God Street Wine

I’ll certainly be the first to admit that God Street Wine is a curiosity in SLUG Magazine. That’s why this phone conversation is running as it happened without any editorial opinion. The new CD is titled God Street Wine. The interested can go to a store and listen before they buy. God Street Wine will perform at the Zephyr Club on November 10. It is nearly 1998. In 1968 The Band released Music From Big Pink. In 1971 The Allman Brothers released Live At The Fillmore East. In 1967 Buffalo Springfield had an FM radio hit titled “For What It’s Worth.”  If God Street Wine can sign a major label contract then what in the fuck are The Jackmormons doing without one?

SLUG Magazine talked to Aaron Maxwell, God Street Wine’s vocalist/guitarist. He’s a long-winded sort of fellow so portions of the conversation were removed due to space considera­tions. Maxwell is also friendly and personable, a gentleman.

SLUG: “Did Bill Wray make you try to play any zydeco?” 

Bill Wray has worked with Zachary Richard in the past. 

AM: “He did­n’t try to make us do anything. Anything he wanted us to do we were definitely obliged and will­ing. He has a real knack for get­ting the essence of the band out of them.”

SLUG: “Do you consider yourself a hippie jam-on band?”

AM: “I am a person who doesn’t really believe in labeling. I don’t know what that means exactly. I think everybody has their own identity and can say their own things. I think that label is put on bands to be able to categorize them and make them more acceptable. I consider us that if it means comparing ourselves to bands that really care about music, want to really work hard at their craft or at what they’re doing. We do like to improvise a lot. Every show is different. So if that means that we’re a hippie jam band, yeah, we are and I don’t have any problems with that. It’s the connotations that it conjures up in some people’s mind that I have problems with because they’ll miss it or some­thing. ‘Oh, they’re just a jam band’ and they think they know everything that you do because they have that preconception in their head.”

SLUG: “It’s a media thing, not a musician thing?”

AM: “Right. It’s kind of like a stereo­type and it used to really bother me, but I came to the conclusion that if that’s what people need to understand where it’s coming from then let them. Just as long as they listen to the music.”

SLUG: “Is there a boot­leg culture surrounding you?”

AM: “Yeah, definitely. We have a lot of kids that tape our shows and trade them around. We have a…we don’t have it…there’s actu­ally an Internet kind of …I don’t know what you call it…a chat thing where people trade tapes and that’s really a beneficial thing for word of mouth because all of our shows are different people like to…’I got this particular show where they did this or that’ you know? That’s another aspect of why people would say that we’re a hippie band.”

SLUG: “Do they name themselves?”

AM: “They’re affectionately termed ‘Winos’. We didn’t coin that. It just came up, I think.”

SLUG: “Were the Allman Brothers an influence at all?”

AM: “It’s funny because I wouldn’t say that we set out to sound like the Allman Brothers, or they weren’t something we lis­tened to religiously or anything like that. After we opened for them for a few weeks, that was probably a huge influence on us. Just kind of seeing their work ethic and the fact that they were still doing it after all those years. I kind of went out thinking, ‘I don’t know how these guys are going to sound.’ They blew me away every night. I think it was kind of a natural thing where we had two guitar players who both played lead and it was a natural thing for us to work in two guitar melodies and stuff like that. People say the Allman Brothers, and at this point I think that’s a very flattering statement because they’re an amazing band.”

SLUG: “I’ve seen the Allman Brothers do a 30-minute version of ‘Melissa.’ Do you have anything like that? Have you ever done a 30-minute ver­sion of one of your songs?”

AM: “There’s not a certain song. For us, on this tour especially, we’ve been going out without a struc­tured set-list. What happens is, any kind of tune can become something else or kind of meld itself into something else and we’ll jam on it for a while you know? It’s not like any specific song can be a 30-minute song, we’ll kind of set ourselves up. Okay we can take this song out somewhere and lead it to some­where else. Let’s keep that in mind while we’re out there. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t.”

SLUG: “It depends on the feeling or the moment?”

AM: “Exactly, and that’s kind of a breakthrough for us because we used to structure our sets quite rigidly. Then we realized that it flowed so much better when we can react at the moment. Just do it how we feel we want.”

SLUG: “At one point in time you all lived in the same house in upper New York state.”

AM: “Well, yeah, it was about 45 minutes from New York City.”

SLUG: “Did you ever feel like The Band living with Bob Dylan in Big Pink?”

AM: “Yeah, there was that kind of comparison, but for us it was a real turning point for our band. Before that we were all living in New York City and kind of all scattered and not real­ly that focused, and that gave us the opportunity to play all the time and practice all the time and really dedicate ourselves to it. It really took us to a new level. We didn’t have to worry about pay­ing by the hour to rehearse and that kind of thing. We ended up making our first album for Mercury in our house, which was Red. We turned our house into a recording studio and made that record there. That was quite different from this last record. We were experimenting with many different things, really left up to our own devices for better or for worse. That house was definitely a place where we could experi­ment with quite a few things.”

I’ll interrupt the conver­sation here because the next por­tion concerns the number of albums God Street Wine has recorded and the number of times they have visited Salt Lake City. But Maxwell did offer this comment on Salt Lake City: “You never know where it’s going to happen. Salt Lake City was one of those places where it’s always been people there. You don’t know why, but somehow it hap­pens and we appreciate that.”

SLUG: “I believe that’s all the questions I have. Oh, wait, I have one more. Is John Popper really a gun-toting fascist?”

AM: “I don’t know if I can comment on that. I’m not going to deny it and I’m not going to affirm that either. He’s a really good guy. He’s been a friend to the band for a long time. I wouldn’t want to mess with him in a dark alley.”

You SLUGs probably don’t even know who John Popper is, do you? His harp is a feature on several songs on the new God Street Wine album. —Herbal Joe

Read more interviews from the SLUG archives:
Buck-O-Nine
Everclear

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