Eric Krasno loves his music–as if you didn’t know that by over a decade of his playing in Lettuce, Soulive, Chapter 2 and his increasingly frequent sit-ins over recent years. He may not be the most voluble man alive, but when he begins to discuss the creative process of making music, no, all things related to music (including his favorite musicians), his voice gains a lilt and a concentrated focus similar to that of his playing.
The bulk of his conversation with Doug Collette is devoted to the latest Soulive project, their homage to The Beatles, Rubber Soulive. Interestingly enough, considering the freshness and economy of the recorded work, the concept has been in discussion for years, coming to fruition through the trio’s whimsical decision to devote some entire sets to the music of the legendary Liverpudlians and a reacquaintance with the music renewed, as no doubt was the case of so many, by the release of remastered Beatles CDs in the fall of 2009.
But the dialogue didn’t stop there, as Krasno, again as is his wont when handling a guitar, found a groove and moved into discussion of how the Beatles material translates to the stage, his solo album, the work of Jimi Hendrix and the means by which he solidifies his bond with his collaborators, not confined to immediate partners Alan and Neal Evans, but increasingly close friend Derek Trucks as well as drummer extraordinaire Adam Deitch (Lettuce, John Scofield, the Adam Deitch Project).
It’s a fascinating journey through the mind of a music lover who also plays, so the insight into recording technique, the joys of the road, and the seemingly infinite opportunities to explore new ideas with new musicians fairly leaps from the text. And though it’s a trite saying about interviews—“You had to be there”—the infectious (mutual) pleasantry so resonates from this interaction, any reader would be hard pressed to resist listening to some of Eric Krasno’s music, the very first chance available, after perusing this piece.
Thanks for taking some time to talk to me today. Have you ever been busier in your whole life?
(laughs) There is a lot going with all the different projects
I wanted to talk at length about the latest Soulive project, but I can’t go very long without telling you how much I enjoy your solo album Reminisce.
Thank you, I appreciate that a lot.
It must’ve been great to do something with a lot of familiar faces at a familiar location (Soulive drummer)– Alan (Evans’) studio.
Yeah, it’s a great spot. It’s really cool to be able to go there. He’s a great engineer and it’s definitely the best situation you could ask for.
Did he feel stretched at all trying to do the Soulive album, engineering and playing virtually at the same time?
Not really. He has things set up so he doesn’t really have to move things around much. There’s only three of us there, so he’s got his little remote thing so he can record right next to his drums using basic faders on a laptop. So we’ll try to record as much as we can and then go into mixing mode. The great thing about it is that a lot of the sounds you hear are the sounds we heard when we were recording. There wasn’t lot of post-production or overdubs: there were only may a couple overdubs when I added a couple extra rhythm parts or an extra lead part, but primarily all the solos and everything were live. It was a pretty easy recording process.
It’s interesting to hear you say that because the album (RubberSoulive on Royal Family Recordings) sounds fresh from start to finish. Although I didn’t consciously listen for overdubs, nothing jumped out at me and that’s one of the great virtues of the album: it sounds like you just got together in the studio, had all the tunes set to go, then you all ran right through them and nailed them, one right after another.
That’s right!
I understand the idea for doing the Beatles tribute came from you working on their song “Get Back” for your solo album, is that true?
Well, really before that we’d talked about it. We’ve definitely discussed how cool it’d be to do a Beatles record instrumental. Then when I was recording my record, it just came up to do that, so we played it a couple times and then said “Oh let’s do it!” Then, listening back to that, when that was coming out and being mixed that sparked the idea again: “We should do a whole album as Soulive.” We were literally on the road and the Beatles remasters were coming out and I picked up some of those and we were listening and that was all happening at the same time. We literally had three or four days off in between two little runs of mini-tours and, rather than go home, we decided we’d go to Al’s studio because we were going to be back there anyway. So it turned into making that record.
Nice! I’m interested to know how you actually went about choosing the tunes that you wanted to do. Did you all submit lists or did you have brainstorming sessions?
We pretty much did it all sitting there together. We went down and put it all into iTunes, there were like hundreds of songs there—and we just started going through them. We had a few that we knew would translate well: I knew I wanted us to do: “I Want You (She’s so Heavy) is one of my favorites….
That’s a great opportunity for you to just crank it on guitar, isn’t it?
(laughs) Yeah it is—exactly! And for the other ones there were two phases: we’d go “That one would be great to do” and we’d try to play it and if it felt great, we’d keep playing. It was all about find the right ones for us; some of them we tried to keep true to the original, something that had a groove thing on it, and if not, we would take the melody and chords and just put on whatever we felt like doing to it, you know? There wasn’t a lot of premeditation going on: if we sat down to do a tune and it worked, we just kept going.
