Jackie Greene -The Prince of Americana (INTERVIEW)

The New York Times called Jackie Greene “ The Prince of Americana” and while that’s high compliment indeed (in the venerable paper’s inimitably glib way), it hardly does justice to the versatile talent of this young California musician.

With four albums and a DVD to his credit, Greene, 27, hasn’t really come out of nowhere, but he reached a whole different level of visibility when he joined Phil Lesh and Friends in the summer of 2007. Greene’s diverse skills have allowed him to become this group’s de facto frontman, a role to which he has conveyed a commanding stage presence as he sparks both his band-mates and audiences.

As a singer, songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist, and harpist within Phil and Friends, Greene has become the catalyst for absolutely compelling stage performances. The well-wrought material of the Grateful Dead sparkles anew next to Green’s own originals and covers that range from The Rolling Stones (“Brown Sugar”) to Bob Dylan (“A Hard Rain’s A’Gonna Fall”), all of which are surrounded by lengthy adventuresome improvisations.

Jackie Greene’s stature will surely rise yet another level altogether with the April release of his new album Giving Up the Ghost. Co-producing the project with Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin (Berlin oversaw Greene’s last studio effort American Myth), Greene employs his experience as an increasingly skilled recording artist (he now has his own studio) on a dozen original songs that radiate intelligence, vulnerability and a willingness to take chances—not to mention a healthy sense of humor.

Not surprisingly, all those character traits were in evidence as he spoke with Glide in a conversation that reaffirms the truth of Jackie Greene’s music as an absolutely accurate reflection of who he really is.

Having listened to Giving Up the Ghost, the tracks with horns may be some of the strongest on the whole album. They’re so uplifting. When you go out on the road with your own band, do you play material from throughout your career…do you throw in covers?

On this one we’re going to try and do a lot of the new stuff. There’s a lot of ones people scream for from the old ones and we’ll eventually get around to doing those, but there’s not enough time in the night to do everything. And we find that there are songs that we love to play live and those will show up a lot. And we do some covers but not very many, maybe one a night.

One well-chosen cover can make a night or make everything else around it stand out.

Right. Sometimes there are sets that can be similar from one night to another, and then all of a sudden, they’ll dramatically change and that is only due to me basically (laughs).

I was going to ask you…“How do you devise your setlists?” If, in fact, you have them at all, how much they change as you hit the stage and you work your way through the evening?

Ours is quite funny because there’s more times than I can count than I can come up with a setlist and say “Oh, this is going to be great” and we get up there and we get playing and we go “Let’s do this one instead!” It happens a lot to me and I don’t really know why. There’s times when the drummer will help make a set list, but generally I make it and I show it to them and they go “Why don’t we change this around and put this here? Then we can take this song into this song and we can change this around? And we go “OK, let’s try that.” If it doesn’t work, then, we just don’t ever do it again. The audience, unfortunately, is sometimes our guinea pig. We don’t feel bad about that actually…

Ultimately I have found out that the audience is there to have fun and if it looks like we’re having fun—you gotta lead by example. We gotta have fun first and then everybody else will loosen up and they’ll have a good time. And it won’t matter so much: “Yeah, that that was almost a trainwreck, but that was kind of cool.?”

I wanted to ask you about the album because it seems like such a definite progression from American Myth and as I went back through your other records too, it seems like you’ve taken a pretty straight path forward instead of what often happens: two steps forward, one step back—do you feel like you’ve gone forward every time?

It’s tough to say for me because I’m the guy that lives with myself everyday. It’s a little easier to make that comparison when you’re a listener and your only point of reference is the record that came out two years ago and then you have this one. There’s a whole time frame in between there where there are things that have happened and shaped the way I view things, the way I perceive things and the way I go about doing things. So I don’t really notice that much of a change myself, it seems relatively natural to me, But I am aware of how other people may see that because they don’t seem me every day.

You are listed as co-producer with Steve Berlin and he got sole producer credit on American Myth; how much of a change was it working with him on the new album?

I helped produce it because we did a lot of it in my own studio. One of the things that happened in those two years was that I began to own a studio. So I learned, recording other bands and recording myself, I learned a lot about making records and it organically happened that way: it started at my place and grew from that. In terms of difficulty, though, it’s a lot easier working with someone a second time because there’s no ‘getting to know you’ period. We immediately know each other, we immediately like each other, I pick him up at the airport and we go to work. We can call each other’s bullshit right off the bat and in that respect it’s a lot easier.

Did you have to call each other’s bullshit a lot during these sessions?

Oh we always do that working together. We’re bound to do that. There’s a good thirty-forty year age difference: I gotta keep him young and he’s gotta keep me in check. We don’t go at each other’s throats or argue all that much, but there are definitely differences of opinion and both are valid. And you’ve got to find a way to accommodate both…or sometimes not. (laughs)

I read an interview that noted—and I don’t know if it’s true or not—that Steve actually picked the songs that ended up on the album. Is that what happened?

It’s not that simple. He definitely had a hand in it. What basically happens is, I have twenty or thirty songs and I give them all to him. And because they’re my songs, I’m not really the right person to be picking them, so what he does is go “Well, I think these songs go good together” and then I go “OK you’re right but what about this one…or that one?” But you are right: he did pick the songs and there are probably another ten stragglers lying around. There’s no easy clean way of doing that but it’s guilt-free on my part.

