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Happy hunting
In search of San
Francisco band Deerhoof.
QUAINT, PRETTY
, about 40 miles outside Yosemite, and crammed with gold rush history, Mariposa seems like the perfect habitat for the strange, shy creatures of Deerhoof. The Bay Area band spends much of its time there these days, practicing and exploring new musical terrain where monarch butterflies once provided the inspiration for land-grabbing Spanish adventurers.
But Deerhoof won't be able to hide for long. Six albums along and almost 10 years into its life span, the group has caught the attention of heavy-footed media behemoths such as the New York Times, Artforum, and Vice. One can only hope they will be gentle with such a rare and delicate specimen. I imagine it quietly grazing at a sun-dappled glade or bellying up to the dessert buffet, thumping softly on its snare, entreating bunnies, "half-rabbit-and-half-dogs," and "trickybirds," to come closer. Don't be afraid – Deerhoof only eats candy and cake.
The idea of Deerhoof, innocently capering along a creek outside Yosemite, is an appealing scenario, isn't it? It's only one of many fantasies, story lines, and subterfuges that surround the band. Veiled in mystery that's part protective camouflage and part honest timidity, Deerhoof now has a reason to show itself. The band has emerged with its sixth, latest, greatest, and dare I say, most approachable pop album yet, Apple O' (5 Rue Christine/Kill Rock Stars), lovingly clenched between its incisors. The bashful beast has been doing press – and lots of it.
I approached carefully, not wanting to frighten it away. I sent a warning volley of e-mails and tried to catch a glimpse at a sold-out Cafe du Nord show. But the elusive Deerhoof was tricky and evasive. At first contact Deerhoof scampered off into a thicket of stories, digressions, qualified statements, increasingly friendly e-mails, a phone call from Mariposa, and the ho, ho, hos of drummer, band founder, and de facto ringleader Greg Saunier. Frantically contacting others who were touched by Deerhoof, I pieced together a picture as best I could, trying out some pet theories as I went along.
Riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
Deerhoof make music that is at once all of the confusion and pain and murder that you have in your mind from looking down the road and seeing people pass out on the sidewalk from being too ruined to quit shooting up, and also every bit of hope and care and frenzy that you could ever feel when you see a pelican and a seagull fly over the ocean and both catch a fish at the same second. It is the terror and the, no joke, ultimate beauty made of sound.
Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu
I'm on the phone with Saunier, who's hunkered down in a practice session with Deerhoof guitarist Chris Cohen in Mariposa. He's agreeable, given to fits of giggles, and freely admits he tends to ramble like a chatty, rootless, and fanciful gypsy. But somehow what could be an interviewer's dream come true turns out to be more of a mental and verbal contortionfest, a vaguely confrontational discussion reminiscent of a college freshman acid-influenced late-night talkathon.
"What I thought would be something really fun to talk about is Apple O', which is our new album. That, for us, is the most exciting thing happening," Saunier says.
"As far as we're concerned, I don't think it's really interesting to talk about the history of the band or ... the personal lives of the people in the band."
After an outburst of rapid-fire ho, ho, hos, he explains, "I laugh because I imagine all the bands I've been in that I've not been proud to be in."
And those are?
"No comment, no comment," he says gleefully.
"So I hear you don't play by the rules, musically," I offer coyly, thinking I'll trap big bad Deerhoof yet.
"Oh, ho, ho, I don't know," he says. "If you talk to any other bands in San Francisco I think I'd be surprised if anybody said, 'We write our songs ccording to a pop rule book. We love to follow rules. We love people telling us what to do.' Nobody's going to say that. If you ask any other band in San Francisco, none of them are going to answer that way."
"But the music sounds so original," I say, pointing to time changes, tone shifts, the slashing Who-like guitar, the rhythmic spasms.
"I don't think that at all," he says, guffawing as if it's the funniest notion ever. "Every time I hear somebody play some music, it's original because it's them. It's unique, and it's 100 percent original. By definition. There's no way that what they just did could be done by anybody else. There's no way what they just did could be done by anybody else a minute later. Music and art are an expression of a person, or a group of people, but it's a human expression that's ... individual. Even, even, even," he says, searching for words, "traditional music is always different. In the way it's played from person to person, it's different from time to time. It's different most importantly in the ears of everybody who hears it. Two people who come to see Deerhoof and any other band play, and they're going to hear two different ... things. It's very ... hard to really talk about it, hard to put into words.
