A Brief Encounter with Guitarist John Dieterich
Photo copyright Mc-Q, 2007
[Interview first published in Austinist, 2011] One of underground rock’s most crucial and influential bands of the last quarter century is the California quartet Deerhoof. Founded in 1995 by drummer Greg Saunier, Deerhoof currently exists as a quartet with guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez and vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki. The band was part of a creative nexus in the Bay Area along with groups like XBXRX, Caroliner, Xiu Xiu and THF TFFTHF (most of Deerhoof’s members later spread out across the country). This phone interview was conducted in advance of their then-new album Deerhoof vs. Evil (their eleventh full-length and first for Polyvinyl, following a long association with Kill Rock Stars). Deerhoof played Austin’s Mohawk in February 2011; I’d been introduced to their music by my friends Aaron Russell and Sarah Hennies, who were at that time half of the Weird Weeds.
—
So you’re living in New Mexico now, right? How does the band’s location, being more spread out as it is, affect its place as part of a community or coterie of “Bay Area bands?”
In some aspects it has changed – we get together for shorter periods of time and have to be more productive. Part of the new record, Deerhoof vs. Evil, is a reflection of that as, even more than we normally would, we’d been going in separate directions on our own time, so when it came time to do the record it was like “wait, what are you doing now?”
Right, I saw you in a trio with Thollem McDonas (piano) and Tim Barnes (drums) here in Austin, which was a decidedly more improv-heavy context. What would be an example of something you’d be bringing from those other settings to Deerhoof?
Actually, to be honest I spend more time working in Deerhoof, touring and so forth, than other things so I tend to bring the things I do in Deerhoof the other direction. For example, there’s a musician in Albuquerque named Raven Chacon, and we played together recently -- the day after I returned home from a Deerhoof tour. My preparation was playing Deerhoof music every night, and while what we played was quite different from what I play in Deerhoof, the skills required to make it are the same, as is the goal: i.e. make it good by whatever means necessary. And of course it often fails, but for me it’s important to put myself in situations like that, and improvising is a big part of what we do in Deerhoof, as well.
So, how do Deerhoof compositions come together? How do you work these pieces out?
There is no coherent method, really, for better or worse. Someone could bring anything from a short guitar riff or bass line to a rehearsal, or it could be an entire song with all the instrumental parts worked out. Sometimes we’ll decide that a certain part will go better in one song than another after trying it out. It just depends. The new record was all done in our practice space in a month, and we made a point of experimenting, looking for other sounds. We’d put contact mikes onto a snare drum and run it through a feeding back guitar amp, for example. On the first track of Deerhoof vs. Evil, “Qui Dorm, Nomes Somia,” I’d written guitar parts but through brainstorming, the fleeting idea to make the album purely electronic came up, so I rebuilt the song from that perspective. Ultimately, it became a combination of both electronics and something closer to what we actually would use live.
It seems like early on there was a sort of “feral” element to Deerhoof, but of course that’s changed over time – a band has to evolve, and often as a band gets “better” they become more interesting. In that light, how do you view that process of moving from more “outside” to more structured music?
Well, there was an element of the early stuff that was improvisational, and we’ve tried to retain that but as we write more and more music and learn more about recording ourselves, playing our instruments, etc., we are always forced into different areas where we haven’t been before and try to force ourselves to adopt different musical languages. I saw Deerhoof live before I heard the recordings, and when I later heard the album The Man, The King, the Girl, there was a surface to it that was difficult to penetrate (which is part of its appeal), but I learned through time that there were songs buried in all of that. Now when I go back and listen to that album, I can see that they were definitely pop songs, but the presentation belied that. But we’ve worked a lot at making our ideas as clear as we can. In fact, I actually feel like I was personally less “feral” when I joined the band, or at least I had a hard time tapping into that energy – one skill that those guys helped me work on was becoming emotionally invested in the music, living in it. I might have been able to play the part well, but I often had a hard time communicating the spirit of the music (something that I admired so much in founding member Rob Fisk’s playing). Part of being in Deerhoof for me has been a process of learning how to project emotion and the feeling of the song while still trying to remain true to my own musical sensibilities.
Right, I can see that – especially having seen you perform, you’re a very physical player, but you obviously have a lot of instrumental and conceptual control over what you’re doing. It also seems to me like there is a very strong tension or juxtaposition between the vocal parts and the instrumental parts, which is obviously very important to your sound. Could you talk about that a bit?
