by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
WHO: Tea Leaf Green
WHERE: Freebird Live
WHEN: October 9th
Ten years ago, the musicians of Tea Leaf Green developed an original sound that appealed to a large fan base. The group’s sound harkens back to the San Francisco bands during the psychedelic era when musicians jammed and super-groups were born. It was the “season of the witch” that produced The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Since then, the group has performed at many outdoor festivals, making many new fans. Two years ago, TLG performed at the Bonnaroo Festival to a crowd of over 10,000 rock fans. It was clear by the band’s reception that TLG was building the momentum to achieving national status with hit potential. This lead to the band relentlessly touring to promote its two critically acclaimed albums.
To find out more about this rising group, EU talked to lead guitarist Josh Clark for a chat about the band.
EU: Your group is making some noise in the biz. So how long have you been in existence?
Josh: We’re coming up to our tenth anniversary in a few months.
EU: So you guys are road dogs from hell. When I listened to your music, I came up with a formula- psychedelic jam band=Grateful Dead. Is that an accurate assumption on my part?
Josh: No. We just put it out there and let people decide what it is. Actually, we were never into the Dead. But I will say that we evolved with a similar spirit as the Dead, in that, we’re from San Francisco and we improvise on stage. But if anyone wants to compare us to the Dead, we’ll just go with it.
EU: Then what you’re saying is that you improvise more than most bands?
Josh: In concert, yes. But we try to keep our songs down to the basic three minutes in our studio recordings. But on-stage, we improvise to flush out the details. When we first wrote our songs, we jammed out to extend the time, but we quickly learned that we couldn’t go on with four songs, even with jamming-out for twenty minutes each. So that got us into writing more songs. Now we have a backlog of songs ready for performing.
EU: Have you released a live album?
Josh: Yes, we just released a live album titled Rock’n’roll Band on DVD, which gives you the entire TLG experience.
EU: I see that you have podcasts and other electronic venues, which makes your music available in many different markets. Does this stimulate ticket sales to your concerts?
Josh: We make our music available for free so that people will come to our concerts. We’re about making new fans at each show. At this point in our career, we are making our living from our live shows. Of course, we are hoping that will create a greater market for our CDs.
EU: Going this route gives you complete independence to make your own decisions. Have you used a producer on any of you albums?
Josh: For the last album, we brought in a top engineer and producer. For our first albums, we produced it ourselves, which in a manner of speaking, gave us enough rope to hang ourselves with. But, we decided to bring in an impartial producer who we all trusted for our last studio album. And we made some changes that we all agreed made the record better. It was hard to take our hands off the project, but it worked out for the best. This gave me a chance to concentrate on playing and not worry about making the record sound better.
EU: Yeah, the bottom line is pleasing your fans. Your fans are the holy grail of your career. And if you can sell product at your shows, then it will build momentum from there. Air play helps, but in today’s world, radio is not life or death like it was years ago.
Josh: It was gratifying to see our fan community grow on our MySpace site and from our website. And we cater to our fans, giving them a forum to express themselves and talk about our music. We also make ourselves available to our fans, which keep them happy, and we learn a lot from them. It’s like you said, fan devotion is the holy grail of marketing a band.
It was fun chatting with Josh about his band’s rise to prominence in the wild jungle of rock’n’roll.
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EU Critic’s Choice Awards
