big part of it and then another part of it is simply creating music and making art. It’s hard to do with friends, it’s hard to do with family, it’s hard to be in a business together but I think the sense of humor and friendship is what makes the business aspect of it or the work of it easier. As long as you balance the two things you’re going to enjoy yourself. So I think it’s always kind of like a balancing act like that. You can get away with the jokes but you also you have to concentrate and support each other when you’re actually working. We just kind of over time and a lot of miles of traveling and whatever, we struck a balance in how we do that. And keeping it fun is definitely a big concern for us.”
BH – I really don’t know much about your own personal story. How did your musical odyssey begin?
CG - “I started playing saxophone when I was around ten years old. My parents were both music teachers but I think they wisely decided not to try to teach me anything. But they were very supportive obviously through grade school and high school. So I played saxophone for nine years and I learned how to read music and play in front of people. Every once in a while you have to stand up and take a solo, you have to put yourself out there to make mistakes. I never had tons and tons of confidence doing that but at the same time I realized that I had a good ear for it and I knew that when you play with a bunch of other people in an ensemble or whatever, I knew how to balance what I was doing with everyone else. I think the first guitar I got didn’t even have strings on it. I bought it for three and a half dollars from our next door neighbor at a tag sale. It was one of those Japanese Teisco Del Ray models, like there were four pick ups on it and locker switches, all kinds of crazy stuff. I didn’t even know what it did but my dad had a little Ampeg amp that he played saxophone through and he gave the amp to me to goof around with, with the guitar. I think I was about thirteen, maybe a little bit younger and I didn’t even know how to put strings on it. And I slowly learned how to do that and how to not get shocked by leaning on metal objects in my basement.”
BH – Where was this?
CG - “This was near Utica, New York. It was just a slow learning process of how does the amplifier work, how does the guitar work. I never took any lessons but one of my sisters had a little Beatle acoustic guitar as well so I just kind of taught myself how to play stuff on that.”
BH – Were you one of those musical geeks who would play for hours on end and even sleep with your guitar?
CG - “Definitely, but not very well. It wasn’t like I was playing scales or anything. I was just kind of like learning by listening to the Police and David Bowie and the Who and classic rock radio in general. It was really when I discovered David Bowie I realized that every album I bought from his catalog sounded different. There was like a different incarnation and a different sound and a different style to every album. And I thought that was pretty amazing. Where with the Police there was an evolution but they always sounded like themselves. So I just taught myself how to play by listening to bands like that and figuring it out. I already knew a little bit about theory from playing saxophone and just basically taught myself everything by ear.”
BH – Tell me about the genesis of the band? I hear that it was you and Rob that started this adventure.
CG - “Rob and I met, he had gone to school near Utica and then New Hampshire and his first year at Buffalo was my first year at Buffalo. We met actually through a common friend who I went to high school with. And as it turns out, at the time, she was Al’s girlfriend although Al didn’t live in Buffalo. So Rob and I started playing acoustic guitars in the dorm we lived in. There was like a common bathroom with a big shower stall area whatever, an acoustic guitar sounded great in there and basically rather than doing any kind of work we played acoustic guitar and hung out. That was pretty much it. Another common friend of ours got us together with a drummer and Rob had started learning bass after that first year. The following Halloween we played a bunch of cover tunes at a Halloween party in somebody’s basement and that was basically the
beginning of the band.”
BH – I heard that these clubs in Buffalo would stay open to all hours and that you started stretching out your songs so you’d have enough material to fill the night. Is that true?
CG - “That’s partially true. Actually at the time when we first started doing it the songs were bizarre and fast and not really extended. But in Buffalo the bars stayed open until four or later, so that had a little bit to do with it. But another aspect was we started traveling around New York state. Our first travel gigs were like Poniana where Al went to school and all of the small college towns in upstate New York and Erie Pennsylvania and Toronto. And basically, just to keep things interested for us on a daily basis, we started extending the songs. Al was a really big deadhead and he said ‘why can’t we start stretching things out?’ It was really like if you have to play for three or four hours a night and you don’t have a ton of material, you have to stretch everything.”
BH – Do you feel like the band is still improving?
CG - “Definitely, there are periods where you feel like you stagnate and then all of the sudden there’s a freshness to how you approach songs that we’ve been playing for ten years. And that comes from improvising, that comes from just being influenced by different things that are current. And keeping older songs current is another thing that keeps us interested. But what’s hard is that every once in a while you feel like music sucks and then you hear something or you come across something that is new and fresh and it makes you excited about creating again. And that is something that’s a constant process. Maybe I’ll be down on my own abilities or songwriting or whatever and Rob is kicking ass and writing a bunch of tunes and it kind of goes in waves like that. But I think that’s a good thing. That’s how the band supports itself in that everyone is trying to bring some new sounds and a freshness to different kinds of music that we can try to make.”
BH – Do you have any side projects that you’re working on?
CG - “I did a side project called ‘All Thumbs’ which was with two friends, Gibb Droll and Johnny Hickman who is a guitarist for the band Cracker. It’s just that sometimes you find the time to actually do it and other times moe. is just either touring or working or doing whatever quite a bit. And I think just as of late we don’t have much time to devote to side things like that. We’ve been busy recording, touring, working on our DVD, and trying to release a ‘Warts and All.’ This past year has been really jam packed with moe. related stuff and there just isn’t much time to do other things.”
Check out www.moe.org for more information on this unique and wonderful band. Now what do you say we close this out with a few verses from that old Bresler/Wynn song?