I thought his arms were going to fall off.  If you’ve ever seen Brian, the percussionist of Guster, play the bongos, you’d understand what I mean.  He strategically throws his arms around on stage, hitting the bongos in precise places, and faster than I’ve ever seen anyone move their arms before.  I suppose there’s a reason they call him the Thundergod.

When I interviewed Brian, his arms were fairly motionless.  I entered Guster’s dressing room with a herd of other members of the student media and was lucky enough to get some questions in between bites of his chicken salad sandwich (which he generously offered to the rest of us).  As one of the three members of Guster, Brian answered questions about subjects from the worst band to play with to the reason there’s always a goldfish in their dressing room.  What follows are excerpts from the interview with Brian…

**Note: Matt Targarona ’03 and I asked questions for The Advocate.  The title “other interviewer” has been given to those who asked questions that we included in the excerpts.  We thought we should give credit where credit is due. 

Matt: What did you guys major in at Tufts?

B:  I was an American Studies major, which means I had no choice but to come a musician.  Adam was a psychology major and Ryan majored in religious studies.  So we all had no futures except for trying out a band, so that’s what we did… we met when we were freshmen in 1991 and on the orientation, as I recall, we were talking about our high school bands we had just left behind.  We decided to get together in our dorm rooms and jam sometime.

Another: Did you guys have serious training?

B: We were hacks.  We’d never really had aspirations beyond getting into the battle of the bands at Tufts.. one thing kind of led to another. Jen: What was it like playing with Barenaked Ladies? B: It was cool because we were playing arenas that were full of people and if we were just playing arenas by ourselves, there wouldn’t be that many people.  Their fans were very receptive to our attitude.  The music is similar but it’s not so similar.  The whole on-stage vibes are very comparable and they couldn’t have treated us better or been more sincere and down to earth people, so I have nothing but good things to say about them.  I do enjoy talking shit about people if I don’t like them.

M: Who are the worst people you ever played with?

B: The Verve Pipe were assholes. 

M: Was there anyone else like the BNL who were really great to play with?  Or any shows that were really incredible?

B: Yeah, we did a week with Dave Matthews, and they were great to us.  Their fans were great.  Otherwise we haven’t done that much opening, we’ve been headlining predominantly since we’ve started touring “Lost and Gone Forever.”  Now, this is just a 6 week run so we can try out a few new songs and so we don’t get stale just sitting in a rehearsal space writing songs all day.  But the rest of the year we’ll probably not be involved in the touring, we’ll be mostly writing and recording, hopefully we’ll be able to get in the studio by the end of the summer. 

J: So what’s it like to be the band that someone else is opening for? B:  Well we’re fortunate enough to choose our openers on this tour, so we have this weekend with Jump Little Children who are good friends of ours, and who are a great band.  And then we’re bringing out some other friends along the way.  Headlining is different because you play two or three times as long, it’s more of a show.  I don’t know how to explain that.  It just feels nice to play to your own crowd.  You want to give more because you’ll get more back. Other Interviewer: Do you ever sit back and think about what you’ve become? B: Well, the last few months we’ve been off the road.  Living in New York City can be very humbling, until I came to this dressing room and saw all this stuff, I was like, ‘oh, that’s right, I play in a band.’ M: So what do you think of the dressing room? B: It’s great!  Yo-yos, and stuff… the goldfish is the test.  The first time we ever got a goldfish, we’d had it on contract for a long time but no one ever gave it to us.  And once we played a show in Burlington, and there it was in the dressing room, and we’re like, wow’ so we brought it on stage and we were giving it away to someone.  This kid was onstage receiving this goldfish.  Somehow the crowd just started chanting ‘Eat the Fish! Eat the Fish!” and the kid, you know, he’s like 18 and all his new college buddies are there and he wants to impress them, and carpe diem and all that; swallowed the fish onstage.  We got a lot of hatemail, actually, from people.  He said he could feel it swimming around in his stomach all the way down or something.

M: We saw on your website that you’re listening to Stevie Wonder and the Smiths on your bus, is there anything else that you’re listening to that people should know about or that you really love?

B: I’ve been listening to The Band recently, didn’t realize how good they were.  I’ve also been listening to the “New Pornographers” who are fantastic, that’s one of the best records I’ve heard in the past few years.  It’s good when we all get on the bus and have all these new CDs, everyone’s playing them for everyone, we have a lot of good listening sessions. 

M: Also on your website there’s a video of you guys throwing a couch..