Well, we superimpose ideas from a melodic approach (which is often vocal) and an improvisational, instrumental approach. What happens is that these things coexist, with two or more different ideas happening at the same time. The melodic ideas can sometimes be very simple, like children’s songs, nursery rhymes and so forth.
I suppose that both singing simple, basic tunes and improvising get to the heart of what the “primal” musical instinct might be
Right, people sing melodies to themselves naturally, and I guess there’s something sort of primal in that. You could treat these as two separate ideas, but what we’re trying to do is reconcile them and on some level maybe it doesn’t even make sense – there’s a tension between them and one could easily overpower the other. We try to develop ways to counteract that, and I think improvisation often helps provide the tools that you need to solve some of these problems. When you improvise, you’re forced to interact not with some abstract idea but with the actual sound itself. What you hear is what you get. Playing composed music really is no different, but it’s hard to remember that sometimes. It’s easy to slip into patterns of playing or listening that have less to do with the moment than with the abstraction that is the “song.” It’s really nothing more complicated than, for example, if someone can’t be heard, everybody else quiet down until that person can be heard.
Coming from that, I wanted to get to the subject of influence – Deerhoof has been name-checked by a number of left-field rock bands, for sure, but I’ve also noticed some kind of cross-pollination with avant-garde jazz and improvising musicians. Mary Halvorson (guitar) and Ches Smith (drums) have name checked your music as an important factor in their composing and playing, and though one probably won’t see jazz critics running out to buy a Deerhoof record, it’s interesting that you’ve captured that level of interest.
Wow, that’s nice to hear because they’re both heroes of mine. I met Ches shortly after I moved to the Bay Area, and he was instantly one of my favorite musicians there, someone who never seemed to repeat himself and played in a ton of different contexts. I’m a huge Good for Cows fan and also really love Mary’s playing (her Dragon’s Head record is brilliant, I think). These groups have a sense of humor in what they do, which is something I can certainly relate to. I actually made a record with Ches that has yet to come out – a quartet called SWAPS with Steve Touchton (from XBXRX), Ed Rodriguez, Ches and myself.
How did you get interested in music yourself?
Growing up I would listen to the radio, and I sang in choir. From age four to seven, I played Suzuki piano, so that was my first musical training, I suppose. I identified with metal when I was young, and my got me into punk – he introduced me to extreme music like Septic Death, and while I didn’t necessarily understand the political aspects of a lot of punk music then, it was more about the visceral feeling of it. I mostly played music by myself and had no interest in being in a band or playing with other people, no aspirations toward being “a musician” or becoming involved with music on a professional level. In college I took a jazz appreciation class in spite of the fact that I couldn’t really relate to what I’d heard up until that point, but when I heard Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, that changed everything because I felt like it had no extra baggage musically, it was very abstract and direct. It just sounded like music, and it just killed me. I remember sitting in the music library with tears running down my face. Of course, I also discovered Captain Beefheart, John McLaughlin (especially his playing on the electric Miles records) and the Jesus Lizard around that time, all of which were really inspirational for me on some basic musical level.
I moved to Minneapolis from my home town in Wisconsin and transferred to the University of Minnesota, and that’s when I made the decision to devote myself to music as much as possible. I met Ed Rodriguez and Chad Popple, in ‘95 and we started Gorge Trio, which for the first couple years was all improvised music. In 1999, I moved to the Bay Area, and within a month I met Greg and joined Deerhoof soon thereafter.
So what other projects do you have going on? Are you thinking about the next Deerhoof record yet, or is that antithetical?
Well, we’re not to the next record yet, though we have learned how to play almost all the songs from Deerhoof vs. Evil – we weren’t sure we’d be able to, so that’s good news! Satomi has a new band she’s working with, Greg and Ed both have various new projects going on as well. Ed and I are trying to finish the next Gorge Trio album, which may take a bit. I have a duo with Jeremy Barnes from A Hawk & A Hacksaw, which is basically rhythm exercises gone awry (he’s playing drums). I’m also working on something with Jeremy Novak from Dymaxion, and I’m currently mixing a record I made with clarinetist Ben Goldberg and drummer Scott Amendola. Oh, and that group you saw with Thollem McDonas and Tim Barnes also recorded in Austin with Mike Watt, and that should hopefully be finished relatively soon. Thollem and I will be playing some duos in March in New Mexico as well.
