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ENTERTAINMENT
Mike Gordon celebrates new release at Mountain Stage
Phish bassist Mike Gordon celebrates the release of his new album "The Green Sparrow" tonight at 7 at Mountain Stage.
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When Mike Gordon found out it was going to take a graphic artist a couple months to do his album cover, the Phish bassist didn't freak out, he got out the glue and the scissors.
"I bought all of this colored tissue paper, sat in a room for 10 hours, and I had this vision of how the sparrow would look and the mood of how it looked a little bit like an elf," said Gordon, who is best known as the bassist for Phish. "It was great to take something in my own hands."
Musically, Gordon has been doing a lot of that lately.
The melodic bassist and multi-instrumentalist who's worked with 12-string guitar legend Leo Kottke, southern music guru Col. Bruce Hampton and Warren Haynes' Gov't Mule, celebrates his new Rounder Records release, "The Green Sparrow," with a live set tonight at Mountain Stage at the Cultural Center Theater in Charleston.
The 7 p.m. Mountain Stage show also features Vienna Teng, Crooked Still, Carrie Rodriguez and The Rescues.
Tickets are $15 at the door.
Gordon is touring with his fellow Burlington, Vt.-based band including long-time collaborator Scott Murawski on guitar, percussionist Craig Myers, Tom Cleary on keyboards and drummer Todd Isler.
Gordon, who has nearly 30 dates into early September, said he's excited to get back out live and share the tunes that got boiled up in his head during a full year off from playing live.
"It was strange to take a year and not play and now since the album has been out, playing for people who do not know the songs," Gordon said. "That has been interesting. It's a little bit of reacclimation getting on the stage again. These lessons are important to learn over and over again like just relaxing. And then the other thing that is important is to push out of the box."
Gordon said reading the classic "Magical Child" has helped him keep that balance of relaxing, yet stretching out on stage under the stress and high energy of that situation.
"My favorite bands are tight and loose and original and traditional," Gordon said. "Like a band near the cusp, not so avant garde that I can't relate but with some tradition in the formula. Solid and sensitive. For a bassist it's like holding the groove and being sensitive in that environment but not playing off of every lick on the guitar. It's one of these balancing acts. Getting back to being in a band reminds me of all of this balancing."
Getting back to a band has been a long, winding year-and-a-half-long journey tunneling into Gordon's past, his dreams and his daily life to churn out 10 eclectic, free-range of rock, pop, funked and calypso songs that appear on "Green Sparrow," a CD spiced with guests such as Ivan Neville, Chuck Leavell and Bill Kreutzmann, and former bandmates Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell.
Gordon, who has played Mountain Stage with Phish, and then just a couple years ago with Kottke, said that after doing several amazing collaborations after Phish broke up in 2004, he knew he needed to draw from a deep well within. It's a creative well that over the years has written songs and books, made movies and videos, writtn stories, dreamed dreams and written oh so much music.
"Doing all of these amazing collaborations with Leo and with Grateful Dead drummers, it was sort of putting off the inevitable to me to make that biggest leap that I could possibly make and to put together my own project," Gordon said. "I don't want to be a dictator, I just have a lot of creative energy, and playing with other people, I felt like I wasn't applying myself as deeply as I could have."
So Gordon set aside 2007 and spent the whole year, every weekday, experimenting with a lot of his basslines, music, recordings, previous jams and new ideas swirling in his head, on tape and in his notebooks.
"The idea wasn't just to make an album but to write a whole new repertoire of music for a band," Gordon said. "I knew I had the idea to use my head less and that is the thing about improvising is to go into a subconscious mode. I felt like songwriting could emanate from the same kind of place."
Gordon, who catalogs everything from dreams, stories and lists on his Web site, compiled "everything on one drive" with guitar licks, lyrics and tons of ideas from over the years.
Working alone and from scratch, he built songs from ideas or snippets from the past, meticulously piecing them together and doing it daily at his home studio in Vermont.
Gordon had written 50 songs but had only recorded six when he brought in engineer Jared Slomoff in October of last year and decided to change gears, work more quickly and see what happened when he recorded one song a day.
They recorded 21 songs in October and another nine in November.
Gordon said although they used different processes to gather and record them, there was a common theme to the five songs picked through September, the four he picked from the October sessions and one from November.
"They ended up drawing from all sources and methods," Gordon said. "It gave it a bit of variety, and I think by the time October came along, the songs written six months ago seemed like it was years ago. I still liked them, and it still feels like it ('Green Sparrow') has some cohesion to it."
That cohesion is not unlike the meticulously, musically hand-crafted melodic collage that kept Phish as a favorite band for many people.
"It sort of unfolded itself in a natural way," Gordon said. "There were certain songs I couldn't live without. Everyone reacted to them, and I picked the more upbeat songs. The last album in 2003 was kind of dreamy, so I wanted this to be very awake. I had to be falling in love with all of these songs, and I am still in love with some that we didn't use that are maybe more dreamy or contemplative. I also didn't want it to be that long. It felt better that way."
If hand-crafting his dreams and visions with friends felt good, sharing it with his fellow Burlington-based band live at such venues this summer as West Virginia's All Good Festival has felt even better.
Gordon, who still keeps a daily hotline open to his fans, loves that chemistry that happens when live music spirals out through the open air to a field full of fans.
"It was so beautiful around there," Gordon said of the All Good Fest at Marvin's Mountaintop in Masontown, W.Va. "We were experimenting at All Good and got inspired for creating a way for the audience to conduct the band with hand signals. The audience made hand signals to direct the band members to make changes in the band and improvise. The trick that I told people was how to have group mind. So everybody was supposed to look around and make the same signal as your neighbor. That was all part of 'Radar Blip,' a song we had never played in public before. In the song, I am kind of running but going in unexpected places, and I am running on a coffee table while people are meeting and when I am home I always turn right at the end of the driveway, but instead I turn left and discovered this private pond with geese in it."
Armed with these twistable, turnable songs like "Radar Blip" and the infectious dream-sequenced "Andelmans' Yard," Gordon has been enjoying what he called "that funky and excited vibe of putting together a new band."
"The five of us have a certain chemistry, and that feels really good," Gordon said of the band that is anchored by Murawski, the guitarist who he has played with for 15 years. "Having come from the Phish world, it's a lot about having songs that can develop on stage and from night to night."
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