Audio By Carbonatix
I, uh, inadvertently blew up a gas station,” says Drums & Tuba drummer Tony Nozero.
Come again? Blew up a gas station?
“It was outside of touring,” he says, laughing sheepishly as he tells the story behind the band’s latest release, Gas Up, Blow Up. “I was in New York. I had just moved there. I was delivering for a place that made fountains and shit out of stone. I went to Jersey to pick up a bunch of granite rock from this granite supplier. It was January, and it was like freezing, icing rain — just the worst weather ever. I had over a ton of rocks in the back. I was running out of gas, and I saw this gas station. I was going just a liii-ttle too fast, a little sputtery. I pulled off the highway, and I hit this patch of ice and went flying towards the gas pump. The van just smashed right into the pump and burst into flames. It was insane. I ran out of the van and tore across the parking lot and jumped over a fence, [thinking] the whole freaking block was going to go up.
“Still had a coffee in my hand,” he adds, recounting a scene of him standing near a snowbank on the other side of that fence watching the black smoke and fire.
So exactly what happens after you blow up a gas station? Surely there’s paperwork, questioning, a string of legal hassles.
“You know what was totally nuts about it? I just walked away from the whole thing. The cops came, the fire department — all these people came. I could have gotten totally pummeled by The Man. I was so, just, not happening at that point,” he says, summing up the tangle of interstate license, registration and insurance complications that could have come back to haunt him in a big way. “The tow truck came, and they put my van on the truck. I hopped in with them, went to the yard, and that was the last I heard of anything. It was just like the scene in the movie where all this crazy stuff is happening and the guy who is responsible for it all just kind of slips away, and there’s so much commotion that nobody notices. I don’t know; it was so weird!”
Nozero seems to fare better when sharing driving duties with the rest of the band (Brian Wolff on tuba, trombone and trumpet, and guitarist Neal McKeeby). And it’s a good thing, because the trio has logged countless miles crisscrossing the country since forming in Austin, Texas, in 1995. Drums & Tuba currently averages 200 shows a year; needless to say, Nozero doesn’t have plans to get another job anytime soon. And while he jokes that he’ll conveniently forget to write “granite delivery” on future applications, the fact is, he may never have to. With each successive road trip, the outfit’s diverse fan base keeps growing — and as more people discover that one of the most forward-thinking acts in music today, Nozero and company are closer to being homeless once again.
“We all used to live in New York, and we’d sublet our places and hit the road and then come back and live in our place for a month and a half and then leave again and sublet,” Nozero says, conveying the merry-go-round sense of movement in his life for the better part of the past decade. “That got old, and at a certain point, I was just like, ‘Forget it — I’m just gonna move out completely.’ I didn’t have a place for probably eight months, just kind of scraped stuff together in between tours. That got old.”
What remains fresh, though, is Drums & Tuba’s sound. Though comparisons to other outfits are common, they often miss the mark, because the subjects of comparison are spread all over the musical map. In reality, D&T walks a fine line between an assertive post-Zeppelin brontosaurus stomp and jazzy looseness. Though McKeeby, Wolff and Nozero consider their music to be “just rock,” their sense of interplay, for many, evokes the unexplored, undefinable territory of jazz. Similarly, even though they don’t “jam” in the strictest sense, the jam-band legions have embraced them. And while people hear different levels of improvisation in the band’s work, Nozero says the compositions are, in fact, quite structured.
In a typical session, Nozero starts things off with a funky groove, and either he or Wolff takes it from there, sampling, looping and adding effects. At the same time, Wolff uses a tuba to lay down a low-pitched bass part, which he then loops and mixes with his other horns — perhaps applying the trombone as a keyboard before articulating upper-register melodies with the trumpet. McKeeby, whose individual style defies description, comes in with oddly textured chords and single-note lines with a mostly clean tone — sometimes with two guitars concurrently, often in opposing rhythms. Then Wolff loops the others (who all employ a wide array of effects pedals) and fades the various loops in and out of the mix. Often there are six parts going simultaneously.
Two guitars at once, loads of effects, eclectic influences and no vocals: On the surface, this might reek of gimmickry, yet it all coalesces seamlessly on stage. Somehow, despite such fullness, the arrangements remain uncluttered. And the music’s diversity is reflected in a Drums & Tuba audience, which is likely to include equal measures of indie-rock mathletes, prog-rock heads, jam-band hippies, jazz aficionados (of both the traditional and avant-noise stripe), dance/electronic enthusiasts and straight-up rockers united under one sweaty roof, forming a heaving collective of shaking asses and moving feet.
Though the trio set out from day one to do something unique, all three members cite a 1998 tour with Manchester ambient trumpet/drums duo Spaceheads as a huge formative influence “because of their use of electronics and loops,” Nozero says. “Just the way the two of those guys play together and the way they construct the songs — just their whole thing, you know? Beyond the gear. A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, you got all your ideas from the Spaceheads. You figured out the looping because you saw them do it.’ Yes, that’s true, but there was so much more. They influenced us in so many other ways. At that time, when we toured with them for the first time, they were just fucking blowing us away every night. It was like, ‘Oh, my God, these guys are so great!’ It was probably our biggest influence in our career as a band. They really pushed us, like ‘Man, we gotta really start throwing down! Let’s get into this electronic shit, let’s start really, you know, doing it.’ We started doing the looping thing almost immediately after.”
Meanwhile, a random phone call from Ani DiFranco shortly after that tour not only inspired the band, but essentially saved it. “She used to record in Austin,” says Nozero. “I think she was just kinda pokin’ around and saw Drums & Tuba something.” DiFranco and her husband, Andrew “Goat” Gilchrist, bought an album and were so impressed that they asked Drums & Tuba to open a handful of DiFranco’s shows. At that point, Nozero, McKeeby and Wolff were all living in different cities and contemplating breaking up. The few shows grew into two tours that established an ongoing relationship with DiFranco and Gilchrist. Nozero says that tour galvanized the unit in a different way: “After that, it was like ‘Wow, maybe we can actually do this,’ so we really started buckling down.”
Gilchrist and DiFranco recorded the band’s fourth album, 2001’s Vinyl Killer, at the couple’s Buffalo home; Gilchrist also recorded the followup, 2002’s Mostly Ape (both released on Righteous Babe, which also bankrolled the self-release of Gas Up, Blow Up).
Drums & Tuba plans to record again at the conclusion of this trip, hopefully in New Orleans, with Gilchrist manning the sliders again (McKeeby also calls New Orleans home these days; Wolff still resides in New York). But most likely the players will begin work on a planned double-album collaboration with eccentric one-man act That One Guy, who frequently tours with them. In addition, the band has newer songs yet to be recorded, as well as a just-recorded album that’s awaiting release. The album was intended as a vinyl-only recording of breakbeats, and ended up as a set of new songs written in the same week they were recorded. Nozero says a much-talked-about live album will happen at some point, but that the three of them find it difficult to listen to their own performances.
He says that having a surplus of unheard material comes in handy, as Drums & Tuba often hit the same cities on tour. “A lot of bands will do a record a year and tour on the record. We’re just way too energetic for that,” he adds, sounding somewhat daunted at the prospect of getting all this work done.
“It’s kind of silly,” he reflects. “On the one hand, we just want to make tons of records — you know, ’cause we can, sort of. On the other hand, it’s kinda weird having, like, fifteen albums or something. From a business perspective, somebody comes up to the table and we have six albums. We’re gonna have seven the next time we tour. It’s kind of like a lot for someone to deal with.”
Then again, burning the candle at both ends seems to be what Drums & Tuba is best at. They might as well sit back and watch it burn.
