Black-eyed boogie
S.F.'s Zen Guerrilla scorches stages around the world.
By Summer Burkes
 SITTING HALF- cocked in a musty downtown bar, you might have seen a six-foot-three-inch behemoth (seven-foot-one with Afro) take the stage in wraparound sunglasses, the three-piece rock and roll unit behind him exploding into what seems to be a noisy instructional video for the Kiss School of Detroit Metal Histrionics. The giant singer alternately wails on a distorted harmonica and shoves the mic almost all the way in his mouth; by virtue of heightened passion and limited technology, you can't understand the lyrics – not one word – but you can tell he's testifying.
He seizes and shakes like an AME Zion preacher with a small live animal caught in his pants. The band sweatily, expertly, blisteringly pounds out slab after slab of hard-core secular gospel metal Motown, finishing it all with a chilling, reverbed-to-hell rendition of David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream." By the end of the set the band has transformed the room's vibe from alcohol-soaked dive to take-me-to-Jesus-revival-tent. Dumbstruck, you order a compulsory highball and contemplate the role of music as religion in the atheist's universe as the headlining band slinks onstage, overwhelmed and ashamed. You have just been worked over by Zen Guerrilla.
Even though they're a local band (relocated from Philly five years ago), Zen Guerrilla are never here. The hardest-working band in showbiz likes to stay on the road. In the midst of touring to support their third (aptly titled) full-length, Trance States in Tongues (Sub Pop), they touched down in San Francisco for a couple days. Lead singer Marcus Durant and drummer Andy Duvall shot the shit with the Bay Guardian over 40-ouncers in the Z.G. tour van.
Bay Guardian: You went deep-sea fishing with David Cassidy?
Marcus Durant: Yeah. And he had a series of these magic tricks. Every 15 minutes he would pull out some wacky little trick, which annoyed the hell out of us because we were just there to concentrate on the fishing. So he knew that he had sort of worn out his welcome. He stormed ten feet to the right, which was as far as he could go, and pulled out his cell phone and had [another] boat come pick him up. He meant well.
BG: Why were you on a boat with David Cassidy in the first place?
MD: I was working the boat. I was chumming – slinging fish guts. Attracting the fish.
BG: You signed to Sub Pop last year and are hopefully getting some of the backing you deserve after ten years of truck-stop food and van breakdowns and playing to six people. Are things changing?
MD: It's a little easier, but we're pretty self-sufficient. We do things on a low budget.
BG: Have the crowds gotten bigger?
Andy Duvall: We're now at a point where we're playing with other bands that have also been doing it for a long time, and when you put two or three bands like that together, obviously the crowds are going to get bigger. It's a bigger package. But we still play the shows with like fifteen people there.
BG: What did you sound like when you started a decade ago?
AD: We played a lot of Yardbirds covers. One of our first reviews said, "The Cows meets Motown," and I think that was the best description of us at the time.
BG: Name your favorite songs to cover (besides "Moonage Daydream").
AD: "DOA" [Van Halen] is a good one. Iron Maiden's "The Trooper." Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" – but that's a tough one.
BG: Describe your onstage setup. All I know is, it looks like you're talking to your amp, which is propped on a stool next to you with a mic like a fifth band member.
MD: It's an amp I built from an old movie projector speaker. I was driving up Fifth Street in North Philadelphia, and I saw this thing on the side of the road. It was a [vintage] Bell and Howell movie projector, and I took it apart and discovered that the actual amp was separate from the projection device, and saw the visual mechanism that picks up the visual message that translates into sound. I took apart an old Peavey delay and figured out how I could cross-circuit the modulation. So I hooked that up, dropped a tube amp into the back of the speaker, and dropped in this customized modulation.
BG: Do you have extra pedals to help with the sound?
MD: No.
BG: All of it comes from this contraption?
MD: Yeah. [The speaker setup] is not as elaborate as it sounds. It sounds like shit, to be honest. But I like the quality of it.
BG: Do you all listen to anything special before you go onstage? Andy, do you do crank?
AD: I look like I'm on crank?
BG: In a good way.
AD: Oh, that's OK then ... Well, when you have a crowd of people staring at ya, my initial reaction is to give 'em something to stare at, instead of feeling awkward about it.
