Hoof and Mouth

Deerhoof is one of the premier veteran post-post-punk trios in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not only that, but they're also one of the decidedly different acts of any kind in any climate; with sounds both small and silly and epic and overpowering, they will no doubt go down as a great among turn-of-the-century innovators. On the occasion of their new record Friend Opportunity -- and the accompanying worldwide tour -- I sat down (for a phone call) with drummer Greg Saunier and guitarist John Dieterich. They refused to let their sound be defined, repeatedly referenced voices in their heads and felt strongly about Milli Vanilli.

Jonas Oransky: You guys tour like crazy...

Greg Saunier: In every town or city or hamlet or village that we seem to go to, it kind of blows my mind to think there are people out there who've somehow listened to our music. These are songs that started in some dark corner of the imagination, or some very private source, and some perfect stranger is singing your melody back to you in the middle of a concert.

JO: I feel that your music is at once strikingly avant but almost always accessible because it's so friendly. Does accessibility interest you?

GS: I wouldn't use that word, because I'm never sure really what it means. To me, ‘access' is like making sure we have mp3s available for free, that if someone becomes interested in Deerhoof -- "what do they sound like?" -- they can then find out, or at least we aren't doing anything to stop them from finding out.

But that's not really what you mean by "accessible." You mean, is it easy to like? And I don't know; I'm very happy to hear you say that our music sounds friendly at the same time that it's avant-garde, but a lot of times we like music that's mean or unfriendly. Say, what's a good heavy metal band? Actually, I thought Judas Priest was sort of friendly, at least sympathetic. Oh -- a perfect example: The Sex Pistols just mocks you for even bothering to listen. It calls you a fool for putting the record on. And yet, who doesn't love Never Mind the Bollocks? While I don't disagree that our music can be friendly, if you also pointed out it has a dark, cruel aesthetic, I wouldn't disagree either.

But you're really asking whether it's something we bother to think about, making our music likeable. I've always been obsessed with the listener. We'll invite friends over and play a new CD for them, and even if they don't say anything, I can tell how it's striking them. Basically everyone hears music differently, and I've always wanted to increase my repertoire of ways to listen. In the early days we got called one of these bands that are trying to be unlistenable, just doing our art up in our ivory tower or something. That was never true. As you're making your music, you're always testing it mentally.

Still I haven't really answered the question. It's not, "Am I thinking about if they would like it?" My final goal in this conversation isn't just to get you to say, "I like what you said"; I also want you to get some meaning from what I said, more than just yes or no, good or bad.

JO: Maybe it's the centrality of percussion in Deerhoof, but one way I'd characterize nearly all of your sounds is "pared down." With Friend Opportunity, I think that's particularly the case...

GS: With Friend Opportunity, one person's going to say, "This is their most decorated and orchestral, it's so layered and dense," and then another person will say, "This is a really pared-down, stripped-down sound." Someone will even say, "This is their most bubblegum, poppy, sellout music." We get these completely contradictory responses. If you feel it sounds particularly pared down, I don't disagree; that is one angle that we were trying to play.

John Dieterich: When [bassist] Chris Cohen left last year [to play fulltime with Curtains], we noticed this space in the music, and there was something we liked about it. With only three instruments, it was just less mass.

JO: So you re-learned your music on the road, on the go, with pre-existing material?

JD: Yeah, I wanted to see what would happen if I removed everything that I could conceivably find objectionable from these songs. So first I'd remove the melody, and then the chords, and then the rhythm. I tried to rewrite the music from the ground-up, see what remained. That's how some of the new versions came together.

JO: So then simplicity became a goal with FO?

GS: We do cobble together a few goals wherever possible. But the goals almost never end up being achieved. Our original goal on Friend Opportunity was to make a country gospel album, recorded with one microphone and lots of vocal harmonies. Each time that goal changed, it was more ridiculous, or at least more convoluted and elaborate.

JO: The members of Deerhoof have participated in such a variety of side projects. Are there any sounds you want to add to your music?

GS: Every couple days, I think that about something I hear. Any of us is struck by something, and says, "Oh man, we've got to throw everything we've done right out the window and start over." Of course it never turns out that way. We have music friends all over the world, and we feel like we belong in a human sense, but we've never really fit into any theme. The new dance-punk scene, the noise scene, the garage-rock scene or the reggae scene -- every big city has these sort of mini-armies of people who are veering towards dressing alike, starting to play music all in the same kind of vein. And no matter which scene, we were always too much of something or other, and ended up being misfits. Of course, it should be obvious from my tone that that's the fun of it.

JD: I'm interested in making music that anyone can get something from, whether you're a six-, 25-, or 90-year-old. Someone told us recently that her three-year-old daughter kept requesting this song off the new record. That song it turns out is called "Kidz Are So Small." One of my first musical memories is hearing "Good Vibrations" when I was about four years old. It was on a Sunkist commercial, and I just sang it all the time.

JO: It's been said about 2005's The Runners Four that your songwriting style was more collaborative than ever before...

GS: Yeah, with that record it was a lot more like being in a normal band. We started playing some drumbeat, and someone said, "No, let's try this other one," and we'd work it out en route, aloud, with everyone playing. Then we'd press "record."

That's just generally not our ideal. Some bands just jam and improvise, and I think that's amazing. Somehow, it always just degenerates when we do that. One person tries to play something that sounds good. And a second person ends up playing something that makes fun of the first person, y'know mocking them. Our temperaments are such that, it's kind of hard to hear those really special secret song ideas, when drums are bashing away, and guitars are turned up to 11 or whatever.

JO: You have such a big repertoire. How do you choose which songs to play on tour?

GS: Yeah, and each one could go in any direction: If it's a heavy song on the album, we could play it live as a quiet one. Basically certain songs feel like hits to us, and we play them over and over, because we think we play them well and they keep pushing us in some way. It's never like some chore that the audience expects us to play our MTV hit. Like imagine if Milli Vanilli played and didn't do "Girl You Know It's True." People would be like, "What did I just pay to see!!"

JO: I'm not sure that's what went wrong with that band...

GS: People in our audiences are just as likely to know one album as any other, one song as any other -- and if they make a request, there's equal chance it's any song from any CD. That's a great privilege, people don't want us to be limited, don't want us to repeat ourselves, don't expect any one exact style or sound or song.

Friend Opportunity is released nationwide on January 23. See them at Irving Plaza on January 26. Full tour schedule here.