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reeves gabrels
skytop oasis

words by Nathan Thorin
pix by Max Michaels

  "Yeah. Well I think if it’s done right there’s not an issue with it. If I succeed and it seems like some sort of seamless integration of it, it’s just because I’m not really thinking about it separately. It’s just ‘now I step on the pedal’.
   And I don’t really have much, but the wah-wah pedal and the modulation modeler, which is like flanger, tremolo, and univibe type thing. And then a channel switch. So that’s less than your average Holiday Inn guitar player.
   What I do use is DJ effects. The things that were on the stands were air effects, and this thing called the Chaos Pad. I bought the Chaos Pad after I read a review on it that said it was made for DJ’s or keyboard players but had absolutely no use live for bass players or guitar players. It said you could reprocess your guitar after you recorded it, but no use for live application. So I immediately went out and bought one and used it the next day at a gig. ::laughs::
   The air effects came along because I wanted to get away from using the tremolo on the guitar. Because especially in my band being a trio, if you break a string on a floating tremolo the tension changes and the whole instrument goes out of tune. And I’ve done that with plenty of other bands where I was not the singer and I didn’t want to put the singer through that, and I’m not going to do that to myself.
   So I wanted to be able to play a Les Paul style stop-tail piece guitar, and what the air effects has is an infrared beam. And it’s not that different of moving your arm this way (for a floating tremolo) or going like that (up and down over the air effects). So that’s set on a pitch bend, and it sounds kind of a record slowing down it’s a little more than usual, and the filtering is nice.
   Some reviewer said that watching me play guitar is like watching a Japanese film dubbed in English. Like sometimes my fingers are moving but you don’t hear anything, but sometimes you hardly see my fingers moving but you hear a bunch of notes, I guess. It made me really think in terms of communicating, fundamentally I don’t want to play for guitar players I want to play for people. I want to do something to someone who doesn’t really know anything about music but wants to hear music. Otherwise you’re just preaching to the converted, I’d rather be a missionary.
   What I realized is a lot of people hear with their eyes. They have to see you do something. And when you’re in that little guitar player hunched up position playing and doing all of this stuff, unless you’re right there, you’re not going to see it.
And if it’s a pedal you don’t really see what’s going on. So I’ve noticed it seems to bring people along a little bit more because I have to reach for this thing. And also I keep the Chaos pad a little lower than is comfortable, there’s this old R&B thing, because I have to reach for it so I don’t abuse it, because I have to change my position physically.
   But also there was like the old school R&B guys, road guys, that were like always wear something that people can’t buy at a store, even if it means just sewing a little blue patch on. And never make it look easy. Let them see you sweat. So by keeping the pedal in a place that’s not easy it keeps me from abusing it, but also lets the audience know that I must really want it. That I must really mean to do this now if I’m gonna stretch for it. So it’s all part of communicating something."

  "I think we parted on good terms but it just… there’s a lot of things when trying to explain my reasons. You know, things get excerpted in the final edit of the interview. I mean he opened the door for me, and I’ll always owe him for that. And he and I were good friends and I hope we still are. I knew him before he knew I played guitar, so that relationship should still exist.
   But it was just that I had gotten into a space because we started with Tin Machine, I always kind of thought of him as the singer in the band I was in. Or even worse that he was the singer in my band. How fucked is that? Like, ‘Oh yeah, David Bowie is the singer in my band and I know better than he does because I’ve been doing this for ten years,’ and he’s been doing it for thirty years. So my ego was a little out of whack.
   But I think at the end of the day that it was a nice long run. We wrote a bunch of songs together, we recorded seven albums together. It was just time, I didn’t have anything new and that would have been dishonest. I cared too much about him and the music and the legacy of that. I always tried to do justice to his legacy as if you would if you were playing with Miles Davis or George Jones, or Merle Haggard or Bob Dylan. I always wanted to pay tribute to well and before, but also the responsibility to move it forward.
   Which to me, my favorite album that I did with him and the one that I’m most proud of I think, is ‘Earthling’. That’s the one that I felt that I finally got to the next level. I mean Tin Machine was different, but ‘Earthling’ was future different. And I wanted to stay in that space for another record, like a 2.0 version.
   That was one of the things that made me feel that I didn’t have any thing more to say there, because I wanted to go more in that direction. We were co-producing and co-writing everything on ‘Hours’ and that was great but at the end of the day it was his record and he has to be happy. I was becoming less happy, and that’s not going to do anybody any good."

