A piece aired a couple of
months ago on NPR about Steely Dan’s legendary sound engineer, Roger
Nichols, who had just passed away from cancer. Michele Norris
interviewed Donald Fagen about Nichols and his storied inventiveness,
including the tale of Walter Becker and Fagen struggling with a drum
track for Gaucho’s “Hey Nineteen” and challenging Nichols
to come up with a mechanized drum system to outline the beat. Which, in a
few weeks’ time, Nichols did, and the dry, relaxed-but-airtight snare
line remains intact on the tune 30 years later.
Steely Dan records aren’t much cited nowadays as influences on anybody, probably least of all Gaucho, but we were a little shocked when we heard Jake Cinninger, guitarist for the broad-shouldered prog-jam outfit Umphrey’s McGee,
give a shout out when we got him talking about the band’s new release,
more or less in the can and being readied for a September release.
Cinninger was blipping in and out of cell reception on the
tour bus as the band rolled across the Indiana cornfields on its way to
Richmond, Va., for a two-night gig — we thought of Mel Gibson’s crafty
alien nemesis in Signs — but the guitarist, an admitted musical
old-schooler, was pumped about the new CD, which follows the brooding
and somewhat dark disk from 2009, Mantis.
As always, the band focuses hard on its studio efforts, a
kind of studio craftsman’s ying to its release-every-live-show yang, and
Cinninger relishes the meticulous process of getting it right in the
studio before the band takes it out and stretches and deconstructs it on
stage.
“We really wanted to do the whole sonic treatment on the new songs,” Cinninger explains, “to get them sounding just perfect. We’ve spent the last year and a half on these tunes.
“Usually it’s a lot of tightening up little things, like rhythmic passages. Or … almost what not
to play, to make air in the music a little bit more. We have three
melody-makers in the band, bass, two percussionists … so there’s a lot
going on. So, it’s kind of like, when to drop off, to really make the
song pop. Some of the best and most beautiful recordings have all that air
in there, like those old Steely Dan recordings. Like … ‘Hey Nineteen,’
the drums are so driving, and everything’s just sprinkled around the
huge beat. Stuff that’ll sound good in a large room, like that old arena
rock sound … although we’re definitely not arena rock. What happened to
that, anyway? Seems like it just went away.”
Umphrey’s kicked off its festival season at the
Chicago-area Summer Camp festival in late May — as reigning Windy City
big-ticket draws, the band played three nights, debuting some of the new
material and mixing it up with old bud Huey Lewis as The rUMors for
some old Huey Lewis and The News hits, and as the Staple Singers for a
dangerous take on “Respect Yourself.”
We were also interested in the band’s Mountain Jam gig a
week or so later, when they brought up The New Deal’s Dan Kurtz. Kurtz
and the Umphrey’s guys go way back, of course, kicking off their careers
at just around the same time in the late 1990s, but Kurtz is out on the
road for the last time with the groundbreaking Canadian trio, who
decided to call it a day after one last tour, appearing at the Fox
Theatre the night before Umphrey’s plays the Rocks.
“Yeah, I know,” Cinninger laments. “We’ve been good
buddies with those guys for about 10 years. It hurts to see them go.
Some of my favorite driving music has been The New Deal, so yeah, they
go way back for us.”
Every band has a different sell-by date, and as touring
becomes more or less the only way to make a decent living in the music
business these days, we wondered how Umphrey’s has managed to hold it
together well into its second decade.
“Basically, the time off is just as important as the time
on. So we really make sure that we allow the time and feel normal and
recharge the batteries. Go back and see our families, and then after a
few weeks we’re excited to go back out and hit it again for three or
four weeks. It’s kind of an oddball schedule, but it works for us. You
can only beat a horse so hard before he gets tired and doesn’t want to
plow the field anymore.”
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