"I'm saying there's more to an experience with music than just what you can say about it a minute later. Or what can be reviewed. In a few sentences or an entire book. Still more. You could choose one song in Apple O' and write a thousand-page book about it. Or you can choose one song from Numbers Life and write a thousand-page book about it, but that still wouldn't be the tip of the iceberg, or even come close to the complexity of what it is, what it means, all the different ways it can be heard and interpreted."
The rest of the band – bassist-vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki and guitarists John Dieterich and Chris Cohen – can be just as oblique. Later I notice the interviews are riddled with good-natured non sequiturs.
"If I get excited when we're playing, I sometimes 'speak,' " Dieterich writes in an e-mail. "It's not like words, though. I recently heard a deaf person making sounds while she was signing with someone else in an airport waiting room. It's like an artifact of the music. I missed my flight."
Still, e-mail exchanges, held at a safe distance (I put as much space between myself and the monitor), end up being more fruitful than chats on the phone. Talk is cheap, and furthermore, it's not cheese.
"I don't really talk to other bands about music," Matsuzaki writes. "I talk about something else usually. I'm not into talking about music. I like talking about cheese and stuff."
I'm happy for her, but this is a story about a shy, elusive creature called Deerhoof, not that pungent, moldy wedge of dairy product called Roquefort.
Wily, cuddly savants
Deerhoof's music is mega. It makes my brain confused and my heart happy. Rain evaporates before it hits Deerhoof. I think Deerhoof is one of the best bands. They are simultaneously powerful, cute, scary, technical, and messy. They are constantly practicing, and it shows. I have worked with them several times on cake demolition jobs. We were successful and efficient.
Nate Denver, Total Shutdown and Nate Denver's Neck
Deerhoof definitely has a special something going on with edibles. Cake, candy, portobellos, and a shroom cloud-like cored über-apple pop up in conversation with the band and on the new album, which includes "Dinner for Two," "Apple Bomb," and "The Forbidden Fruits."
Onstage the band threads together fascinating song fragments that function fully and weirdly as tunes all by themselves – tunes found on releases such as The Man, the King, the Girl (5RC/KRS, 1997), Holdypaws (5RC/KRS, 1999), and Halfbird (Menlo Park, 2001) – and blows them up with combustible, joyful abandon. At the Hemlock Tavern not long ago, the band piled onto the small stage and proceeded to gleefully drop a bomb on the cheek-to-jowl audience. Saunier perched on a milk crate, center stage, alternately smashing out and teasing forth wildly divergent beats, as Cohen and Deiterich supplied a lot of droney rhythm guitar, mimicked vocal lines, and added color to the edges of the songs with ragged scales, all while locking tightly into the drummer's tempo shifts.
Meanwhile Matsuzaki extended her arms in a sort of Deerhoofian sign language, wailing in high, sweet, and borderline dissonant tones, "Sing to the East / Sing to the West / Sing to the one you love the best." No wave, off-kilter jazz, tender lullabies, soundtracks to nowhere, a new Beefheartian blues-rock language were all part of the mix as bits of wood flew off the edges of the snare and the pile of splinters grew next to Saunier. The music flew emphatically in the face of convention – there wasn't even a fluttering of an eyelash toward staid musical beauty standards.
They do practice a lot. Hence the stop-start synchronicity, which hints – like tracks leading from a campground – at conscientious toiling over hot, heavy instruments. "Deerhoof practices go on much longer than the Curtains'," says Cohen, who plays in the Curtains with Saunier and, at one time, Matsuzaki and Trevor Shimizu. "We need a lot of practice. We need a lot of help. The songs need work, and we have to practice our instruments to remember our parts, and there are just a lot of details."
Yet despite all of the work going on in Mariposa, Saunier likes to de-emphasize technique and concentrate on making music. Welcome to the natural kingdom of Deerhoof. "Drumming is something that anybody can do. You can always beat on something. In fact, people beat on things all the time. Every time you take a step, you're drumming," he says before turning around and contradicting himself. "It's certainly not effortless. That's one of the reasons it's fun. It's really nice exercise and can be very exhausting. When we play, I feel exhilarated for several minutes afterwards. About an hour later, just as it's time to load our equipment back out to the car, I suddenly have an enormous drop in energy.
