Jay Lane Interview - Part 2
Jay was kind enough to sit down with Dave & Allison Rosenberg in Stamford, Connecticut, on August 22, 2006 to discuss his music and career. A complete transcript follows. Photos by and copyright (in order of appearance) ??, ??, Bud Fulginiti, ??, Butch Worrell, Dave Clark, Gregg Nixon, Butch Worrell, and Bleu Grijalva.
Part 2: RatDog and The Grateful Dead [Return to Part 1]
So anyway then Rob calls me up to go up to Bob Weir's house to do this Satchel Paige thing that they were working on that I still think they're working on.
Yeah how's that going?
Yeah ya know. Let's see, like I said I got called up to Bob's house to work on the Satchel Paige thing and I believe they were almost done with it at this time and now it's like 13 years later? So anyway, yeah man, I met Bob and there you have it, I had like four gigs at once. And I was able to do a couple, three rehearsals and gigs here and there, but it wasn't long before everybody wanted to do a tour at the same time so you know it's like here I went and started juggling it. And you know what, I'm really glad that everything turned out the way it did because if you think about it, I had four gigs I coulda chosen from and I coulda just said "I'm just gonna do this" or "I'll do all of them but I'm gonna primarily do this one." For some reason I was just like "I'll do all of them," but when it came to push and shove there was something about this, even though I knew it was like the big frontier I was like looking at. I look at it, so I go play with Charlie Hunter and I could see Charlie Hunter was really about to be Charlie Hunter and he would play with me for a few albums and been like, "Alright, now I want to play with these other guys," 'cause if you look at Charlie Hunter, it's Charlie Hunter's name and he gets different guys all the time so that's what that woulda been.
Alphabet Soup is really my—the kind of music that I really come from, the kind of music I really play, you know from my upbringing or whatever—hip-hop, funk, jazz, whatever—and it's a lot of Bay area guys that I come up with or whatever, but we never took it seriously, all of us. You know we never took it out of the clubs. "Okay we got a gig on Tuesday night, cool man" and we all show up Tuesday night and play the gig, get paid our 60 bucks each and "see you at the next gig." Nobody was really like, "Hey man, we gotta get this on the road" or anything like that. But we have still been doing Alphabet Soup to this day, and the rappers from Alphabet Soup have actually—a couple original ones who had the real magic spark have gotten back together recording under the name right now of the Band of Brothers, even though we might do a gig called Alphabet Soup. Who knows, we just still don't know. But we're still playing, though, so that's cool but.
Or I could've decided I was gonna devote my time to Les where that woulda been like one tour one time, that Sausage tour we did, then he did Primus after that. He didn't do Sausage again after that. But there was also that was all music with my peers and guys I knew and it was kinda like music that I already knew. I knew jazz and funk and R&B and all that stuff; it was what I grew up with. I didn't know anything about the Grateful Dead. You know, I mean I remember seeing the video with the skeletons in the 80s, you know, "I will get by." I mean that's all I knew. That's really all I knew. 
Or actually my friend Tom Pope who came and played drums with us a couple times in New York—I met him also at Cazadero. Let me put his name back in the Cazadero thing. And when I would come hang out in Berkeley those years I was living in Berkeley I would go hang out at Tom Pope's house, and he turned me onto the Grateful Dead. "Check this out." We sat around, smoked pot, looked at the album covers n stuff and he'd show me, "Look at The Beast." He was telling me about The Beast, the thing Billy n Mickey n drums n all that shit. "Wow cool." We were kids so it was like, "drums... oooh." You know all excited n shit, then we'd listen to a little Grateful Dead, then take that off and King Crimson and "oooh," then put on Peter Gabriel. You know sitting around. So anyway so let's see Tom Pope, alright, where was I gettin off to?
Getting into the Grateful Dead...
