"I can do that because it's an old song and I'm an outsider. It's not part of my history. But it is darn eerie that it's playing now. We're plagued by the supernatural. Maybe we should do an album cover with us standing in a triangular formation with the Bermuda Triangle in the middle."
Grant Lee Buffalo have always led a strange and charmed life. As soon as this Los Angeles trio of pop aethetes released its debut album, Fuzzy, last year, they became not only critical darlings but also favorites among their fellow musicians. In fact, they even managed to earn Pearl Jam's respect by saying no to them.
"What happened," bassist Paul Kimble says, glazing intensely from behind wire-rim glasses and a head of bleached white hair, "was thatthe first time Pearl Jam got in touch with us, they asked if we wanted to do some shows with them, and we told them we couldn't do it because we had already told [former Replacements front-man] Paul Westerberg we'd tour with him. I think they really like that, because we didn't go, 'Oh you guys want us to play? Well, Paul, see ya.' So they gave us another chance to tour with them" The tour, last spring turned out to be Pearl Jam's last before their highly publicised legal battle with Ticketmaster.
"One thing that I noticed when we were touring with Pearl Jam," Phillips says, "was that they were like us live - their show changed from night to night. It was inspiring to watch from the wings. We've always been into that idea that you don't come to a show to recite something, you come to share in something that's bigger than any one of us."
Another band whose respect Grant Lee Buffalo earned, R.E.M., has asked the band to join them on their first tour in five years. This time, Grant Lee Buffalo didn't say no. In fact, Phillips is so anxious about the tour, which will take them to Europe, Australia and Asia, that he recently had a dream about it.
"I dreamed that we had done our show," Phillips says. "We were watching R.E.M. perform, and they were incredibly loud but they had no amplifiers. The dream was all in sepia tone. After the show, Michael [Stipe] came back, and he was wearing a gold King Tut headdress like the one Steve Martin used to wear. That's all I can remember. I think our friednship with Michael is the greatest thing that came out of our recordings."
Phillips, of course, is just being modest. As Grant Lee Buffalo's performance at the Manhattan Center on the night before this interview demonstrated, this small band can make a big noise that will give any group a run for its money. Strumming an amplified 12-string acoustic guitar, Phillips controlled the pace of each songs, stomping on a distortion pedal whenever it was time to turn a moving ballad into an all-out rocker. Kimble, a former drummer and guitarist, whaled mercilessly on his bass as Peters used to the drums to explore instead of bash. Phillips and Kimble's falsetto duet during "Mockingbirds" drew a torrent of applause from the audience, but their exercise in denial, "Mighty Joe Moon," was the evening's highlight.
"Have you tasted the finest of trout - oh, no, " Phillips sang with all the passion he could muster. "Have you slept in a log-burning house - oh, no - with your feet flopping over the couch - oh, no."
After the show, Phillips dodged record-industry dromes and dined on mozzarella sticks at a nearby restaurant. "Taht line 'Have you tasted the finest of trout?' is my most exquisite to date." Phillips smiles, happy with his performance. "It's a line that I can sing, and it actually makes me laugh. It sort of jumps out of the song, but then it dives back down to the sea.
I think the longer we play together, the more we develop and depend on this language that exists between the three of us," Phillips says. "And it's such an exclusive language that I don't know if anybody but the three of us would understand it. If we were to sit in with some other musicians, we would be considered freaks."
BACK AT THE PARAMOUNT HOTEL, lounging in multicoloured seats, Grant Lee Buffalo are experiencing the dead time that rock bands often do while on tour. In a few hours a plane will whisk them to Europe for a headlining tour. Kimble mumbles that it's his 34th birthday today; Phillips and Peters mumble back their congratulations. It's not that the band members don't get along, it's just that they are more compatible musically than socially. Phillips has a subtle sense of humor, Kimble is consumed by cynicism, and Peters is quiet and somewhat nervous. Their differences aren't stumbling blocks but components of a perfect whole, which is one reason why they don't see themselves breaking up anytime in the next decade or two. After all, it took them long enough to find one other.
For Kimble, it took nearly 15 years of bashing guitars and drums in heavy-metal and punk bands to find the right combination of musicians to play with. Phillips, who is 31, Peters, in his late 20s, paid similar dues.
Phillips was raied in a musical family - his grandfather and great-grandfather were fiddle-toting preachers, and his grandmother was a gospel singer. Phillips' music, however, was somewhat sacrilegious. "I was in one band calld Bloody Holly," says Phillips, a native of Stockton, Calif. "We had a great logo. It was a drawing of Buddy Holly with cracked glasses. We'd get our PA system out of a country church and rehearse almost every night in my freind's garage."