B: Did you see it??  I haven’t seen it yet, I mean, I’ve seen it on my camera, I shot it.

M: Is there any other throwing-furniture-out-of-building stories that you have?

B: Not on video.  We had a yard sale a couple of years ago, we had an apartment in Summerville, and we gave all the money to charity, but we overpriced everything as if we were real celebrities, so all these people came and dug through our stuff and all the stuff that was left over, we didn’t know what to do with.  Those couches no one wanted.  For some reason we couldn’t get them down the stairs.  We’d got them up the stairs once upon a time, but we couldn’t get them down the stairs.  So we launched it.  It crushed that desk.  We thought that was very important to share with our fan base.

M: I saw you have a link to McSweeney’s.net.  Are you big Dave Eggers’ fans?

B: Well we all read that book of his; it’s nice to see an author become very popular just by being dry and honest and entertaining.  I like that book but I don’t really visit McSweeney’s much. 

Other Interviewer: Back to the fact that you’re writing a new record, is there anything that Guster fans can expect that will be a little bit different?

B: Yeah, none of us are playing the same instruments that we’re supposed to play.  I don’t know, we’re just really experimental.  Ryan’s turned into quite a bass player so we’re writing a lot of songs around the bass lines and we’re playing around with electronics just for fun.  Things are probably going to change quite a bit, just because we’re ready to shake it up.  However, I think that the thing that makes us signature more so than our instrumentation is our song-writing, so I don’t think that it will sound like that much of a departure even as wacky as we get with the arrangements.  The only rules this time is that there are no limits.  On “Lost and Gone Forever,” we pretty much tried to make an album that we could play live, that could be recorded with the six limbs that we use when we play live.  We’re not limiting ourselves to that this time.

J: So how do you know when you write a song that you haven’t just heard that melody somewhere else?

B: We do this a lot.  Everything sounds like something, but then we realize that we’re hypersensitive to that.  If we’ve really ripped something off, someone will tell us.  Sometimes I think “Center of Attention” sounds like a Duran Duran song.

M: So are there any questions that you get asked all the time in interviews that you absolutely hate?

B: Yeah, how do you get the name Guster.  What are your influences, that’s a bad question.  There’s no real way to think like that. 

Other Interviewer: Do you guys ever get nervous? 

B: I would say I was nervous when we played Madison Square Garden with the Barenaked Ladies, that was nervous, Central Park was nervous.  Woodstock, I was shitting my pants.  I’ll be nervous tonight because we haven’t played in months.  We’re debuting a few new songs.  A Muhlenberg debut.  We put Muhlenberg in the title of our tour, we’re calling the tour “From Muhlenberg to Upper Darby and everywhere in between.” 

J: So the whole Napster thing, has that helped you or messed you up?

B: Totally.  It’s been the most beneficial thing to us, however I’m not a believer that music should be free.  The whole technology side of Napster is brilliant and long overdue and hopefully will make record labels more obsolete, however for bands to sustain themselves independently in the absence of record labels, if they want to sell their product over the internet, you cannot have people growing up thinking that music ought to be free.  There’s no way they can make a living.  It’s amazing how many people will, because Napster is so convenient, will ignore the artists and the compensation of the artists.  It doesn’t affect us because when you buy our album in the store all the money goes to the record label, so it’s only benefited us, people discovering us through Napster.  But in principal, it’s flawed.  It’s a bad system and I hope, though I doubt, now that Napster is no longer a big player, there’s a zillion other technologies and websites that will allow you to download music without being able to find out where it comes from.  I don’ know, it’s going to get ugly. Another: How would you specify the type of music that you play? B: It’s pop music, the thing that defines it a lot of times is the instrumentation, the presence of no drum set, live, the harmonies.  It’s really hard to classify beyond just pop music in the sense that The Beatles are pop music and not in the sense that J Lo is pop music… that’s Jennifer Lopez.  Another: Has it changed over time? B: It’s evolved considerably.  We used to honestly think that our new album sounded nothing like our old album with the exception of the vocals and the percussion.  But I think all bands evolve and that’s a good thing.  I mean, if you want to sustain yourself over a couple of decades, there are inevitably going to be reinventions and evolutions.  In the case of a lot of bands, REM and U2 and Rolling Stones, they never could recapture what they had in their prime.  However it’s necessary for the band’s sanity to keep trying new things.

M: You mentioned before that you guys played Woodstock.  How do you feel about all of the controversy over the incidents that took place there?

