Umphrey’s McGee doesn’t have a lot in common with the Dave Matthews Band. So when their Live From The Lake Coast DVD lost to DMB’s Central Park Concert at this year’s Jammy Awards, the blow wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been. After all, they didn’t lose to one of their own. Umphrey’s McGee belongs to the jambands, whereas the Dave Matthew’s Band, well…whatever.
And although Umphrey’s had a slow start, lost in a quagmire of amateurs and sound-alikes, by the time they added second guitarist Jake Cinninger and got serious, they kind of became a new hope for a troubled genre. Arriving on the national scene just in time to provide relief from the clones next door, Umphrey’s McGee is as textbook as it gets: they jam well, they jam frequently, and they jam often. And people are finally noticing. So then, why is America’s next big jamband about to release an album that is deliberately not very jamband-esque?
“It’s just a phase that we’re in,” explains Cinninger. “It still retains the musicianship of our fusion playing, but it also keeps a Beatles mentality of simple songs with great lyrics.”
Tentatively scheduled for a June release, Anchor Drops will be the band’s second studio album, and their first one with this new approach. After talking to various band members about the recording process, it is quite clear that the experience has changed them as musicians. During a phone conversation last summer, Cinninger told me that he wanted to “back off a little bit from soloing so hard and being this shredder guy. I feel like I have a lot more than just fast notes and fast runs that I learned when I was a kid.”
And now, close to a year later, guitarist/vocalist Brendan Bayliss unknowingly echoes Cinninger’s sentiments: “After seeing our DVD, there was one solo I took where, looking back on it, I was like ‘You’re trying too hard to play too much, man.’ I wished I could’ve gone back and slapped myself on the head.”
Sitting on a sofa on the other side of the room, Cinninger nods in agreement. “I’d love to play like David Gilmore, but I know I’ll never be able to play like him,” he says. “That’s something to learn from. If I could be more like that…”
It’s a question of being young and wanting to blow your wad versus being a little bit more experienced and knowing how to let it burn. And it’s a lesson Umphrey’s McGee is getting hip to. Both Bayliss and Cinninger point to the recording sessions for this new album as a catalyst for this conversion.
“I think the first time we played live after the initial two weeks of recording, everybody went to the shows feeling that we could play so much less,” says Bayliss, obviously pleased. “After being under the microscope of hearing everyone isolated and being able to hear everything, everyone realizes now that you can say as much as you want, but you don’t have to be so busy.”
We’re backstage at the Crowbar in State College, PA and like any good rock club, the dressing room is dark and dilapidated, a victim of destruction by countless bands and their entourages. As with many a dressing room, bands tag the walls as a way of leaving their mark. But here there’s a twist. In keeping with Crowbar tradition, a part of the band’s name is substituted with the word “ham.” Today, “Umphrey’s McHam” joins the ranks alongside “Leftover Ham,” “Jazz Hamdolin Project,” and “Jimmy’s Ham Shack.”
It seems natural then that the show tonight is lighthearted and humorous. The band brings the ham. Early on, they riff off of Dave Chappelle’s “I’m Rick James, bitch!” skit, eliciting much laughter from the audience. They then invite the entire OM Trio onstage for an improvisational heavy metal jam with an ad-libbed “sludge and death!” chant. The setlist includes an unusual amount of rarities and any concern that Umphrey’s McGee is no longer a jamband is put to rest by their incessant improvisation. In fact, the band even busts into “Jimmy Stewarts” (a designated improvisational structure) three times over the course of two sets. They reprise one of them in the encore. Relax people — Umphrey’s McGee is still a jamband.
But back in the ham-branded dressing room, Cinninger questions if that’s a reasonable conclusion. “It’s arena rock in a 200-seat bar,” he says. “It’s what Zappa was doing. It’s what Blue Oyster Cult was doing. It’s what Dream Theater is doing now, definitely with no ‘jamband’ mentality. Rock ‘n’ roll is rock ‘n’ roll.”
Cinninger grew up in hard rockin’ Michigan, home of Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, and Alice Cooper. Unlike Bayliss, he never went through a college Phish phase. But Bayliss also has grown apprehensive about the jamband label.
“You’re not calling Led Zeppelin a jamband, but you’re calling Gov’t Mule a jamband, because it’s 2004,” he says. And indeed, while music fans and journalists and publicists and record labels are all still trying to figure out what it means to be a jamband exactly, Bayliss is still trying to figure out what it means to be in one. Or if he even wants to be.
“What’s cool lately is that we’ve stumbled into this coherent formula for improvisation where it’s got direction,” he says. “It’s almost like trying to write instead of jam.”
“It’s formulated jamming,” Cinninger interjects, emphasizing the basic principle behind the Jimmy Stewarts. “So it’s got movement; it’s not just about staying in the A Minor for 30 minutes. I don’t really know of too many other ‘jambands’ that are doing that.”
It’s a methodology that comes straight from jazz, where the players can modulate and use progressions to move from a starting point to a destination. In one way of looking at it, Umphrey’s McGee doesn’t necessarily jam so much as improvise compositions.
Explains Cinninger: “Bayliss will show me a chord progression, and then hopefully within five or six seconds I’ll figure it out and can play something over that or can play those chords…then we try to come up with a B section. We move out of the section that we just came up with, then come up with a whole other progression. Then we’re able to fluctuate back and forth, so we’re kind of developing a song. Bayliss will start thinking of words and start spouting the words over a brand new chord progression that we just thought of. That’s kind of the risk of a Jimmy Stewart.”
“And then it’s just like Tenacious D,” laughs Bayliss. “You know, ‘NEXT SONG!’”
The show at the Crowbar is balls to the ham wall. Not just with Jimmy Stewarts and bones for those keeping score, but with songs that have complex interlocking parts and which are designed for specific purposes. Some of these songs came from combining parts of past Jimmy Stewarts, while others came from snapping together different sections of music that various band members wrote separately. Most of them are designed with live reproduction and modification and flexibility in mind.
But the band hints that the songs on the next album aren’t necessarily going to be like that. Warns Cinninger: “When you hear the new album, you’ll hear that we’re trying to pull back the reigns.”
“I think it’s a natural evolution,” says Bayliss. “I mean if you look at every band over time…Look at the Beatles. The last thing that they recorded was Let It Be. The last thing they were doing was just three chords and the truth. It’s like, ‘Well, shit!’ And at some point for any band that becomes associated with a certain style — like writing 8 or 9 minute songs — after writing several of them, maybe you just don’t have to say it anymore.”
“Or you just get tired,” Cinninger adds. “It gets redundant.”
“It’s ironic then that Umphrey’s McGee’s sudden affection for shorter songs and cleaner arrangements would be perceived by some to be distancing themselves from their roots. After all, what better jamband ideal is there than constant change, constant motion? And yet, even the title of the new album, Anchor Drops, hints that when the new album hits in June, Umphrey’s McGee will have arrived at a new destination, like a “Jimmy Stewart” arriving at a song.
When I ask Cinninger how the new album differs sonically from 2002’s Local Band Does OK, he thinks for a second and then says, “I think it’s definitely more multi-layered. There’s a lot more colors.”
“After hearing Cinninger elaborate on the actual recording sessions (“We used some really sick gear”), and how the band ultimately learned to embrace the studio as being an entirely different creature from the stage, Bayliss looks proud.
“It feels good too,” he says. “Not just not being stagnant, but actually making progress.”
And then it’s just like Tenacious D — “Next song!”
