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What are some of your favorite songs to play with Phil and Friends? The one song I really love to play is "Golden Road [To Unlimited Devotion]." I thought that the first Grateful Dead tunes that I learned were with Bobby and Bruce Hornsby - "Big Railroad Blues" and "I Know You Rider" - and it wasn't. I was in a band called The Yorkshires when I was a sophomore in High School and they brought the first Grateful Dead record…I spoke to [John] Cutler and Rob Barraco about it and I said, "I want to do this song." They though it would be a great idea. It's so great and it has this great feel to it. I played a lot of material over the years so talking about playing that tune… First album, first song. Yeah! It was a bit of a challenge. I get so hyped up about that and everybody does. We just start playing that and the crowd just is dancing so hard that it's hard not to just rush… [starts to hum the first notes of "Golden Road"] …it's hard not to get that adrenaline rush! There are different challenges with different tunes. Songs like "Unbroken Chain" - now that's a hard one to play with all of the different time changes. So there's different challenges along the way like: excitement and getting the right energy, playing the room, not playing too loud, making Phil sound good on the vocals, supporting the vocalists. By the way I do have to add that Rob, Warren and Phil have just such a great blend! It's just so great to play with those guys. This lineup seems like all of you just really gelled and hit a certain peak… …great chemistry! All of the guys really like each other. We all hang out and listen to music together and we listen to a lot of similar types of music - really cool chemistry. Let's talk about Modereko… Yeah, when I was playing with Bruce I'd often times go out on the bus with this trumpet player named John D'earth and we'd sit out there and do trumpet and drum duets. I wish we had a rolled tape on it -it was really cool. We started to develop this musical language. Bobby Read, the sax player, would come and join us every once in a while and we'd just be out there blowing - just musicians hanging, just the cats. No one allowed just intellectuals and cats just playing music. So I stopped playing Bruce, then started playing with Mickey for a while and I started working on this project out here with this guy named Tim Kobza. He's this USC guy - the University of Southern California - a cool guy who's a little younger than I am. He's a great guitarist who's really vibey and we started to talk about getting together to do some writing. He started coming over here and I started doing drum loops and he started doing bass lines with it. He would then go home and start writing music to it. I heard some Radiohead, and some other stuff, and read an article that this guy Bruce Lunvell from the Blue Note wrote about how he's missing a generation of Be-Boppers and Jazz, so I started thinking about it. I thought, man I think I have an idea here. So I was writing with Tim Kobza and wrote different grooves and he'd go home and work them on his computer. Now at this time my father was dying of cancer - there's this weird tie-in and I actually hadn't even thought of this - so I'm working on this music out here and flying back to the East Coast to watch my Dad who is dying of cancer and just to be supportive of the family. I was going back there and said to Tim Kobza, "Tim, why don't you give me those tapes we've been working on and I'll go down to Bobby Reed's place in Charlottesville and put horns on a couple of them." So I got these tapes and went to see my Dad for a couple of days and he wasn't in such good shape. So I'd drive down to Charlottesville and got together with Bobby and John and they put some horn stuff on it. Then Tim and I got working together on it and it was just magical. It was just like being on the bus again. It was just so automatic and easy that we had just developed this language by just jamming together during the days off - during the days of Bruce's gigs - we just developed these tracks that were like Farfesa organ, Cir guitar, electric bass and drum loops with this kind of high-brow horn thing. Anyway, we ended up doing all the tunes and mixing them. I remember I played them for Mickey Hart on the back of the bus and I left him back there listening to it. All of a sudden the door swung open and he pops out and is in his enthusiasm says, "John, congratulations man! This stuff is just amazing!" He was just off on it! He gave it to Candace and she said, "John, this is some of the best stuff!" So I was just like, "Holy Cow!" So I sent it to some record company people and they asked if I had a live thing going on and I was like, not really. So I didn't really pursue it too much. So next thing I know Bud Harner from Verve called me up and I've known Bud for years - great drummer and great musician who went into the music business side of things with A & R. He called and said, "John, what's up with Modereko?" I said, "Well we just put this thing together and it just worked out so well that we pursued it and made this album." He said, "Well, are you playing live?" I answered no because we were kind of all busy and he said, "Well you ought to." So we put together this showcase in LA, and Ben Jammin the tie-dyed artist from Utah, came out… When was this? Oh gosh, it was in March. We got a bunch of young kids…I found as many young Heads as I could, smokin and getting the incense going, and I got Phoenix the liquid light show guy from the Bay Area to come down and he's a high maintenance cat, but man he delivered the goods! Man, he did a great job! He came in and was like, "Move this, move that" and I just sat back and said, "Go Phoenix!" He did this light show with some amazing colors! Not so many people in LA do a show with tie-dye and young kids. It was definitely more of a party vibe. John Singer helped me with it conceptually, I talked to a bunch of people and I had an idea of how it should go down. So The Verve guys walked in there and before we even played they were just like, "This is great! This is just perfect." So you know how we were talking earlier about artists and it's like, "Do you like the music? OR Do you like the scene?" Maybe you hear the CD and its not killin' you but you go to see the