   "I met him at the birthday show. When we did David’s birthday show. And Robert is funny because Robert hated Tin Machine. I was working the songs out with everybody that was going to come up and sing. So I was talking to Robert, and then playing with him he finally said to a friend of his, ‘Well I was really wrong about Reeves’. Then he asked me to play on the ‘Wrong Number’ single that’s on the ‘Galore’ record which is their greatest hits album with a new track. Then he and I wrote a song for "Orgazmo". It was he and I and the drummer from the Cure. We called it Cogasm, as a working name for the band.
  We did that and then a couple of more little things with him. I did like ten live shows with him as well. I was jumping back and forth from being on tour with David, and they were right behind us. So when I could stay for a day I would go play their set with them. Most of those nights ended at like ten o’clock in the morning and somewhere around seven we started talking about what kind of song we wanted to write together. So that song was gestating for about a year. And we actually wrote and recorded it in a day. I just had to mix it at a later point.
   When I first put my album out on .mp3 that wasn’t on it and ‘Trap’ wasn’t on it. Just because of the download time. I was thinking well, I know how many I’ve sold and this isn’t working out as well as the first solo album, which was on a brick and mortar label type thing. I remember thinking, ‘Well, it’s time to start the new record, this one’s over, it’s been out for a few months’. Then I get a phone call from a friend of mine from New York going, ‘Have you been to the Yahoo site in a while? You’ve been nominated for Best Internet Album’. It was me, Jimmy Page, The Black Crowes, The Who, Aimee Mann, and They Might Be Giants that all got nominated.
   For me, that was enough right there. But that’s what brought the album out. In trying to stay away from the major labels, and record labels and do it all myself, it turned around and I was right back with the record companies again, because of the interest generated by Yahoo."

  "Yeah. I was kind of under the weather but I’d rather play a small place that’s full. I mean a thousand people is great, three hundred people is great, two hundred people is great. Anything over a thousand starts to get a little weird. What really sucks is a place that holds a thousand that only has twenty-five people in it. I haven’t had that one yet.
  The other thing is size determines revenue, so you kind of try to play as big as you can. The band is killer. Brock Avery (on drums) and Paul Ill? (on bass), we went to school together but we didn’t hang with the same group of people. And we all knew of each other from Boston but I was kind of hanging with the art fag crowd, Brock was more of the jock rock contingent, and Paul was… I don’t know what Paul was. Paul was so degenerate.
   But we knew each other by reputation. And I didn’t see them again until I moved down to L.A. last year. I was playing in something with Paul, because I did cross paths with Paul. I had a rehearsal space that Paul needed to use… then I met Brock again. And they ended up in my band.
   And it’s just great. We were laughing so much traveling that we actually drove past Philadelphia. Missed Philadelphia went through Camden and didn’t know we had gone too far south until we hit Wilmington, Delaware. And this was just a normal sober drive. I bought one of those voice-changing megaphones so we were yelling at the toll attendants. So we got our payback there for abusing the toll attendants.
   That’s why we were laughing last night. The heckling… my friends were heckling me. Some of the things that came out of mouth I would never say. I said something then I turned around to Brock and Paul and was like, ‘ I can’t believe I said that, where the hell did that come from?’
 The one guy that said, ‘Play something you know’, was actually a friend of mine… a guitar student of mine. And I just said, ‘I didn’t know your mother came with music’. I was like, ‘Why did I just say that? I feel like Jackie Mason’."

   "We’ve been playing some of the new stuff on the road. We played a new one last night called ‘Tunnel’. It’s an optimistic little song. It goes, "I’m sorry that you hate the life you lead/It’s just the tunnel at the end of the light". We go through funny sort of as-a-pack thing that we’ll start listening to something. We went through this Mountain period, the group Mountain. And ‘Tunnel’ came out of that. And we’ve been writing, we’re like four or five songs into the next album. We get into these obscure bands and we trade albums back and forth and it informs us on the next thing.
   And it’s good with this trio format, because it’s flexible. We’re the trio that sounds like a five piece. But we try to avoid the…cliché’s of that but still keep the concept of the trio alive. You can look at the Police and Nirvana. But as far as flexibility, I can go like, ‘ Keep pedaling, I’ve forgotten the first line’. And I’ve had situations where I like tagged the chorus, and I didn’t realize it until I was almost done singing it because Paul and Brock were right on me. And Paul was actually singing the harmony part on it. And that’s what you get with the trio, you don’t have the keyboard player going, ‘What?’ "

   "Going back home. It’s strange, we’ve only done like one gig out of ten on our own gear. And we’re playing up at EMP the "Experience Music Project"… Then we got a break and when schools are back in like late August and early October we’re going back around again. This tour was great, we got a really good reception and we got on well with all the club owners, they’ve asked us back. It was pleasant all around.
   You know, we could stay home. If it was about making money, everybody’s got other gigs that we could all sleep in our own beds at night. I mean it’s one thing because I get the glory of having my name on the marquee. But the for the other guys, they’ve been incredibly very supportive. They’ve got tons of experience. They don’t need to be doing this again. It’s just fun. And we’re making something. And every night is different. There is room for improvisation. The difference between the live thing and the album… I think we maintain the integrity of the songs. We just arrange some things slightly so we can do it as a trio. We just strip I down so we have someplace to go in the song.
   A couple of places have been billing us as the Reeves Gabrels Band. Which is kind of creepy. We didn’t like it as a unit. Prior to that we were used to saying, ‘Hi, we’re Reeves Gabrels’. But then we settled on unit. Not ‘Thee Reeves Gabrels Unit’, but just ‘Reeves Gabrels’ Unit’. "

::laughter:: So kind of vague there.

   "I don’t know if we’ll put that on the album, I just want to pay tribute to their contribution. I feel awkward sometimes when people say we’re going to see Reeves Gabrels, when they’re coming to see me and Paul and Brock. But Paul’s working on some stuff so maybe we’ll just come out as Paul Ill." ::laughs::

Check out Reeves’ site at www.reevesgabrels.com