The question comes to mind, then, can you remember one or two tunes that didn’t work for some reason?
Yeah, a couple. I thought “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” was going to work really well– have you ever heard the Joe Cocker version? —but it didn’t quite connect like we thought it would in the way the melody and groove went together. It might have if we’d worked on it more, but there were so many tunes, we thought, “Let’s just keep moving” and if we want, we can come back to it. That was the only one we fully recorded, the other ones we’d just start laying on it, then move on.
I suppose to keep working on something that didn’t fall right together would’ve detracted from the spontaneity of what you were doing anyway, so that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Right, right…
I’d be interesting to know if, at any point you were trying them out, or in preparation once you had decided to do this, did you go and listen, either individually or as a group, to the original Beatles recordings to get a feel for what they did? Or did you just wing it by recollection?
In some cases, one or the other, I remember for “In My Life,” that’s one of my favorites and I really wanted to do it, there’s a solo section, kind of a baroque thing that (Beatles producer) George Martin plays a harpsichord (on Rubber Soul); on the original, they slowed it down to half-speed so he could play it –it’s pretty hard to play at that tempo. If you notice that run at the end, it’s almost physically impossible to play because they sped it back up. Neal (Evans, Soulive keyboardist) not only had to play it, but play while playing the bassline with his left hand, so we researched how the Beatles and Martin did that and went “Wait! There’s no way we can do that!” Neal then proceeded to say “We’ll overdub it?!” and we said “No! No!” So he then spent ten minutes working on that solo section like a metronome over and over, till he got it perfectly…Then he said “Hit record now!” (laughs) So we recorded the song and though it’s a really hard thing to play, he nailed it.
I remember reading how the Beatles did that with Martin and what a laborious process that was. Probably no less so than Neal having to learn it!? It’s interesting you mention him doing that at the same time he was playing bass, because one of the first things I notice—probably because I was looking forward to listening how you did it—was listening for the basslines on Rubber Soulive. Because (Paul) McCartney is such a great bass player, he’s so inventive, I thought “Boy, Neal’s really got a challenge ahead of him to come up with things comparable to what McCartney was doing.
That’s one thing that now that we’ve been playing this stuff live for like, six months or so, I’d like to do a live version because it’s really taken on a whole new life. We’re letting the tunes stretch out and finding all new ways to interpret the stuff. It’s always funny now the recording is the first interpretation of it, but then you play something for years and it becomes a whole new thing. I think it’s cool because it’s all so fresh in the studio with the stuff, but now, certain tunes have taken on a whole different life.
I began to think about that as I began to listen to the album more. Because one of the great things about it is that all the takes are so economical: you got the rhythm, you got the melody and you got the groove, so most of the tunes ere were instantly recognizable. But then you didn’t just run through them haphazardly, they really clicked. The one exception to being immediately recognizable was “Revolution” and when I finally listened to it closely and figured out what you guys were doing with it, I thought this is something you could really stretch out on if you gave yourselves time to do it on the stage.
Well, that’s funny because that is one where we’ll play that groove. I remember Neal was playing that groove (but I have to ask him if he was even thinking of this song) like we so often do when we get into the studio: we’ll just groove on stuff and not really think about where it’s going, we just play and get the sound together. And he was playing that groove and I started playing along (sings melody line). I don’t think we even spoke about that process as we turned it into that, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t go ”Ok, let’s try doing “Revolution” and let’s try this groove,” it just fell together in this half-time type of feel. When we play that live, that’s the one that really catches people off-guard a little bit.
I couldn’t quite figure out what it was and when I did, I thought “Well this isn’t the hard rock electric version, this is more like the slowed-down version that’s on The White Album, but then I realized the wisdom of grabbing that one because you could really dig into it melody-wise and rhythm-wise at the same time. And when it comes to the chorus, it all comes together.
That’s a great moment too because that is immediately recognizable after a few moments of doing something more abstract. It’s great how the subconscious process works as you recognized what Neal was doing and went on from there. So when you play this stuff live, do you do the whole album in sequence or do you just pick a few tunes every night?
On certain dates on the tour, when we’re maybe doing multiple nights in one place or it’s “An Evening w/ Soulive,” we’ll do one set of The Beatles, then one set of Soulive, then an encore. We’ve been doing a lot of festival dates this summer, so it’s during those we’ll do maybe three or four Beatles tunes or a longer medley.
Every time I hear band’s cover Beatles tunes, whether it’s Phish, Gov’t Mule or somebody else, the audience invariably goes nuts. Is that comparable to the reception you’re getting to the Beatles tunes when you do them?