"That's funny," Kimble says, comparing small-town notes. "The first place I ever rehearsed in was in the base-ment of a church." Kimble was rasied a srtict Methodist in Freeport, Ill., approximately 100 miles northwest of Chicago. "It was really weird because the guitar player and the bass player were five or six years older than me, and they would bring all of this pot and beer down into the church basement, and we'd play. It was a rock & roll lifestyle right from the start."
Peters, who grew up in Santa Cruz, Calif., a coastal playground for Northern Californians, commuted to San Francisco when he was 16 to play in punk bands. Within a few years he was drumming in an R&B outfit five nights a week and with a jazz band on weekends. Among the people with whom he played were such blues luminaries as John Lee Hooker and Charlie Musselwhite.
"I was 20 at the time," Peters says, his sharp features obscured behind his beard and long hair. "The guys I was playing with were from 30 to 40. But after a while I felt it was time to move on."
Peters moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and began playing in younger bands. Six months later he met Phillips, a film-school dropout, when they both joined a band called Shiva Burlesque, which went on to record two albums of dark, psychedelic rock.
Somewhere in Freeport a few years earlier, Kimble sat in a borrowed car with $400 in his pocket and let a baseball game dteremine the path that would eventually lead him to Grant Lee Buffalo. "It was the year that the Dodgers were playing the Yankees in the World Series, and I knew I wanted to go to L.A. or New York, but I couldn't decide which one. I was sitting in my driveway, listening to the final game of the series, and I said, 'OK, whoever wins, that's where I'll go.' The Dodgers won, so I turned left and ended up in L.A."
But quickly he became disillusioned with Los Angeles and couldn't find a decent musician to play with. That is, until he went to a Shiva Burlesque concert. "The first thing I said to the person I was with was, 'Wow, I should get in this band and steal the guitarist and drummer and start a band,'" Kimble says. "I knew they were the guys I'd been looking for for years. And it only took me a year and a half to steal them away."
"When the three of us got together," Kimble says, "we could move at about 10 times the speed we could in Shiva Burlesque, and anybody that got in between the three of us could fuck it up or it slow it down."
This, however, wasn't the beginning of Grant Lee Buffalo. It was the beginning of Mouth of Rasputin, the Machine Elves and Soft Wolf Tread. The trio used a different name at every show before they settled on Grant Lee Buffalo in 1991. When it came time to record, Kimble, who had developed an excellent production aesthetic after working in stereo shops for 10 years, took over aa producer and engineer. The result was Fuzzy.
"When we made Fuzzy, we were collecting a bunch of songs that were written over a period of time," Phillips says. "And each song had its own identity. Fuzzy wanted to be 11 different albums. It was a blueprint for all the things we could become. I think we just sort of got more hardheaded about our obsessions when it came to making Mighty Joe Moon."
AS THEIR MONIKER - which merges as the names of two Civil Wat generals with that of an animal associated with American Indians - implies, Grant Lee Buffalo are a band obsessed with the dark side of American history. Their songs explore the American dream as seen from the window of a fast-moving car. On Fuzzy the band deals with such diverse subjects as New Orleans voodoo ("Dixie Drugstore") and the common ground among the Civil War, John WIlkes Booth, Al Capone and New York's East Village ("The Shining Hour"). Mighty Joe Moon, a tighter, more focused album, traces thel ine between Lee Harvey Oswald and David Koresh ("Lone Star Song") and examines the various uses of tools, from the creation of highways to the destruction of John Wayne Gacy ("Sing Along").
"I've always been fascinated by American history," Phillips says. "But when I write songs, it's more like a tornado come through history and picked everything up and spun it around. And when it landed, it wasn't history anymore, it was something else."
In addition to having all grown up in agricultural areas surrounded by dirt roads and railway tracks, the members of Grant Lee Buffalo share an interest in another American image: Evel Knievel. Phillips broke his foot trying a Knievel-inspired feat on his bicycle; Kimble wiped out trying to ride a motorcycle backwards; and Peters burned down five acres of grass behind his parent' house during a childhood stunt.
"All boys wanted to be Evel Knievel," says Phillips. "In fact, I dressed up as Evel Knievel one year for Halloween." Phillips look at the clock and notes that their plane leaves in an hour and a half. But, daredevils that they are, the band members keep talking, trying to outdo one another wth tales of rural madness.
"I agree with Grant," Kimble says after Peters has recounted the time he got arrested for sneaking onto a roller coaster at night. "It was all Evel Knievel. Freeport was an endless daredevil city. It was really Blue Velvet-esque....I had this fascination with becoming a stunt-car driver becsaue I spent all my time driving on gravel roads, and it snows all the time, and I was drunk a lot, which I don't recommend while driving. We got into races all the time. Sure I got hit in cars, ran into ditches at 90 miles an hour."
Phillips and Peters rise to leave, but Kimble remains seated. "I shouldn't be alive, for sure," he says, as if seized by the vision that he could have become one of the back-road tragedies that Phillips often writes about. "Many, many times over, I should be dead."