Band on the run

Deerhoof trample new terrain: consuming passions, mealy behavior, and crazy lemons.

By Kimberly Chun

THEY SAY THE way to a man's, woman's, or critter's heart is through the stomach. Of course, that's only if you're bypassing the brain, though in the case of possibly the best band in the Bay Area, Deerhoof, a group that has smarts, spirit, and guts to spare, the old saw is still applicable. Ask vocalist-guitarist Satomi Matsuzaki and drummer-vocalist Greg Saunier to sum up each band member with one short, stubby, and serviceable adjective – which one, say, is the funny one or the smart one – and they'll puzzle over it briefly, as Matsuzaki does, huddled in the marble lobby in the Hotel Nikko, down the street from their Tendernob home, before answering.

"John [Dieterich, guitarist-vocalist] is the fast eater. So fast. I've never met somebody who eats that fast. So amazing," says the Tokyo native. "And Chris [Cohen, bassist-vocalist] is a very polite eater. He uses a knife and fork like ... very careful. And slow. And you are like ..." She gazes at Saunier.

"I'm incredibly slow. Sooo slow," he says. "Chris is slow but very right and very neat – he doesn't spill. He doesn't make sounds. He holds his utensils continental style, he uses his napkin, and there isn't a huge puddle of mess around his plate when he's done, like John."

"John always has ketchup on his pants," Matsuzaki explains.

"By the end of the tour, his pants are just kind of littered with, yeah – he just spills. He spills a lot of food – a lot of food doesn't even end up in his digestive system."

So his tour pants end up like an abstract expressionist painting of food stains? "Yeah, Jackson Pollock," Matsuzaki says.

"I tend to just say yum, yum, yum to everything, and go slow and savor it. But for you ..." Saunier looks at Matsuzaki, groping for words, "every meal has a story, and you can see what goes into the making of it, and you can imagine what the recipe is, and you can imagine – "

"The chef's face!" She laughs.

Understanding achieved – something Deerhoof fight hard and sincerely for and generally arrive at, after much labor and good humor.

Deerhoof's new, seventh CD, The Runners Four (Kill Rock Stars), possesses a less prominent foodie leitmotif than 2003's Apple O' and 2004's Milk Man – but no one can deny that the sprawling double album-length release offers any less food for thought than their previous discs.

The result of an intense, nearly day-in-day-out six months of recording, editing, mixing, and reworking, The Runners Four found the quartet trying to piece together the record by themselves in an acutely consensus-driven way, while all four took turns singing – sometimes their own lyrics, sometimes others'.

Unlike the live rock-oriented Apple O' and the Leonard-Bernstein-meets-Stan-Kenton-in-Brighton-Beach Milk Man, Deerhoof's latest starts slow and stuttering with the quiet but restless rhythms of "Chatterboxes," as Matsuzaki hails, "Storytime in your wildest mind / What a wonderful / Magical animal," until the song breaks down into impressionistic coloration, and the album unfolds into some of the hardest, rockier, and more bottom-heavy songs the band seemingly eve r recorded, with Matsuzaki switching from bass to guitar and Cohen from guitar to bass. Gone are many of the electronic whorls and blurts of the symphonic Milk Man – replaced by early Floyd-ish psych interludes ("Running Thoughts"), boogie rock breaks ("Wrong Time Capsule"), and music box tearjerkers ("Bone-Dry") in Deerhoof's attempt to capture each member's musical thumbprint – from the moment they entered their new Oakland practice space in January to the moment, many aborted submissions later, they finished the album this summer. Cohen says he thinks of The Runners Four as "all one big song," but that almost seems to do a disservice to the album – it encompasses so many great, discrete yet oh-so-distinctively-Deerhoof numbers. Listening to it, perhaps newbies will understand why this 11-year-old band has gathered such disparate admirers as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and The Simpsons' Matt Groening, has become a regular at All Tomorrow's Parties in the UK and US, and has most recently been asked to play with the Roots in Illadelphia and back up Danielson Famile's Daniel Smith on his next full-length.

Brotherly love

Cohen and Dieterich meet up at the latter's tidy Oakland house, as twilight falls on the marauding mealy bugs outside. "I love our street, but I think we need to come together, really," says Cohen, ra cing out on one of the many tangents that the members of Deerhoof often love to explore. "So I want to say to everyone on 37th Street, we need to come together and lick this thing once and for all. I'm just thinking that, with some love and care, we could bring these trees back to health. It's just that I can't open the gate to John's, out here."

"My car doors are stuck shut because of the sap," Dieterich drawls, laid-back and leaning into the shadows. "It's, uh, serious. You can see Chris's real passion, the eradication of mealy bugs."

"I don't want to eradicate mealy bugs," Cohen insists. "I just need to, uh, open that gate."

"We were going to do a benefit for the destruction of mealy bugs," Dieterich deadpans.

The pair finishes each other's sentences, disagrees, and backs each other up like brothers. ("Chris is always trying to convince John to eat meat," Saunier later says. "Not that he's trying to make it seem good – he's trying to make it s eem necessary, like, 'John, you can't survive on this diet. Burger King veggie burger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.' Chris is convinced that John is going to be deranged. He's killing himself basically. It's not healthful, mentally or physically, to not eat meat. It's somehow morally wrong. It's really, really funny!") Sitting on a tatami mat on the floor of Dieterich's living room, we avoid the meat question altogether and eat chocolate truffles at a low Japanese table instead.