Yes, so, thank you, yes. So I knew that there was something there that I really dug man. I really dug the whole idea of hippieness n all that shit. I grew up up the hill from, like five blocks from Ashbury and Haight, that's where I lived at that time when all those guys were doing their thing down there from—I was born in '64 and I think the first couple years I lived in San Mateo, then we moved to San Francisco like five blocks from Haight and Ashbury.
Where?
It was up the hill in Ashbury Terrace. It was these really nice houses up at the top of a hill there, man. This house today that I lived in, I'm sure it's worth like 3 million dollars, and I remember my mom, I remember the price she got it for—300,000 dollars, that's how much she paid for it. But she didn't pay it off, she's a teacher, you know, an educator, so she was paying on it then we moved. So but anyway, oh god I lost my train of thought again.
You were talking about loving the hippies.
Yeah, you know I just, there was something there. It was like the big frontier, but I knew it felt like home. There was something there that felt like—You know what it was? It was that, now I love Charlie and I love Les, but their music is more about, "Look at me. Check out this amazing shit," rather than "Okay, we all know this is amazing. Now let's all get down together and dance among yourselves and we're gonna do this all together."
Here's an example. Billy Kreutzmann is not a household name, right? And it's because he's a hypnotist. It's because when he sits down behind the drums, you don't think about who's playing the drums. You instantly start dancing. He's playing only for you to dance, and the way he plays it's not a flashy show-offy, "look at me" kinda thing. It's like almost like as soon as he starts playing, he starts dangling that little watch in front of your face and you're dancing. You know, he turns your dance thing on, and you couldn't give a fuck who's playing drums, as it's supposed to be. Of course when you're a kid and you're taking drums lessons and you want to see the guy with the eight toms and you want to see the guy who can play the fastest and that's exciting when you're young. But to see a guy who's mastered the subliminal part of it, the part that gets you on the deeper level, you know....
I'm convinced the greatest drummers are the guys like Charlie Watts or something where you're not even thinking about the drums when they play, you're only thinking about the music and the song. It's not like, "Wow, oh yeah, hold up, wait, this drummer, whoa look at that," you know. It's like "Oh yeah, the music's starting," and then you're partying with your friends.
So I was really attracted to that because I think that's what I want. I mean, the hip-hop thing and all the things I was doing with Alphabet Soup are very similar to that actually too. We never rehearsed. Alphabet Soup never rehearsed. It was made up of rappers who had their rap thing down whether they were doing a thing they worked out together or whether they were freestyling. 
Kenny Brooks and Dred Scott, who were the jazz portion of the band, had their little jazz heads and their melodies worked out and their chords and they would do that, and Sam the bass player would pick up on whatever key they were playing, and he and I would full on reggae out with the hip hop and reggae kinda bass and drums, so everything was set up. We didn't have to rehearse, we'd just kick it off, ya know. It was great.
But it was very much like, I don't know, I was playing beats. I believe when I'm playing the drums I get the most enjoyment out of other people enjoying themselves. I cannot stand people sitting and watching. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at, and that's what it was like playing with Charlie and that's what it's like playing with Les. People stand and watch. Really, you go to a show, that's what you'll see. Maybe they're bouncing up and down a little bit at a Les show or surfing the crowd a little, but for the most part they're watching and I'm all about—the best gigs I've played are where the whole front row is turned around facing the other way 'cause the party's on the dance floor, and the band, we're just facilitating the whole thing. It's easier—people aren't looking at you. Maybe it's 'cause I've never been like a show-off. I don't like the attention, If there's a whole bunch of people looking at me, I don't like the attention. I'd rather be part of the joke or part of the thing, we're all laughing together here, not everyone's laughing at me.
You can't look at it like that....
Right right right, not people laughing. Now that sounded like I'm totally paranoid man. No, you know what I mean, right? If you could imagine yourself up there and everyone's looking at you it's like, "Alright, that's cool but isn't it better if we're all together on this shit?" I don't know man. If you look at the most successful bands of all time, they're the ones with the most audience participation, they're the ones where the audience is up and they're dancing and singing and clapping, fully participating. Look at the weakest selling music—the ones where the people are not doing shit but sitting there probably. 
