Interview: Dave Schools - Hard Working Americans, the Anti-Supergroup
Bassist Dave Schools dives into the nitty gritty in a conversation with Heather Nigro about Hard Working Americans, haunted spaces, and finding authenticity in the age of misinformation.
I know you've been recording your third studio album. Is there a method to the madness of sculpting the sound to what Todd Snider is writing?
Dave: I think method and madness are sort of mutually exclusive, so it's kind of one of those oxymorons like jumbo shrimp where there may be a method that we aim for, but it can just change day to day. The batch of songs that do make up this alleged third record did have sort of a method to the madness that he had spent a lot of time trying to write outside of the sort of traditional folk and country song structures and chord changes that he has plied for years and years.
So that was something that Todd worked really hard on before he went into the studio last April. And gosh, it's almost been a year. Wow. So insomuch as to compare it to the other records, the first records were songs that were written by peers and friends and idols of his. So those structures were already there, although we did really have our way with them. We deconstructed them, but melodies are intact, the lyrics are obviously already written. So it was a curation of songs, the first record.
Then the second record, Rest In Chaos, was a two year project where we took poetry and jams and slowly evolved them into song forms. It was a really, really long road kind of approach to making a studio record, but we wanted to do something sort of monumental and challenging. Not just for listeners, but also for ourselves. So that was Rest In Chaos.
Photo: Paul R. Giunta Photography
And then the live record came out, bunch of touring and we took some time off. Todd started listening to bands like The Who and Oasis and just decided that he was gonna write a bunch of songs over rock 'n' roll chord changes and he already had them made up.
We went into the Cash Cabin and had Daniel Sproul, who is the new guitar player in the band and we wanted to do one song a day. To answer your question about the methodology of the madness, that was it. We'd show up, we'd have the song picked out, we'd find the right vibe for it and record it and overdub it minimally and if Todd wanted to rework the vocals with a fresh voice, we'd do it first thing the next morning before we get down to the very next song. So really we wound up recording, I want to say 15 songs in 12 days.
There seems to be certain themes, stories or topics that resonate with each of the Hard Working Americans albums. Is there a particular direction that you can share with this upcoming album?
Dave: It kind of runs the gamut. I mean, you're talking to the wrong guy for meanings of songs. I'm not the lyricist. I discuss this a lot with Todd, as I would with any artist that wants to include a band member or a producer or another musician in such a discussion. Songwriters put themselves through a whole lot and sometimes it gets really personal and sometimes any of our lives can be messy in a personal way.
And things aren't cut and dry and compartmentalized, you know? I mean, I know a lot of artists who would color code each record, like, "This one is about being in love, and this next one is about that love falling apart." But our lives really aren't like that. Todd writes from his heart and he lives day to day and the feelings he has turn into songs and he's a very, very consistent editor, so things are never really set in stone until the record is mixed.
There's been plenty of times where he's wanted to recut a vocal during the mix. Maybe change a couple of lines to alter the granular meaning of a song. So that's pretty much all I can give you on that. I mean, Rest In Chaos had a lot of relationship woe stories about falling in love with his wife and then the eventual divorce and things that happened in between. Addressed a lot of rumors in Nashville. It's a very deep and personal artistic statement.
And there's a little bit of that overlapping this record. There's also some good humor. There's some straight up just great songwriting, so you know, I can't really speak to if there was a over-arching theme to the batch of songs. I think it was freedom and the want to explore some new songwriting templates with this new band.
You shared that you did some recording at Cash Cabin in Tennessee. What's the feeling like recording there?
Dave: It was Johnny Cash's personal space and that's a vibe that is...it can be overwhelming. A lot of times when people who are big fans of country music or the history of country music or Johnny himself would come by to visit and see the place for the first time, they're pretty much overwhelmed.
