Jay was kind enough to sit down with Dave & Allison Rosenberg in Stamford, Connecticut, on August 22, 2006 to discuss his music and career. A complete transcript follows. Photos by and copyright (in order of appearance) ??, Mike Scotellaro, Jonathan Rabhan, ??, Dave Clark, and Bud Fulginiti.
Part 3: On Stage with RatDog [Return to Part 2]
So how do you go, when you're learning a new song, how do you take it and learn it?
A new RatDog or a new Grateful Dead?
Whichever, Grateful Dead
Okay, so say it again, when we're...
When you're starting a new song, where do you start?
Well, when we were listening around, I heard Terrapin Station, well I think we all listened to it. "We should do that. Okay." Well when I heard the second half of Terrapin, I was like, "Well man, Jeff could do that kinda shit, Kenny could do that shit, these guys are fuckin note masters," you know. I know a lot of that stuff was meticulously worked out in the studio, whatever, that orchestrated shit. But we could figure that out. We could learn that. So I was like, "Let's learn that man." So when we were in Europe we had the tape and we sat there and listened to it over and over and over but I kinda pushed it on the guys—but without Bob being in the room—on Jeff and Mark and Kenny. "Let's learn this thing, c'mon." Or there've been times where I've come in and I've been like, "Hey Bob man, we gotta do this Syd Barrett." A few years ago I just discovered Syd Barrett. I didn't know anything about Pink Floyd before The Wall or the Animals or all that stuff, and I discovered that first album, and I was listening to it all the time, and I was like man we gotta do one of these tunes. We gotta do this tune, so I came into rehearsal and I was like, "We gotta do this tune," and we learned the tune, Matilda Mother. We learned it.
You know, guys suggest stuff and sit around and listen to it. I think it's the kinda thing where if you ever see Bob go play with the Waybacks or any other band that knows all the fuckin Grateful Dead shit, he just sits right up there and flows right in. 'Cause they already know it, and since they already know it, it triggers it all and he remembers it all, so as soon as I saw that I was like, "All we need to do is know the shit." We can't just be sitting around and expect to jam with Bob and not know anything. We gotta fuckin know this shit, the more the better, and now I'm actually, my thing I'm working on now is I'm trying to learn the lyrics. I wanna learn all the fuckin lyrics so when he forgets a lyric I can jump right in and remind him 'cause sometimes he forgets a little too much, it's like everybody claps now and then but sometimes it's like, "Alright man."
And when you're working up these tunes it seems you're pretty meticulous about it, is there a difference between 58 beats a minute and 60 beats a minute?
To Bob, yes, there actually is. 57 beats pm, 57 for example is Truckin, 60 Tomorrow Never Knows, okay that's 60, that's 57, there's 60, you know it's when you think of it in terms of the song that it represents that tempo it makes more sense, but yeah it gets kooky. But hey, you know what? Bob's been really a nazi about that shit but it's made me better. He had me play with a click track for a lot of years to get that motherfucker down.
So when Rob left the band and you start playing with Robin, bass and drums are of course very tight, how did you make the transition from playing with someone who you were so familiar with?
It was hard man. I still miss Rob. There are times when I really miss Rob. He had a real mastery of the acoustic bass like nobody, and I honestly miss him a lot sometimes, you know. But I fuckin really miss him. To be honest I'm sorry what happened happened. But I think in the long run, it's probably something that had to happen, and you know all I can say is I still want to play with Rob and I try to any chance I get, and I really miss him and I wanna play with him again, and we will. We played a couple trio gigs with Bob but Robin, you know, he plays the electric bass. It's more appropriate for the six-piece band. I think it was just up to Robin to learn all the shit. It was a lot of material for him to learn in a short period of time so I just let him learn all the stuff and tried to help him out, you know, but for me it's weird 'cause there's times I miss Rob and then there's times where Robin does stuff that Rob never did.
What happened to the headphones you were braggin on last spring? You don't have them.
No?
You've been wearing something else.
Really?
They look different.
Which headphones?
They were big, you got them at an airport or something and all of a sudden you could hear yourself.
Those were actually the same ones I'm using now but they're, Shure makes makes three different in-ear things. They're not molded, they're in-ear things and I bought them in the fuckin airport. I bought the most expensive pair, a 500-dollar pair because the drivers are so—these things will make you deaf before they'll blow up, and they're only this big, and they'll fuckin blow your ears off man before they even crap out which is great, I love it. So there's a 500-dollar and a 300-dollar and a 100-dollar one or something like that, and so I bought the expensive ones and I brought them out in spring but left them at home just now. And Charucki has a pair, I'm not even sure if it's the 300 dollar one or the 100 dollar one. I think it's the 300 dollar one. That's what I'm using now, so I pretty much use the same thing but yeah it's nice.
It's helped out a lot man; that's been hard with the whole headphone thing. You know the Grateful Dead invented monitors, then they invented earphone monitors, and by the time we come along in RatDog, Bob's already 30 years in evolution so he's already in the ears and we're like "Ears, what the fuck? We've barely been in a band before and now we gotta be in headphones? " It's like "Hello hello"?
Gotta be a little strange
It's like we were all having headphones on now it'd be like "Hey Allison, Hey." You talk a lot louder you know.
So where you are on stage now versus where you were in spring, it's all the same because you're hearing the monitors?
