The Other Ones Gig

It Started with Phil & Friends

SK
There are Phil & Friends shows August 7th and 8th [1998] at the Fillmore. That's how that whole Other Ones thing got started. This lady Kathy who works for Phil at the Unbroken Chain thing called me up and said, Do you want to do a Phil & Friends? and so I said, Sure. She called up like a week later and said, Do you want to audition for the Furthur Tour? for the Other Ones thing. So I went and auditioned on a Monday morning, just like this, and I'm totally fogged. I went down there and played, and it was fun, and it was nice to see those guys. Then a couple of days later they called back and said, "Nah, never mind. We got somebody else." And I said, "Cool." Then a week later they called back and said, "Will you come back to rehearsal?" And I went, "OK, I'll think about it." So I went back, and that was it, so I'm already in and out of the thing.

Calico
What I get in our communications - and we get a lot of it because we get hundred of phone calls and more e-mail messages every day - is, "Wow, now that Kimock's on the tour, I want to go to more places."

SK
Cool. That's good! Is any of that information communicated in any way to the band or to anybody else?

Calico
Uh-huh.

SK
The people that can do something about stuff, generally don't surround themselves with people who know, because people that know then get into the thing with people that do stuff about stuff, right? So people that know talk to people who care, and then people that care eventually talk to the people that can do something about stuff, but people that know generally don't talk to people that can do something about anything, and the people that can do something about anything generally don't talk to people that know. There's like this "people that care" thing in the middle. You know what I mean?

X
I think I'm following you.

Bass Greats, Lesh and Vega

Calico
Maybe he's never in doubt.

X
That could be it.

SK
That's a good answer. No, both of those guys are great players. They're both unfailingly musical. Bobby is never at a loss for the groove, and Phil is never at a loss for the note choice thing. Phil's a great player. Playing melodically on the bass - and this is something that I deal with with Bobby all the time - there's some hierarchy of note choice relative to register, where there's different kinds of tension and release, and relative degrees of consonance and dissonance, relative to the register you're in. In higher registers there's obviously way more stuff you can get away with, so to understand how to play melodically in that register Phil plays or Bobby Vega plays, it's a whole different ballgame down there. I don't really understand it, in fact. I know how to work my side of the street, but it's different, down that low.

Who Plays What Solo?

SK
Yeah, with like 30 guitar players.

X
... with three guitars, and in this fairly short amount of time, the whole group has had to rehearse and get familiar with material and arrangements. Have you literally worked out where you're going to play a lead or a melody or a fill here and Mark Karan

is going to play it there? Is it mapped out who's going to solo?

SK
Well, not much. There's some stuff where right inside a tune - for example, in Sugar Magnolia, after the first little chorus, I think it's my job to take that break. I think! We'll see. It kind of gets switched around, and it's hither and yon. It'll settle in once we get going, I think. And there's a couple of tunes, what the hell is it? Corinna, I think.

X
A very rhythm-based song.

SK
Yeah, where I was just like, Oh, this is cool. I can just skank on this. And then somebody says, How about some solos? and I'm like, "No, man, I'm with the rhythm section." I dig that.

X
The Dead used to be accused of being all rhythm section. You've got two drummers, and at times they've had two keyboard players. You often have many different rhythms overlaid, going on at the same time. Is it hard to pick your way between them, or float something in there?

SK
It's cool. I have so much fun. Admittedly it's been like one gig. "One data point," as Doug [Greene] would say, "does not a curve make," but I really dig playing with both those drummers. Of course, I don't really know either of them or their stuff that much, but just being in the section, I actually got to the point where I could have one eye on Molo and one eye on Mickey Hart, and play with both of them at the same time, limbs going everywhere. It was very cool. So I dig that.