"I wonder if I should tell the truth?" he wonders aloud. "That everyone else takes nap, and I do the loading."
Would-be nature lovers
The first time I heard Deerhoof was at Radio Free Records in San Jose, when the Lowdown played with them, probably in 1999. I never really heard music like theirs before. They were more epic than Metallica and more brutal than Body Count, without the bloody moshing. Their friend brought deer-shaped cookies, I bought a CD, ate cookies, and their guitar player and keyboard player, Rob and Kelly, invited me to drink wine and watch movies with them in San Francisco. This made me very happy, because I had just moved to S.F. and thought they were cool, but I never called them.
Trevor Shimizu, former Curtains member
Deerhoof may embrace all critters great and small, but don't call it a fresh-air fiend. The new Mariposa stomping grounds at the Cohen family abode are just a temporary fluke, Saunier says. Mariposa's beautiful: Deerhoof gets to see deer, but the band is basically made up of urban animals.
In fact, a good spate of violence against the objects that dot the city landscape might inspire Matsuzaki to write a song. "When I encounter something interesting, that's what triggers my melody button," she writes in an e-mail, "such as someone who is kicking the public telephone booth, starting from five meters away and really running towards the telephone booth and kicking so hard, several times – that really makes me want to sing."
Saunier kicked off Deerhoof with vocalist-bass player Rob Fisk in April 1994. Matsuzaki joined a year later, and in 1999 keyboardist Kelly Goode and former Gorge Trio member Dieterich hooked up with the 'Hoof. After quitting twice, Fisk finally decided to leave for good in 1999 and moved to Tennessee with Goode, where they perform as 7 Year Rabbit Cycle and he continues to contribute to Deerhoof, most recently as the cover artist of Apple O'. After meeting the rest of the band at a soccer game and giving Deerhoof's fifth album, Reveille (5RC/KRS, 2002), some hard listens, Cohen "bullied" his way into the band last year.
Somewhere along the way, Saunier says, a bevy of local music characters have played as part of the Deerhoof herd, including Blevin Blechdom, Steve Gigante of Tiny Bird Mouths, Cole Palme of Factrix, Chris Cooper and Jess Goddard of Fat Worm Error, Arrington of Old Time Relijun, Joe Preston of the Thrones and the Melvins, Justin Trosper of Unwound, and Brut, Satomi's dog in Japan. Meanwhile, in addition to the Curtains, 'Hoofers maintain side projects such as Dieterich and Cohen's Natural Dreamers and Saunier's Nervous Cop, which includes Hella's Zach Hill and the Please's Joanna Newsom.
Looking back at Deerhoof's older albums, Saunier feels nostalgic. "I feel really nice about them now," he writes. "When I finished high school I really didn't want to attend my graduation, and I couldn't understand why my parents wanted to watch me get my diploma and things, but we compromised and I walked, but didn't have to wear the cap-and-gown. But now I understand, because these albums are my kids and I'm proud of them. Even if they aren't dressed in fancy clothes, I still want to see them graduate."
Each one is special in its own flawed way. The LP Dirt Pirate Creed and CD The Man, the King, the Girl are the oldest yet still the furthest from graduation – "i.e., they lost the most money," Saunier writes, while he views Holdypaws as the most poppy Deerhoof album (recorded by Ass Baboons of Venus's Bob Limp). Halfbird killed his four-track, which was used and abused during the three-year overdubbing process, and the live CD Koalamagic is, he swears, "only available in Sydney, Australia, in a stack of unopened boxes."
Apple O' fits right into the discography with a similar, poignant tale. It took place at Harold's International Magazine Stand, where Saunier was happily reading a positive review of Reveille by Total Shutdown's Denver in Slap Skateboard Magazine, basking in the praise given the album, which included "zillions of overdubs and thousands of layers of sound," he says. "I thought we're pretty hot stuff, and then I turn to this interview with Kim Deal, and she said she can't stand these bands that overdub extra instruments onto their recordings. She thought it was corny when you sing something and there's sound of glass breaking, and then I felt really ashamed. And I thought, next time, we'll do it Kim's way."
Deerhoof strove for a "naked sound," as Saunier puts it, "just trying to make it sound the way we really sound when we play." It was recorded mainly in one afternoon by Dilute's Jay Pellicci but also fits in a few songs that were recorded at home on acoustic instruments, as well as "Sealed with a Kiss," which is patched together with samples of juicy fruit songs like Dilute's "Apple," Old Time Relijun's "Johnny Appleseed," and Atrium Musicae de Madrid's "Hymn to Apollo."
"The new album focuses on sweetness," Cohen explains. "My idea for Apple O' was just clear notes and wondering whether they would still sound good, just the way that we would play them in real life. That and candy and fruit. I did mention, candy and fruit?"
The lyrics revolve around "Adam and Eve, love and war, magic tricks, extinction, food, Deerhoof, plants and Panda," Matsuzaki writes in an e-mail. "And money."
Backing away from adjectives like naive, innocent, and childlike, the entire band would rather embrace words like nice, happy, and pretty. I prefer simple, strong, and evocative. In Matsuzaki's hands "Dinner for Two" 's lyrics – "Portabello in the glowing candlelight / Exploding candlelight" – translate into an antiwar message, set to a clunky blues progression and punctuated with eerie recorderlike sounds. "It's about the bomb," she writes in an e-mail. "The mushroom cloud looks so pretty but it is so toxic and kills so many people. People are tempted by terrible images. They want to see them because they are beautiful, but it can lead to disaster."
Triumphing over adversity
More than anything, they are honest. They are not trying to be cool or funny or ironic or retro or whatever bullshit assholes in the Bay Area usually do. Deerhoof is so pure and creative in an area that is so fake and unoriginal I want to fucking hang a kitten. Something that is particularly cool about them is how generous they are with their time and talent and increasing popularity.
Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu
Stewart praises Deerhoof's dear qualities – the members' openness to play with unknown bands, their tendency to pass on cool demos to record companies, and their lack of snooty attitude. But Saunier, at first, will have none of that. No group history. No details about other projects and other members. But later, as he warms up and Deerhoof nudges closer, that changes.
I ask Saunier if he has Tourette's syndrome, as I once heard, and he admits he does – his tics become moderately intense every few months and then nearly disappear. "Would people like Deerhoof more if I said it did influence the music?" he wonders via e-mail.
Probably not, I thought, although it might get the attention of some medical researchers. Rather, Deerhoof's music sounds like the work of a musically gifted alien infant that snacks on contradiction. Just don't call the members childlike – they may be small, but they're not kids. "Besides Greg," Cohen says, purposefully misunderstanding before sobering up, "we're not very tall. Satomi is not tall, and I look young. Actually, Greg plays complicated rhythms, and John is a real technical wizard. So they're not like kids. I've played in garage bands with kids all my life, but I've never played music that's this complicated before. It's complicated for me, but I'm not a superchops player."
Cute cartoons
The beastie's shape keeps shifting, becoming more abstract and fuzzed out as the conversation winds on – squint and it doesn't even look like a cloven-hoofed critter, more like a panda ready to get its groove on. The 'Hoofs are hidden away, but they're always peering out at the odd humans, jerking around in strange dress – and acting out. "There were these kids that responded to Deerhoof by putting on face paint and gyrating and crying," Dieterich writes in an e-mail, virtual tongue in cheek. "I think that might be our best reception so far by human beings."
Human beings are funny like that. You never know how they're going to react when any kind of expression seems futile and bombs are going off on the other side of the earth, when there just doesn't seem to be much point to anything at all. Then, at those moments, you think about Deerhoof, and the idea that a few very different people, on extremely separate wavelengths, can find a connection and make something as strange and beautiful as Apple O' is sort of supernatural.
"Music is so vague, so intangible. So hard to understand
even what you're talking about. The chances of finding some kind
of common ground in four separate people's deepest imaginations
is so slim it seems to me that it's just a miracle that it ever
happens," Saunier says, before adding, "Yeah, anybody
who decides to pick up an instrument and start making sounds –
I feel very, very connected to that person. I really feel a community
with people who make music, which isn't to say I don't feel a community
with people who don't do music. Ho, ho, ho."
Deerhoof plays with Numbers, XBXRX, and California Lightning
Sat/5, 10 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $8. (415)
474-0365.
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