I mean look at the biggest bands, the Dead, the Rolling Stones, the biggest selling bands of all time, even all that shit you see where it's some band you've never heard of in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, little pop thing where everybody knows the song, a fuckin gigantic crowd that is just singing along this song that everybody knows, dancing, singing. So I think, you know, it's the greater thing. I knew that the Grateful Dead was that kinda thing. I didn't know anything about it, but I knew that was what was going on there. And I could tell by the way I met Bob the kinda guy he is, the kinda musician he is, ya know. So yeah. Alright. How's that.
That about sums it up.
Question number one... what's question number two. How many questions you got there.
I don't know but we just went through like two thirds of them.
Really?
Well, not really. So when you're drumming you got four different things going on with your limbs and often singing at the same time. How much of it are you conscious? Are spaced and just doing what you do?
Yeah well that's a trip too, 'cause sometimes you do get really locked into patterns, man. And it's like once you learn how to pat your belly and rub or whatever the fuck it is—rub your belly and pat your head, once you learn to do that, it's easy to do. But now can you improvise with it? 
Can you all of a sudden turn it around backwards or all of a sudden on the fly be able to change it up, so that's the challenge. Like it's easy to learn to ride a bike, it's easy to learn to drive a stick shift car, all these things that take multiple limbs and looking, and you're using more parts of your body. We can learn to do all that stuff, but a lot of times when you learn something it's like you learn how to do it and then you just—
It's like you always have to keep learning, like I saw "The Grateful Dead Movie" where Billy Kreutzmann was being interviewed or something and he said he was working on getting all his limbs to be dancing together, did you see that? He was saying something like that where it's like he said he thinks he had it down where his limbs were all dancing, like each one's dancing. And that's like when I watch him play. The other night I was watching him play at the Gathering and he's got—that's like 40 years of him mastering that, and it's beautiful to watch man, 'cause Billy can do anything he wants at any time and it's like he's not thinking about it, he's just kinda—He's not playing a pattern, he's just playing the pulse and just like riffing like a jazz guy would. "Something just happened so I'll answer that now," and coming from the kind of music I come from where I was really locked into. And coming up in the '80s, too, man I came up really influenced by Prince and when drum machines started coming in, I loved drum machines and recreating beats that were programmed on drum machines and I loved that a lot. But I came up in the world of patterns, so there were two-bar patterns, four-bar patterns, eight-bar patterns, but they were all patterns. So I really have to continue to try to relearn and break out of the mold. I'll give you an example.
You learn one of these Bob Weir tunes, well now every time we play it, you're gonna play it that same way? It's like, "Lemme think of a new way to play this song," or if I find myself doing what I always do on this song, isn't that limiting? It seems like the spirit of this kind of music is to really like be loose enough where you can just do anything 'cause it's almost like Weir does that in a way. Like he has his little things he does, but it's not always the same. I mean he always plays the songs pretty much the same, like KC Moan. I always wonder if you took every KC Moan and you put them on the tape at the same time, I wonder if there's two over time that would link up, like lock. Like the entire five minutes or ten minutes or however long the song is, note for note it would lock up. I bet out of all the ones he's played I bet you could get two that fuckin match up perfectly. But I guess I'm getting off point here.
The point is that instead of feeling like you're playing something that was premade for you to play, like this is the beat to Brown-Eyed Women, that's the beat, I should be able to make it different every time, so yes, it is hard to get all your limbs going and the singing and all that.
For three hours a night
For three hours but it's the kind of thing where, the other thing is the practicing really helps man cause the times, I'm just thinking now, the times I've had a hard time with what you're talking about, when I have actually struggled with like, "Oh my god I can't physically fuckin do this," that's the times where I got frustrated enough where I needed to go practice stuff so I'd sit there and I'd work it out....
Intermission....