But, specifically in terms of the distribution of the soloing and the parts, I came to the thing a little late, so as much of the responsibility for playing any of the parts stuff that Mark is willing to take, he's more than welcome to. I don't know the material all that very well. I've heard a lot of it, but I've never played it before, because the whole Jerry Garcia thing, as cool as it is, has also kind of cast a pretty long shadow over the stuff that I've been doing. I showed up in California in '75 or '76 and people would say, "You sound like Jerry Garcia," and I would go, "Well, I was trying to sound like Roy Buchanan, so I'm obviously fucking it up." In many way, I'm clueless. Probably in many other ways, it's perfect that I am clueless. So, how it's exactly going to work out, I don't know.

Rehearsing the Oldies

SK
I'm relatively clueless. I think most of the stuff that got played at the Warfield was the "A List" of stuff to learn, either because they wanted to do it or because they thought it would be easy to learn. For example, they just asked me this in the radio interview, "Are you going to play Dark Star?" And I said, yeah, I guess so. We spent all damn day on it!

I listened to Dark Star the other day from the record [Live/Dead] and - what a great track, man! that's a bad jam! there's all kind of great stuff going on there - where they're coming from, playing that stuff, playing the spaces, playing the music, I'm there anyway. I don't have to rehearse that. I might be patting myself on the back, but I think I'm there to do the unrehearsable part of it. But everybody else in rehearsal, they're learning that stuff. They're figuring it out. I don't care how many times they've played it. What do you work on when you're working on St. Stephen, when you're working on Dark Star? You're working on the text of the tune. The exploratory portions of it are necessarily left for later.

The Depth and Breadth of Hornsby's Bag

SK
Yeah, there's going to be other good stuff, different stuff. We got to whatever we could get to in rehearsal. The Hornsby stuff I really dug too.

X
Hornsby seems like the kind of player who can pick up on little sounds he hears and throw them back at other musicians.

SK
He's so sharp and fast. He's great. His presence as a player and a person was probably the thing that hit me most strongly initially, because he just does it all. There's a lot of music in that guy, and obviously in everybody else who's playing too, but Hornsby plays the piano and knows all that literature. There's so much great piano music, and he knows all of it. He'll sit down and play Gershwin. He'll sit down and play Charles Ives. He sits down and plays Bach. Sits down and plays Bill Evans, just like Bill Evans played. It's spooky. And he rocks, and he writes hit tunes. Guys that play all that stuff, they either play the piano or they're some kind of rock star or something like that and they don't get it, but Hornsby, the depth and breadth of his bag, man, is fuckin' amazing. Inconceivable. He's got it all. He's cool.

Call the Tune?

SK
Don't know.

X
And you haven't brought material to them to play, like, "Let's play Elizabeth Reed," or anything along those lines?

SK
Hardly my place.

Have Guitars, Will Travel

SK
I'm bringing the new guitar (which is the Florida guitar), the Explorer (the one with the angles), the white stratocaster (which is kind of like my main squeeze), the Vega (which is the guitar that I play the most around the house), the Epiphone Emperor, and a couple of lap steels. That's it.

One thing that's cool is I'm going to get to play some more lap steel on the thing, which I'm real excited about. At first I thought, it's going to be the usual, a couple of guitars, but I'll get a chance to play some more steel just to help spread out the available guitar tonality.

X
There are tunes that had steel on them, like the Wheel, which was on a Jerry Garcia solo album originally. He plays several guitars on the cut, but he plays a pedal steel on that.

SK
Yeah, see that's good, because I wasn't aware of that. That's good to know. I'll have to look at that song.

X
Then there's the question of playing it where it wasn't played before.

SK
I think the lap steel thing is going to work nice. I'm not going to play pedal steel with these guys. That's too much of a hassle, just another layer of production complexity that I'm not willing to deal with relative to the time involved playing it.

X
How come the lap steel isn't a hassle?

SK
Well, I've got the legs, man. I've got legs, so I can stand up and play that. And that's cool. You have to sit down and play the pedal steel. And then, you play too much steel, man, it makes it hard to play the guitar. The angles that you have to hold your body at are so different, and the weight of the big steel bar is a lot to deal with.

Editor's Note: Steve's lap steel guitars appear to have been mounted on legs for the Other Ones tour, according to show reports (often misidentifying them as pedal steel guitars) and photographs.

How Do You Get That Sound?