B: I think rape is bad.  They sold bottles of water for $4.50 and on the third day they handed out torches to the crowd and the Red Hot Chilly Peppers played “Fire” and everyone was pissed off.  You could see the anger and the frustration growing all weekend and I’m not surprised at all.  I don’t think you can treat people like that at a show.  I don’ think you can do that at a festival like that.  The whole spirit of Woodstock is completely gone and at that point in our career, getting a pin on that show was a real coup, but I don’t think we like playing at those big festivals.  I mean, you play 30 minutes most of the time, it costs $60, there’s generally some big corporate banner hanging behind you.  It’s not anything you want your fans to see.  The only reason we play it is to expose ourselves to new people, which we are much happier doing in like the Barenaked Ladies sort of situation.

M: I saw you guys had a controversy over Rockfest, at the Hard Rock café..?

B: Right, it’s with the promoters of that concert, it’s not with Oldsmobile, may they rest in peace.  But, it was just like a big TV screen showing commercials between bands, the whole spirit of the festival was so disgusting that we kind of made fun of Oldsmobile’s slogan, and they didn’t pay us because of that.  I mean, it wasn’t that much money so it wasn’t a big deal but we vented about it in our road journal and it blew up in the press because it’s such an ugly situation.  I’m surprised more bands haven’t spoken out about the heinous nature of a lot of these shows, egregious marketing.  Because Oldsmobile can put this giant Oldsmobile tower in the middle of 100,000 people, every band on that show got paid twice what they normally got paid, and so no one complains.  We couldn’t be a part of shows like that.

J: Do you think there’s something that you learned or matured to since you decided to not go the typical post-college track? B: What’s the typical post-college track? J: Getting a job 9-5 kind of deal, is there something that you know about people now that you didn’t know before?  B: Well, I can’t compare it because I’ve never held a real world job, I do think that I’ve benefited from the travel and the people I’ve met, everyone I know that’s entered the real world is miserable. J: Do you consider yourself not in the real world? B: I don’t consider myself in the real world.  It’s a lot of work, but there’s no grime, there’s no routine… (at this point Ryan (left) comes in and they converse about Adam’s (below) ankle and how, out of the 12 appendages up on stage, Adam’s ankle is the most expendable at this point in time) B: did I answer anything? J: Yeah… well, so what do you think about people? B: What do I think about people? J: Well, like corporations… B: Well if someone wants to work for a corporation and they believe in the product or what they do or how they contribute to it, then that’s fine.  I’m not like, anti-corporation, I don’t think that those things belong ahead of the music at a rock concert, you have to draw the line somewhere.  What do I think of people though… it’s an interesting question.  I think a lot about different people.

M: What do you like to do for fun? B: Twist Adam’s ankle playing racquetball… I like fishing.  Last year we toured 15 out of the 18 months for this album, so there wasn’t much leisure time, off the road anyway.  Those guys like to travel, I feel like I travel enough playing in the band, so I’m more of a homebody. Another: is there one thing that you guys are always nitpicking each other about, quarrelling about? B: I think we each have our little niches that we’re anal about.  Adam’s going to have his way with the temperature of the bus.  Yeah, there’s tension and there’s turbulence just like in any family, and that’s what we are, family.  It’s been 9 or 10 years since we’ve started playing, so we feel old. Another: What do you see happening in the future? B: Well, it’s all about the next album at this point.  I think we’re going to take our time with it.  we want to make it sound good, we want to make the songs good, and I think that will keep us off the road for most of this year, which will be the longest span we’ve ever been off the road.  I think we want to put the energy we spend into touring into recording and so I hope our album will benefit for it.  that’s the goal for the rest of this year, then we’ll probably tour like crazy in 2002.  J: do you like it better when your audience is sitting or standing? B: Standing.  Much, much better. M: This is kind of a weird question, but I promised my roommate I would ask it.  Are you guys AC/DC fans?

B: We got respect for the AC/DC.  I don’t know that that would get many spins on the bus though. 

Another: Do you think your fanbase has changed?

B: Our fanbase is growing, as long as it stays as loyal and spirited as it is, I don’t care if it’s 40+ adult contemporaries who learned about us from the Barenaked ladies or it’s 14 year olds who are finally starting to ditch ‘NSYNC and Brittany Spears.  As long as they like our band, not for our single, but for everything that we’re putting out there.

Brian - Matt - Jen

Back To The Main Page

Tell us what you think.

About this page.