"For myself, I felt like the album was about, how much can each of us put into this band? And I think that's why we had so many songs," Cohen explains, adding that he usually writes for his other bands, like Curtains and the Natural Dreamers, a project with Dieterich, but this time he threw all his efforts into Deerhoof. "I think it makes it a much more ambitious and much more difficult process. But it was really like, um, seeing how much of each person could the band contain without basically just bursting or something. Or the computer just ... frying."

Deerhoof went on tour shortly after they turned in the album the first time, popped the CD into their vehicle's player, and found enough problems to make them begin work again and push the release back a month. "We hadn't been in any car except John's car, which only has a radio, and the front seat kind of keeps flying back, and it slams the person's legs behind them," Cohen complains neutrally.

"And it's covered with this goo from these bugs in the trees. It's completely disgusting," Dieterich says.

"The only time we were in a car while working on the record was going back and forth between here and West Oakland BART and then our practice space," Cohen continues. "The entire six months w as like being here at my house, this place, the car, or the practice space. It was like total sensory deprivation."

It sounds admirably disciplined – like an Iron Man triathlon for four. "It wasn't disciplined," Cohen says. "I mean, it would have taken discipline to actually stop."

Working by themselves, in the practice space they share with No Doctors, to get a "dry, scratchy," textured sound was fun but a "little bit torturous," Dieterich says. "Two months into mixing, and we're into 14-hour days, six days a week, and we're just starting to crack, you know." In the effort to make everyone's voice heard – their pleasure and displeasure alike – feelings would occasionally get hurt, though every alternative was attempted.

"I think that a lot of it is elaborate ways of navigating each other's tastes," Cohen explains. "Like, this doesn't work, Person A doesn't want to do this, Person B doesn't want to do that. So it's like navigating this complex labyrinth and basically what you have is – this is our personal dynamic represented in music. I think none of us would have individually made this record the way it is, but the four of us together could."

Dropouts and drums

During their hermetic album-making period – interrupted only by a trip to Honolulu for the town's Ladyfest – the band ate bre akfast, lunch, and dinner together, Saunier says, which, of course, inspired the previous analogy and caused certain niceties to wither away. "I totally lost my social life," Matsuzaki wails. "I didn't even know what to even talk about when I saw my friends." She assumes a goony, weary tone: 'Uhhh, hi.' "

Still, the band members refrained from lashing out against each other. "We're all actually pretty soft-spoken and pretty ... shy," Saunier observes. "And mild-mannered. So our style isn't necessarily to attack each other. Our style is, uh, kind of like how I'm talking now, very mealymouthed and kind of tortured and not sure how to express what you're saying, lots of possibilities for miscommunication."

But when it got to the point at which Cohen wrote a song, "Lemon and Little Lemon," about a tree in a friend's parents' San Diego yard that produced a mutant lemon inside of another, the others couldn't help reading into it a bit. "After I sang the song, I thought that he's referring to people who have other personalities inside themselves," Matsuzaki says. "Not necessarily a split personality," Saunier adds. "It's not that medical, but you may have an exterior, and you may have an interior, feeling...."

"But because we recorded and mixed and mastered all in six months and the four of us spent so much time toge ther, I was starting to feel like, 'Wait, he's talking about us? Talking about me? Like I am a lemon?' " Matsuzaki chuckles.

"Is it still paranoia if it's true?" Saunier jokes dryly. He does take the responsibility of being in Deerhoof seriously, pointing out the difference between his previous job stapling and filing papers at a consulting firm and his current one, playing music full-time. "It actually is the responsibility of each of the four of us to be accountable. Y'know, I can't just play some drum fills and hope that somebody else is going to sort out what it all means or figure out if it's going to be good or whether its going to be worth the $15 that somebody's going to have to pay for it in the store. There was no one above us, there was no guiding hand, there was no boss, and there was no system in place. It was us recording each day and listening back, saying to ourselves, 'This is terrible. This isn't good at all. We gotta keep working on this. It's not there yet.' And then finally, after some period of months, reaching some point where we were, all four of us, happy with it. I can't imagine a bigger difference between my old job and my current job."

The smashed- and spindled-looking fingers on Saunier's right hand suddenly catch my attention. They look like they've been run over by four runners – and a dozen Hummers. "Modern primitive," Matsuzaki jokes sly ly.

"I kind of chew my nails," Saunier explains. "This is what I meant by dry, scratchy texture – what my fingernails look like is what our albums sound like." Actually, the drummer – who was most recently described as virtuosic in the New Yorker and was once asked by Beck to record with him – says he used to hit the knuckle a lot in the same spot because "we didn't have a practice space for years, up until 2005. I would practice like this at home." He slaps his thighs vigorously. "These were my drum pads!"

Injuries or no, the power, oddities, and unpredictability of Deerhoof continue to play a big part in what makes them a wonderful live band (one that will don soccer uniforms for their Runners shows), although Cohen complains that the band's passionate audiences can hold Deerhoof's trainers to the fire when they disappoint: "There are people who know how the song goes, and I can tell. When I screw something up on the bass, afterwards they're like, 'Wow, you guys are so ... garage,' or something. 'Wow, you guys are really ... raw.' And I'm like, 'I know. I messed up that new part.' People who know how the songs go – it's just amazing to me because sometimes I don't even know how they go."

Deerhoof play a CD-release party with Octis and Whysp Sat/15, 9 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, SF. $12. (4 15) 885-0750.