Another overlooked part of being a producer—and what Steve’s very good at and I’m awful at—is time management in the studio. We don’t sit there and fuck around with a song if it’s not going to go anywhere.

When you present Steve with songs, do you have demos and, if you do that, do you have a general arrangement on the demo (or at least in your head) that you’re going to work from?

Yeah I do. I’ve always been a home-recording nerd and since I have a studio, I made kind of some lush demos (laughs). And in fact a lot of the demos are on the record. “Animal” is a song that was a demo that we just built upon because the vibe felt so good. He’s really into that kind of thing. Sometimes a demo is really great and for whatever reason you need to fix a couple things and “Animal” is one of those examples.

I sent him full demos on things and he listened to it with a producer’s ear and he suggested some changes arrangement wise and what not. “Shaken” is a good example: in the original demo version, there’s a B-section that happens without any lyrics that he suggested because he liked it so much and in the original version I didn’t have it twice: “Why don’t you put that instrumental part in again?”…And we butted heads on it. But then when we did it, I saw that “Yeah, that is pretty cool.” Each of us as an artist has to be open to those possibilities.

I had only heard of you from a distance until last year when I heard you were going to play with Phil Lesh. So I listened to some of your stuff and I could see immediately just by the style of your material why he would find it so inviting to have you play in his band. Yet I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I went to your shows in Boston last fall; I went to both of them and I was very impressed with both nights but especially the first night; as somebody said to me after the show: “If I’d wandered into the Orpheum (Theatre) tonight, not knowing who those guys were on stage, I would’ve thought that was Jackie Greene and his band. He just led the charge.” And I said, “You know you’re right. He was singing, he was playing, he was playing lead guitar and he was commanding the stage.” It’s like you couldn’t have been more confident about what you were doing. Is that how you’ve been playing with Phil since you started working with him?

No, it definitely didn’t start that way because I started out more cautious. Because I didn’t know these people and didn’t really know the material all that well. But it became clear to me that what needed to happen in that band is basically a charge of energy. And there was no one else, in my opinion, that was really going to give that. And I’m thinking, “Well I’m the youngest guy here…” And that’s kind of what he hired me for… and I gotta do it.” So I took it upon myself to start doing these songs…. I was never really a Deadhead to begin with, so a lot of this material is relatively new to me whereas it’s almost forty years old to most other people. So for me it’s easy to be fresh for me. To perform it like it’s fresh, because it is fresh.

I think what people are witnessing is someone up there singing it like the first time he sang it. And I’m really feeling a lot of these songs. I think that translates, I don’t think you can fake that.

Absolutely not. It looked as natural as can be for you to take charge. And being in charge that night, you really connected with the crowd especially during Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A’Gonna Fall.” Did you have literal conversations with Phil when you started out?: “What do you want my role to be?” What do you want me to do?”…Or did it just evolve?

It just evolved that way just as everyone else’s role evolved who’s in that band. Certainly it’s Phil’s band and we certainly do whatever songs he wants to do, but every one of the musicians comes from a separate background. I could just sit there and noodle away, but that’s not me: I want to get up there and perform. It’s called a show for a reason.

It feels good to me to put a spark. I’ve noticed that when I get a little crazy and move around a lot, it gets, you know, Larry (Campbell, multi-instrumentalist with Phil and Friends) excited and Larry will start smiling. And it makes everyone have more fun and play together and be a band. That’s kind of like the ‘lead by example’ thing. You just gotta go do it.  I don’t think about it all that much, to be honest.

It’s interesting you mention Larry Campbell too because as I’ve watched him play with Phil in other lineups and with Levon (Helm’s) band, he’s pretty reserved. It seems like you helped get him going, at least those two nights in Boston, where your playing with him loosened him up and made him go ”Oh, I can do that too!” and he stepped forward and went further. It was great to see.

He is sort of the quiet mysterious guy, even off stage a little bit too. But I know he‘s this fantastic musician and I know we can get it out of him. It’s like you’re poking him with a little stick going “C’mon Larry, c’mon dude…I know it’s in there, c’mon buddy.”

Now that you’ve got the new album coming out and you’re obviously ready to give it a lot of attention, and get people to pay a lot of attention to it, do you foresee continuing to play with Phil for a period of time?  Does he want to keep this band together for the long-term?

Yes, this same band. Phil loves it. He’s really stoked on this band. It’s starting to feel like a band instead of like a jam. We can be jammy, but we can also be tight: we can get all Stones-y, you know?

Has the experience of playing with Phil made a big difference in the way you play your own material on stage?

The biggest thing for me is in the songs I’ve been writing lately, I’ve been taking a lot of influence form these Grateful Dead songs. In order to perform them a lot I’ve been studying them and realized how great they are. And so I’ve been influenced a lot by them, not a lot of the songs on this new record so much, but more of the songs you’ll hear on the next record. And playing live with my band, we’ve started to stretch out more. The songs get a little loongerr…We jam a little more… we’re taking a few more chances. Phil has made me more comfortable with that; I was not comfortable with it at first: “Uh oh, that’s scary…”

Well it takes a lot of courage to stretch out when you’re playing music.

Phil sort of instilled this idea that it’s ok, “you can screw up and it’s ok!” “Oh really?…Are you sure?” (laughs)…”Yeah, don’t worry about it.” And once I got that in my head, now I’m able to be free in Phil and Friends, and do what I normally do–which is that energy thing–and be ok with it.

 

 

Related Content

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter