INTERVIEW: DEERHOOF
WORDS: ALEXANDER HENDERSON
IMAGE: MARY CATHERINE PENN

San Francisco’s Deerhoof has had a pretty good last couple of years. In 2005 they released their longest, most complex and most critically acclaimed album; in 2006 they hit the road with global juggernauts Radiohead, as well as witnessed one of their albums being adapted into a public school ballet; now it’s 2007 and they’re touring the world once again in support of their new album, Friend Opportunity.

Although they’re less one member from last year (guitarist Chris Cohen left to focus on his other band, The Curtains), the remaining three runners show no signs of slowing down. Bassist and vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki, guitarist John Dietrich, and drumming wundermensch Greg Saunier continue to perform songs written for four players as if they were written for three.

Greg talked to us recently about his favorite movies, the dynamics of being in a band, and how to deal with the cramped monotony of the rental van (hint: Worf the Klingon is not entirely uninvolved). Here’s what he had to say.

I’ve read a bunch that you are a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick. What is your favorite Stanley Kubrick movie?
I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s really not a question of favorite, because the way that I appreciate those movies isn’t always just a question of ‘Oh I like it’ versus ‘Oh I don’t like it.’ It’s more like, when I watch them, it’s many things. When I watch them one time, and then I watch them again, say, several months later or a year later, I feel like I’m watching a different movie, which I think is a very rare experience. I mean, you can have that experience with any movie, or any music or whatever, but I feel like it seems to especially happen with his movies and I feel like that’s something that, you know, we always try to aspire to. It’s something that has a certain ambiguity to it that comes out with something different, that you could interpret in so many different ways. It could mean one thing to a child and mean a different thing to a teenager and mean a different thing to a middle-aged person. Depending on what mood you’re in, or what you were thinking about before you started the music or the movie. Your impression of it might change; it’s like, ‘Ok, I spend my $20 and buy my DVD of Full Metal Jacket, but really I’m buying more than a movie. I’m buying however many times I watch that movie.’

Cause it’s a new experience every time?
Yeah, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Part of the thing, too, is that when I watch it, it stays with me, so in addition to being multiple movies, it also lasts longer than - whatever, the 2 hours, 2.5 hours, 3 hours - however long the movie is. It seems to last beyond that: I’ll think about it the whole next day, you know, and I’m trying to figure out ‘What does that exactly mean?’ and it really engages my whole, like, all my emotions, and all my intellect, and everything. It’s almost like a puzzle. So, if I had to pick one, I don’t know. 2001.

I was hoping you’d say that, ‘cause that’s my favorite.
[Laughs] Oh really?

If you can’t pick a favorite one, what was the first movie you saw that got you into Kubrick?
That’s a good question. Probably 2001 but the only one that I ever saw in the theater when it was new was Eyes Wide Shut, so in a sense I feel like - it’s strange, but I feel like that was my first one because that was the first one where I experienced the suspense and the lead-up time, you know, the pre-release excitement and the pre-release controversy in real time as it was happening in culture, rather than reading about it later, like ‘Oh, this is what happened when 2001 came out back in 1969.’ So in a way I felt like Eyes Wide Shut was my first movie, even though of course I’d seen all of them.

What did you think of Eyes Wide Shut, versus the rest of his catalogue?
It’s funny, actually. John Dietrich, who plays guitar in Deerhoof, in fact it’s very lucky that John’s still in the band and that people who come to the show are able to see him performing on stage because John was almost jettisoned from the group, actually, because he joined the group in ’99, which was literally like a couple months after Eyes Wide Shut had come out. I went to the theater and saw it five times or something like that, and John went and saw it and said he didn’t like it, and we got in such a big fight. You know, we’d only known each other for like a month, but… we got in such a big fight, over whether Eyes Wide Shut was a good movie or not that it almost broke up the band right there [laughs]. But later we settled out differences. I’ve learned to hate it and John learned to like it.

Sounds like you guys are cramped up in a van, right? Or in a car?
Minivan, yeah. We always rent. We flew out to the East Coast. John actually is talking to Satomi right now, which is funny cause it’s causing him to swerve into another lane with oncoming traffic. He’s sort of looking into the backseat while he’s talking with Satomi [laughs]. Extremely unsafe. We might not make it to the show, actually.

So we can see on the police footage later the swerving car from the chopper will be…
[Laughs] Exactly, that’s us. This time we broke down and got a minivan. We try to do it in something smaller, but it’s a minivan this time. We always rent, and it’s cool, because actually the rock tour van would be a little too big for us. I’m thinking that driving tours might not be able to last for much longer. I don’t know how much longer the US infrastructure really has in this world, you know. The carbon based whatever-you-call-it, the fossil fuel-based economy. I’m thinking we’re gonna get everything down to practice amps or amp simulators, I’m going to play electronic drums, and we’re just going to tour by train or bicycle or something.

Or that cart that goes on the train tracks that you pump up and down.
[Laughs] Yes! That would be great. That’s us. It’s actually pretty amazing; I’m being flippant about it, but there are bands that really have gotten it together enough to do bio-diesel tours. There are some friends of ours called Apollo Sunshine that totally do all bio-diesel tours. They have a big diesel van and they literally get all of their gas from, you know, like McDonald’s or Long John Silver’s or whatever. They just take their used grease. They’ve got some system that they’ve installed in their thing that purifies it to whatever degree that it needs to be, and they’re running the whole thing. There’s no exhaust and there’s no dependence on foreign oil. So from the point of view of Apollo Sunshine, you know, all this war and stuff is totally unnecessary. They’re gonna be totally fine. And honestly, it’s not just them. It’s a burgeoning movement, you know, and I think that in the near future we’re going to be seeing more and more bands get it together to be able to make that leap. We haven’t yet. We haven’t gotten organized enough. But I have the nothing but the highest admiration for bands that are able to do that.

Would you be willing in the future to consider that before the next tour?
Well, the main problem is the initial capital, which is that you can’t rent a bio-diesel van. You have to buy a van and convert it; you buy a diesel van, which is already rare, usually a European one or something like that, and then you have to covert it, and none of us is very handy [laughs]. There has been some talk about being on a group bio-diesel tour, like where you get a big tour bus that normally runs on diesel but then you do bio-diesel and have multiple bands all traveling in the same bus together. I wouldn’t be against something like that. I think that’d be amazing.

Continuing in the theme of traveling around the country: I’m interested, what do you bring with you on tour to read?
You really want to know [laughs]? I’ll put it out of my pocket and I’ll check it out, cause I actually forget what it’s called. Actually, the cover fell off — no, I still have the cover. It’s called Across the Darkness. It’s Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has a picture of Jordie, Worf and Dr. Polaski on the front, they’re kind of floating in the sky above this weird, looks like some sort of medieval scene of people with shields and helmets doing battle with swords and stuff. Anyway, I usually read Star Trek novels that I can find in a thrift store for under $1.

That is awesome.
You like that, huh? I’ve just proven my lack of hipness to all of your listeners.

But there’s a whole new subset of nerds who are going to be even more in love with you.
Wait, Satomi wanted to share. This book that Satomi is reading is called Satan Comes Down and Plays a Flute. That’s the translation. I have absolutely no idea what that is. Might be too difficult to get an explanation, but according to Satomi’s translation that’s the name. Satomi claims that the Japanese name for the movie Basic Instinct was Crystallized Smirk [laughs]. She claims that in Japanese the words for that movie translate as Crystallized Smirk. I was just like, ‘Ok I’m not sure I’m gonna trust in…’

How much of your output do you think is totally not what you originally intended it to be?
Well – 100 percent, obviously. And that’s not just Deerhoof. I think for every band 100 percent of their output is not what they intended. Nothing is ever what you intend. It goes through a convoluted process. There’s no such thing the ideal version of anything. I’ve never felt like our recorded version is the real version of the song, and the live version’s just the cover version, nor vice versa. I always feel like any version, recorded or live, is just yet another funny variation, basically.

In 2005 Menomena put out an album that was just the three of them each composing a 20-minute instrumental track. I was just wondering what would happen if Deerhoof tried that.
Well, that’s not so far necessarily from what we’ve done. We’ve had some instrumentals, and maybe these songs aren’t necessarily 20 minutes, but we do tend to write our songs separately, so some of the songs on Friend Opportunity are written by Satomi, and some are written by John and some are written by me. We don’t tend to write our songs by collaborating together in the same room, jamming or whatever. Which I think would be kind of like a more reasonable way to make up songs, which I think is the way that most bands do it, but we seem to not be able to do it very well. It’s more like each of the three of us tends to go home, away from the other two, where it’s quiet and try to come up with their own separate ideas. I think that’s kinda how the album turns out. Once the other two people sorta get their hands on it, things start to change a lot, so it’s not like it’s totally separate. By the time it’s finished it does turn into a genuine collaboration, but I have kind of thought of Deerhoof a bunch of times as three singer/songwriters who happen to be in the same band.

So there’s no definite, dominant songwriting force in Deerhoof?
No. Each of the three of us has written a great many songs, and when Chris was in the band he wrote a bunch of the songs, and when Rob was in the band he wrote a bunch of the songs.

I think it’s really cool that you guys toured with Radiohead.
Well, it was an amazingly fun tour for us. They were really, really fun.

Which member of Radiohead is the most talkative? The most outgoing?
Oh god. Colin, the bass player, was maybe the most immediately outgoing. He was the first person who came over and said hello and immediately wanted to start taking our picture and stuff. He’s always got a camera in his hand and he’s really talkative and he’s always posting pictures on their website. When you get down to it, all of them were incredibly easy to talk to, so friendly. And all of their crew. As far as which one’s the most positive; none of them are positive. They’ve all got the darkest sense of humor imaginable. They’re completely down on themselves all the time. They think that they’re a terrible band [laughs]. It’s so funny, I mean you just cannot stop cracking up when you talk to them because they do nothing but put themselves down, over and over again. Probably Jonny’s the most extreme. I don’t even know how to describe it, stuff I don’t even want to repeat. Really hilarious. All of them have the extremely dark sense of humor.

I wouldn’t think that they would be that self-deprecating.
They’re all jokers. They’re just so sarcastic and so funny, just absolutely cruel. Especially when they’re talking about themselves. And we would just be dying laughing. They really are like stand-up comedians when you actually meet them, every last one of them. It’s just so funny.

So, after having gotten to know them and this side of them - the fact that they’re so much more goofy than it seems - does it affect how you listen to their music at all?
Of course, yeah. In a way, isn’t that why with superstars like The Beatles, why people are always obsessed with wanting to find out more about what they are really like, what they were like, what’s their personality, what might be the secret meaning behind the songs. It does that to your experience of it. Even though Radiohead, or whoever it is, their song works like, it comes on the radio between two other songs, and you just hear it abstractly, like you don’t even know what band it is. It’s just some sounds coming out of the radio - even though it really works for so many people on that level, the more you find out about their history both as people and as musicians, and the more you start to understand the lyrics and what the double meanings of some of the lyrics are, and the metaphors involved. You start thinking about the artwork like ‘Oh, I see how the artwork sort of fits with this theme,’ and the more you learn about what instrument they used on this song - it just makes it better and better. You know, sometimes, when you get DVDs and you watch the commentary track or you watch the special features, and all the magic is lost. The more you look beneath the veneer, you realize that there’s nothing there. There’s no depth, there’s nothing behind it, it was just a façade. I’ve personally found that the more I’ve learned about Radiohead, the more mysterious their music becomes to me. The deeper it is, the more I realize there is that I didn’t even realize was there before. It’s meaning only grows, instead of shrinks. You know, we were talking about Kubrick earlier, and I feel the same way there. It’s that kind of thing where the more you learn about it, the more you realize that you don’t know about it.

Last year there was a middle-school ballet made based on your album Milk Man, right?
It was in Maine, on a small island off the coast. An island so small, population 300, it’s called North Haven. Basically, this one schoolhouse, K-12, on this island, and the music teacher-slash-drama teacher decided that she wanted to create a theatrical version of Milk Man with people from the school. They included musicians and dancers and a choreographer, people helping with the lightning, sound, set decoration. Some were adults and people from the community, and some were actual school children. It turned out totally amazing. I have some exciting news about that, actually. People outside of this tiny island are going to be able to get some, at least vague fleeting sense of what this incredible thing was like, because a DVD is going to be available within a week. People should be able to order it from their [the school’s] website. I think it’s going to be like milkmanballet.com.

That’s really cool. I’ve seen clips of the ballet on youtube…
Yeah, but those clips were taken, like, with somebody’s phone. This will be edited with close-ups, and you can see details and the sound is really good. You really get a sense of the whole sweep of it. You can hear all the details of Courtney. She was the person who directed it and arranged all the music, you can hear the details of her arrangement of all the songs. She went through the CD and transcribed it note for note and rearranged it for a totally different ensemble of instruments. These players were amazing, and the dancers! That was the highlight of it. They were kids ages, maybe five to nine, totally amazing. And they also did some singing on a bunch of the songs. You’ll be able to see it. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. I think that I can fairly say that even if I had nothing to do with this, or if I weren’t somehow involved, or if it wasn’t originally Deerhoof music that they were starting off from. It’s just, the combination of things that ended up together in this theatrical performance is a combination unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It was really, really amazing. I think it took a lot of nerve and a lot of guts for Courtney to decide to take what’s normally a somewhat conservative format - which is, music theater in public school — and do something really risky with it, and do something totally new and something really untried, and also something that was an enormous amount of work. I’m just so proud to have been even peripherally involved. It was amazing.