Yeah! People really like it especially when we take them further out, but also they like the recognizable choices. I think we know which tunes people are going to love the most after all this time and it’s amazing how everybody in the world knows those songs, no matter where we are.
That’s what always happens with The Beatles tunes when people hear them: it always brings a bond between the audience and the performer. That’s a great thing when you considering how long it’s been since they put those records out. Do you have any plans to do other projects like this one? I envision Rubber Soulive as being one of a series of albums and I know you talked about doing a live version, but I wondered if you’d talked about going further along those lines with other artists?
Maybe we’ll release a live version, but I don’t know beyond that. We have been talking about doing more cover albums, but I don’t know if we’ll do one now, but rather do an original Soulive album. But we have talked about doing other things like this because it was fun. This one was relatively easy, different certainly than composing, then arranging fifteen or so original songs. We probably will do another one then, maybe Led Zeppelin, we don’t know what yet, but something classic like that.
I didn’t want to press you too hard on what the ideas might be so you could surprise people.
Yeah maybe you can not use this part of the interview? (laughs)…no I’m sure we’ll do another one. Sitting in a van or a bus with the guys for hours on end, we start reeling off ideas: that’s how this one started.
It’d be great to hear you do a Hendrix album of some kind. I remember seeing you guys a few years ago, and you were in the middle of a really intense improvisation and all of a sudden, you started to play this theme that I couldn’t quite recognize and it morphed into “Power of Soul” (from Band of Gypsys) and you really ripped it up—that would be a good choice too, so consider that a suggestion.
We’ve been listening to Hendrix for years and Alan actually sings Hendrix stuff really well, so we’d have the option of going instrumental or having Al sing on some of that stuff.
That would be great. You all did a nice job on “Manic Depression” on your album with Nigel Hall doing the vocal: that came out really well.
That arrangement was drummer Adam Deitch’s idea. I used to make fun of him not knowing any Hendrix: when we were growing up, he was playing Earth Wind & Fire and I was playing Hendrix and he’d go “So loud!… with all the guitar!?!?!…” As time went on, he came to respect him and like him more and finally, to kind of prove his love for Hendrix, he goes “Alright, we’re going to do “Manic Depression” and we’re going to do it like this! And I went “Oh, ok—that’s cool!”
It would be great for him to get into Hendrix if for no other reason (great drummer that he is) than to key in on Mitch Mitchell and how much he contributed to the sound of Jimi Hendrix. I don’t think Hendrix could’ve had a better drummer than Mitch: they played off each other like nothing else.
They were great!..The only reason Deitch knows him is because when he’s in the back of the van, complaining for more than two hours, I call him “Bitch Bitchell’ (laughs)..Just kidding he does know Mitch Mitchell, he just got into that stuff later: his parents were into Tower of Power and all that, whereas I grew up with the Stones and Jimi Hendrix, some Stevie Wonder, but we share all these influences.
It’s great to share music from different points in time, from different vantage points, because you do get different takes on somebody picking up on them at a different time. After hearing Tower of Power, the things Hendrix did like Band of Gypsys must’ve made a lot more sense to Adam than it might have you or me if we were just listening to Hendrix chronologically.
He always refers to that album as ‘the’ album, which I kind of agree because of what that band did, but as a production Axis: Bold As Love does it for me. Hendrix was one of the first guys in the studio to use that new technology: they were really inventing a lot of new stuff at that time, the way to use things in the studio.
Much along the same lines as The Beatles were willing to try anything in the studio, Hendrix seemed to pick up on that thought and play the studio like an instrument and not really be intimidated by the technology. There’s one name I was kind of surprised not to see on your album or on the Soulive album and that’s Derek Trucks. I know you’ve spent a lot of time playing with him: you must be developing quite a good relationship with him over the last few years.
I was going to have him on my album—we had a song in mind and everything and I actually went down to his studio because we were going to record and we ended up handing out going fishing. Every time I hang out with him we never get anything done!? But now actually I’m producing Nigel Hall’s album and we got him (Trucks) to come in and play on two tracks for that. He and Susan are making a record and I’ve been writing with them for that and playing on some things. Adam and I went down together and brought some of our tunes and co-wrote some stuff with them. We have been working together, but some of the stuff on my album is from so long ago, from 2006 and 2007, it took so long to finish it, then get the right distribution deal…
I remember seeing you play with the Allman Brothers at one of their shows at the Beacon Theater in 2008 and you seemed so comfortable up on stage with Derek and Warren Haynes and especially Oteil (Burbridge, ABB bassist): you and he got into a head to head that was pretty fiery at one point.
Those guys are great. I’ve known Oteil since I first started playing out really, so I’m definitely comfortable with him. Warren I’ve gotten to know really well over the last few years, though I’ve known him for a long time. They’re really great people, all of them.