MD: We save up our energy to let it out in that forty-five minutes to an hour. We were all chubby kids, so rock and roll has always been an aerobic, therapeutic thing as well.
BG: Define "chubby"?
MD: I was three hundred ten in high school. Rock and roll introduced me to an alternative to exercise.
AD: All-state football player. He's probably lost about fifty pounds since we started too. He peaked at three hundred ten.
MD: I hold the Delaware record for the most tacos eaten in one sitting. I ate twenty-seven. I was seventeen. I still have the plaque. I actually put my brother through a wall for a box of Cheerios.
BG: Tell us about your mighty stomach. Can you pick things up with it?
MD: I have, yes.
BG: Can you roll quarters on it?
MD: I used to flip quarters on it. I've lost that ability, as you do with a lot of things as you get older.
BG: Do you want the same excesses of fame that MC5 enjoyed, or would you prefer to retain so-called artistic integrity while toiling in relative obscurity in a series of dead-end day jobs?
MD: I just want to pay off my mom's house. So she doesn't have to work as hard. There's something about doing something for your parents.
AD: I don't wanna be lightin' a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill or nothin'.
MD: Living like Wayne Kramer or Fred "Sonic" Smith, nah ...
AD: Ron Asheton's got his Cadillacs up on cinder blocks in Ann Arbor. He's still livin' with Mom. He's kickin' it, though, man.
BG: Is your dad musical?
MD: Yeah, he's very musical. He's a singer. A butt-naked black man walkin' around the house singing the Ohio Players – that's an early memory.
BG: What about your mom?
MD: Opposite side of the spectrum, you know. She's white; she was raised in Grantham [England], went to school in Nottingham, which had its own musical history in the late '50s, early '60s, and then moved to SoHo, which was also a hotbed for rock and roll. She actually watched the Beatles run down the street when they filmed A Hard Day's Night while she was on lunch break.
BG: Tell us about your dad's history, Marcus. He seems pretty influential to you. Is it true he taught himself to read in Vietnam?
MD: He was in Vietnam, and he bettered his vocabulary with comic books. [Marcus pulls out a vintage copy of Luke Cage.] Luke Cage, for a lot of black soldiers, was America's first and foremost black superstar in the late '60s and early '70s. That's a pretty big deal. My dad sent me back a lot of Luke Cage and the Fantastic Four – he was raised in the Bronx, illegitimate kid who had to quit school to help his mother, and she died at a very young age. That was a way for a lot of black men to escape the ghetto – to join the military. So he took that path, made the most of it.
BG: As a garage-blues-type band, how do you think your mixed-heritage background compares with one-good-album hacks like G. Love or Jon Spencer Blues Explosion?
MD: Socially, growing up in a mixed family, in Europe it was cool – but as soon as we stepped out of the plane at JFK ... my brother is as black as night ... [shakes his head]. When you're stared at and rocks thrown at your house, and spray-paint on your house, and my dad can't get a job, and my mom can't work because she's married to a black man ... At an early age you gain a different perspective on people. Me being very "camouflaged" [light-skinned], I was able to sit in with families and see the duality. You eat dinner with them, and it's racial-slur this and racial-slur that, not knowing that my dad's black. So you learn a lot about the blues and soul and where that comes from. That's what I have to offer to the vocals. I don't know what Jon Spencer has to offer as far as that is concerned. But he's contributing something, too – he's pretty innovative. I can't say I haven't been influenced by a lot of his sounds.
BG: Most of your songs sound like fucked-up gospel songs to me. Did y'all grow up in the church?
AD: Naw.
MD: I didn't grow up in the church, but I definitely spent some time there. Family reunions, going to church with my dad. Whenever we went up to the Bronx, we'd all go up to the church up there. On Sunday and even Saturday. [Bassist] Rich played with a gospel band when he was like thirteen, fourteen – playing with a couple dudes that played with Parliament who took him under [their] wing and showed him the gospel discipline.
BG: So that's where he got his chops from.
MD: That and Iron Maiden.
AD: He's the metalhead of the band.
BG: Y'all are such a mutt band.
AD: Mutts live a lot longer.
PHOTO: ROBIN LAANAMEN
return to top | sfbg.com |