There’s something about Deerhoof’s music in general, but in particular something about Milk Man that seems to me to lend itself so perfectly toward that format.
Oh, that’s cool. I’m glad you see it that way. That was one of the things that made us so happy when she first introduced that idea to us. When we were making Milk Man, we felt like ‘This is meant to be music theater. This is supposed to seem like music theater, and it’s supposed to be for kids.’ Of course, we never stated that explicitly, but it seemed like Courtney picked up on that and actually turned that conceptual mood that may have been in the background, she turned it into a real thing and actually made it happen in that form. As if she had reached into our brains and found what we were really thinking and made it come true. It’s really hard for me to even find words to describe what that is like. It was beautiful for us because it felt like the music had taken on a life of its own. One of the things that really blew us away about this whole thing is how little we were involved, how little of this was our idea. She arranged all the music without help from us; the choreography was totally done by them. We didn’t see it until we showed up for the performance. They had taken it upon themselves as their own project and they made it a part of their own life and they made it part of their town and it really had nothing to do with us after a certain point, which was the beautiful thing about it. It was as if our baby had graduated from college or something, and gone off into the world and become its own human being. It’s amazing.

Is there any other, analogous back-of-your-mind concept that went along with any of the other albums?
Yeah, but… I don’t necessarily want to just spell it out, one after another. I mean, that wasn’t the only thing we were thinking with Milk Man. There were other possible shades or interpretations or concepts or themes that we were thinking about. We always have those, kind of, back stories or subtexts, like this is a metaphor for that, or this is meant to be in a certain style. I am hesitant to try to spell it out like a Deerhoof cliffnotes, or something like that. If I told you what my idea is on the themes of our music, it would just be one person’s opinion, and I’m no more an expert on Deerhoof’s music than anybody else. If the Milk Man ballet has taught me anything, it’s that somebody else understands just as much, if not more about our music than I do. They were able to get more new meaning out of the music than even we were. There really is no such thing as the “true” meaning; it’s the “true” meaning from their point of view. Once I was able to be in the audience to experience their sense of what it was, then that expanded my idea of what it was. I could incorporate that into my repertoire of ways to interpret Milk Man.

That makes sense.
I love it when people listen to our music and I really love it when people listen to the point where they’re actually wanting to listen to the lyrics and think about the artwork and think about the themes. You know, ‘Is this album really about something? Am I getting an overall story from this? Are there characters?’ I’m not going to say that somebody gets the right answer and somebody gets the wrong answer, even though I do think it’s amazing that Courtney came up with the Milk Man thing. I kind of don’t think there’s any wrong answer.

I saw Peter Tork of The Monkees when I was in fifth grade and he said the same thing, about the interpretation of the music being in the hands of the listeners.
Exactly. I might even go a step further and say that it isn’t even music until somebody hears it, and interprets it. If we put some music on CD, or we play a concert… it’s really just a sketch to be completed by the listener, in the act of listening. That’s what finishes an unfinished little something-or-other that was growing out there. We always feel like our music is a collaboration between us and the listener.

I definitely think that your music does beg to be analyzed, especially the way that each album has its own peculiar artwork that ties in with the sound of it. Which leads me to a question about Friend Opportunity; there are twelve different album covers possible. Which one is your favorite?
I don’t have a favorite. I actually think that they all work together. David Shrigley did the art. He basically just made about 15 paintings and said “Use whatever you want in whatever way you want.” That basically was like 15 different covers, he didn’t have an idea of which one was supposed to be the cover. I guess we all felt like the one that ended up being on the front in the version that you see in the store is not necessarily our favorite but is the one we thought would look good as the cover. I like his combination of all of them, because each gives a slightly different feel of ‘What does “friend opportunity” mean?’ It sounds like something friendly and nice, but then a lot of his paintings have a dark quality to them, too, or they’re slightly broken or violent or something’s wrong. I kind of feel like they all need to be there in order to complete the picture.

If you had to compose an album with a single instrument, what would you choose?
Human voice. The greatest instrument of all. The most flexible, the one that makes the most sound, the one that everybody has. The most ancient instrument. I mean, there’s definitely no second place. The human voice has to be the greatest instrument. If I had to use one instrument, it would be human voice.

Website: myspace.com/deerhoof