Yeah, I've found for me it's the best way to do it man, because that way no matter where I'm at on the stage, no matter big club, small club, being an outdoor gig, fuckin giant place where it's all boomy, it sounds crisp, perfect. I think the thing is for me to get it sounding as much like a record, sounding good like it's coming from the speakers and sounding all perfect, crispy, then it sounds great. There's been times I was trying to wear some kind of headphones where I could hear around 'em a little bit so I would like listen to some trebly thing, so I'm like suffering in the mix so I could try to hear other things. And I think that's what some of the guys in the band are still doing, like they'll wear one in and one out, stuff like that. That works but it in a way for me it doesn't. I mean, Mark does that 'cause he needs to hear his amp right there and he wants to hear the band also. I'm not sure actually what he does, but the thing is for me, that will drive me crazy, wearing one earphone. It doesn't sound good, it's just so you can hear the shit but it doesn't sound good, you know what I mean? It doesn't sound like if you were listening and sitting in here with the nice stereo, you know you wouldn't do like this with one ear out the window, you know what I mean, so....
I wanna play you guys something real quick. This is something.
{ Zacariah Rose, "Let My People Go" }
Pretty cool huh? That's Zac, the guy who, the rapper for Alphabet Soup and Band of Brothers and he came and sat in with RatDog a couple times actually on the west coast there. He's the one who started, he was on tape saying "I'd rather be a RatDog than a fat cat who never had a rat," you hear people saying that? He's the one who said that.
So that was...
That was something he did at home but I'm trying to get that shit out there, man. He did some other shit that's really good. This guy is like the most—I've only, playing the drums you know you're backing up great vocalists. I've only played behind three people I think of, three or four that I can think of that have that thing where they grab a group of people with their voice. He's one, Bob of course is another but just that thing, just grab people with his voice.
Who are the others?
Well I was gonna say this guy Piero who used to be in the Freaky Executives. He was just like a Robin Williams kind of person. He'd just start talking and people come around, you know. Les and Bob and Zac I'd prolly say.
What makes a perfect show, what kind of venue or crowd or music or environment for you?
Makes a perfect show is if I had a good show.
What's a good show?
Okay, here it is. If I get crowd feedback, 'cause sometimes I feel like I played really good and I'm like, "What happened to the crowd man?" Or you can't hear 'em or something. If I can hear the crowd feedback, the more crowd little rises you know of {crowd noise}, the more of those the better during the show, you know the reciprocal crowd feedback kinda stuff makes the better show I'd say. That's prolly the biggest one. The other one is how I felt about my performance, you know? That's pretty much it man. It doesn't matter what the songs are.
Fast, slow, all the same?
Doesn't matter. Sometimes, and we've all agreed on this, we're like, "We're playing this big fat show tonight and look what Weir put on the setlist, oh no!" And we get up there and it's the greatest show ever. "Look at all these slow songs," and it's a great show.
How about Stuff, anything worked out ahead of time?
All whatever. It's all whatever.
Who's gonna be out there, all that?
Yeah, one of these nights I'm just gonna walk off. Problem is though when I do that, what do you think Weir says? "Get back out there and give em a beat. We're gonna lose em."
He might be right.
He might be right but the other guys can go {beat} on their instruments too, they don't have to be all {melody}.
Do you need to run?
Yeah in a minute.
What do you have coming up? Fall Ratdog....
Fall RatDog, we're gonna get this Band of Brothers or Alphabet Soup thing happening. Couple gigs in the city. We've got one gig now in East Bay. Solano Stroll, a little festival in Berkeley that's happening. That's it. But we're trying to get more stuff happening for that.
Les was going to go to Europe in September, now he's not, so I was gonna be able to do that but not now.
So when you're not doing RatDog, are you always Les' go-to?
Yeah, the thing is with Les he always wants me, which I'm really grateful about but, now he's got another drummer or two that can make it when I can't or when RatDog's got something going on so he—What's happened is this guy Paulo Baldi, he's a great drummer, plays with Cake also, has been playing with Les. Played with him this summer and he knows all the material. I think it's for Les it's like you know now he, they just learned a bunch of these tunes too that he's got on his album that I'm not on—thanks Les—so they got a new set now so he's comfortable. They've rehearsed a bunch so even if I could make it, he might want to use the other guy now, who knows, you know, but he's always doing different stuff.
Actually he's doing a bunch of Primus stuff but I've been fortunate that for the most part Les always likes to play with me, so I'm really fortunate for that.
Oh, you know they're doing a movie about Johnnie Johnson? Because what I think's going on is they're trying to take Chuck Berry to court or getting him paid for songs he wrote, but too much time had passed, statute of limitations. So I think what happened is the community there in St. Louis, one of the TV personalities in the local scene there, this guy Art Holliday, 
really nice guy, when we were in St Louis last time he invited us to his house. He had a little luncheon thing and Johnnie's wife was there and his daughters, and we had to leave early but he ended up showing his trailer for his movie premiere. Anyway he's got a website, johnniebegood.net, so they're making a movie about him to debate should he have been paid or whatever.
Johnnie Johnson, I still can't believe that—the fact that we got to get that close to that guy, of all people in the world. He's like, he's the man who gave birth to all this. Just imagine if he didn't exist, we might be playing Russian music or something like that, I mean really. He hired Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry might never have made it. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't have. There would never have been a song called Johnny B. Goode....