band and you love it live. Well, with Modereko I wanted to do both. I wanted to make sure that we had some really solid material to start off with. So if we had interest in the writing, the material, the style and the production then I thought we'd go out and jam. It's worked out well so far. I admire bands like Medeski, Martin and Wood because they go out and play a couple hundred days and they're slugging it out there. You go out and play for 50 people sometimes and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that. I wanted to make sure that I first had something that people really relate to as far as the writing was concerned and so far, I've gotten a really solid and positive response from that. So we are going to pursue that. Well, I really hope that you'll bring it around. How soon can we expect to see some live gigs? Well gosh I hope as soon as December or January. We'll see. If this deal goes down they'll put something out. One of the things that I want Phil Lesh to do is to get him on CD in a situation that he loved and I think Modereko would be a great re-entry space for him. He wouldn't have the total responsibility of it being his project, but he could come back into a recording scene with somebody that he knows and he knows the music. YES! I would just love to get him documented on CD, on tape in a controlled environment even though I love the live thing, because he's just playing so great! I'd just like to get him into something where you could be in your car and hear Phil blowin' on a couple of just pristine cuts where there was no audience noise and where the engineer really understood Phil, like John Cutler… Would you get Cutler to mix it? Cutler would be great! Would Cutler mix? I don't know, or maybe get a guy down here to engineer/record…Ross Hogarth would be a great guy. There are a number of cats down here that are big fans of Phil that are in the mainstream record industry - you know, making records with Jewel or Keb Mo' and making Pop records. Have someone like Cutler mix it. You know, Cutler has the "Ears of Doom" so he's involved automatically. You have to go to him at some point either the mastering, mixing or engineering. But John is not really a house engineer, he's really more of a studio engineer. He's really more of a mix guy. He's great at it - his thing is really behind the board mixing as you well know. Has Phil heard the CD? Yeah he heard it and he liked it. He had a great comment and he's exactly right. He said that they are vignettes they're not jams. We play live and we jam out on the tunes and we jam between the tunes. I think I only steal from the best and conceptually I steal from Phil when it comes to live music because I think he's got the concept! We apply that to Modereko. Phil heard it and said, "I listened to the whole thing and I liked it." Months later I asked him what his one criticism would be and he said, "Not enough jamming." [laughter] So he wants to hear the real stretching. So we have the substance. We've got the writing and that is always the toughest part so now we're going to go into that next phase of jamming, signing, getting out there and really working it… Do you write most of the songs? I co-write. I come up with grooves and I really like to delegate. Who is involved with writing? Well, Tim is the principal orchestrater of the music and the chords, but when we go to Virginia with those horn players, they're so deep harmonically - I mean really deep and rooted in Be-Bop and traditional Americana styles. When we go there it really takes on another harmonic realm. I don't want to say this but, it sort of starts with Tim it doesn't always have to. Sometimes I write with the horn players in mind with an old jam we might have done. I know when I start out with a groove that it will be something that they'll really be able to elaborate on and write. Tim and I usually start out here with drums and bass and then he goes home and starts working on the arrangement and the construction and then we'll bring it on back to those two studs in Virginia in Charlottesville. That's where Dave Matthews is from and they play with Carter Beuford and I think John D'earth and I can't say that for sure but I think he at one point went up to Dave and said, "You know all these songs that you play on guitar? You should really get out there and get a band." So anyway, and he did. [laughs] So John does some arranging for Dave with the Kronis Quartet as well. He's a great arranger and I feel very fortunate to work with those guys. Between Phil, Modereko and playing with Jemimah Puddleduck, my plate is pretty full. Why don't you tell us a bit about Jemimah Puddleduck? Well Mark Karan called up and said let's play, as I recall, and we got together one day…we basically wanted to jam in Southern California - there's not a bunch of guys that we could jam with. So we found some guys we got a quartet together: Bob Gross on bass, Arlan on keys - who was at the show last night all dressed up in his tie-dye - fantastic! - and Mark Karan [on guitar]. It was just going to be called Mark Karan and Friends but I heard the tape and I said to Mark, "You know this sounds good man!" So we started up with that and it's got a really nice feel. It's really blues-based. I love playing with those guys but it's just a matter of scheduling. Mark is busy with Bobby and The Other Ones, I'm playing with Phil and have the Modereko thing happening. So hopefully one of these days we can work something out. How did you come up with that name? Man, I don't know. [laughs] It's like one thing, I delegate responsibility. You know, I'm not going to argue over a mix if the snare drum isn't loud enough and if somebody comes up with a name like Jemimah Puddleduck man, I just sort of sat there and went, "Jerimiah what?" - "No man, it's Jemimah" I went okay. Now Modereko is a combination of our names: Molo, Dearth, Read, Kobza = Modereko. Okay well, thanks so much. We're really looking forward to all of these developments! Good luck and thank you! Well thank you for all of your continued support! Check out the official John Molo Web site. See
Molo & Jemimah Puddleduck Jan. 19th at the Musicians For
Medical Marijuana Show in Berkeley Stay Tubed For Special Show Announcements Check
out more Molo Audio & Video Here A
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