Cash Cabin in Tennessee. Photo: Cash Cabin Enterprises
You know, I don't know, somehow I got through that, but every day there's a discovery of some artifact or go a little deeper into the vault and stumble across a two inch tape reel that says 'McCartney and Johnny'. And you gotta wonder what it is, you know, what they were doing. There's a lot of history there, but it's a studio and it's a working studio and the people who run it are incredibly sweet and professional.
The engineer worked with Johnny, and it's Johnny's son's place, John Carter. He lives with his family on the grounds and sometimes drops in to help or get a little bit of a laugh or get away from the daily grind of the Nashville country music scene. It's outside of Nashville, out in the country and you go into the barn and look at June Carter and Mother Maybelle's fish and tackle boxes and grab a reel and go try and pull a fish out of the pond.
But mainly, it's a great place to record. The vibe is palpable.
Do you think it's haunted?
Dave: I haven't seen a ghost, but several people have. Apparently the ghosts only show themselves when they approve of the music.
We did get a song out of it called “The Ghost of Johnny Cash.” Which is a long story, it'd probably be better to have Todd tell it to you, but here's the short version.
A couple years ago, Todd has this dream that he was in the Cash Cabin, asleep on the floor, and Johnny came to him in a vision and said, "Son, help me find a song, I think I left it over there..." and gestured to the corner of the control room.
And so with that being said, things went along and Loretta Lynn was there working on some demos, living in her tour bus, parked right outside of the studio cabin. And John Carter, one night, awoke to see Loretta dancing by herself out in the moonlight, and he asked her who she was dancing with and the response was, "The ghost of your father."
Oddly enough, we were just cutting some demos there and John Carter ran into Todd Snider in the parking lot and they talked about what Loretta said and therefore the fates conspired to place us all there at the right time to write a song about Loretta Lynn dancing in the moonlight with the ghost of Johnny Cash.
Dave recording with Hard Working Americans at Cash Cabin. Photo: Cash Cabin Enterprises.
I see a lot of articles that refer to Hard Working Americans as a supergroup, which seems like antiquated marketing jargon. Is it safe to say that Hard Working Americans is the anti-supergroup?
Dave: I like that better than supergroup. I've never liked labels. I mean, they're limiting. Their good terms for lazy people to describe sounds to other lazier people. And that's cool, because most people basically are lazy. They either like something or they don't and they want some form of a gatekeeper to tell them what is cool and then they make their judgements on their own, so I don't blame anyone for coming up with labels, I just don't personally like them. You know, stupergroup might be better.
With you and Duane sharing two bands together, how do you switch gears between the two bands?
Dave: There's nothing that needs to be spoken about with Duane or with any musician that uses their ears and especially if they've been through Bruce Hampton school. They get the ego out of the way and serve the song to be a channel for music to work through. That's the key, that's the blessing and that's why it's sacred. So it's not changing gears, it's just an innate understanding and a tacit agreement, musically, between the two of us that we will serve the song.
We'll come up with the best way that we know how to support a song. And that's really all it is. I mean, we have a lot of fun playing together. From the get go there was a lot of sort of amusement and telepathy and it remains to this day. A willingness to take chances, a willingness to lay back and groove, to simmer, or to really go for the throat.
It depends. There is a difference between what Widespread Panic does and what the Hard Working Americans do, sort of innately in that Widespread Panic, we have the freedom to pivot at any point. We're not held to parts necessarily, whereas Hard Working Americans is more of a song-oriented band, so the job is support Todd when he's singing and to match his intensity on stage and in the studio. But none of that's any big secret.
On the notion of the Colonel, how are you keeping his spirit present with his passing?
Dave: Well, I have nothing to do with it. None of us do. It's there. It's in all of us that he mentored, touched, amused, defrauded, played tricks on and taught. It's there and it's truly spiritual in that the less that anyone tries to teach it, the more grasp it has in the world. When you have people like Derek and Susan, Otiel, myself, the guys in Panic, Duane and hosts of people that have been through that school, we just simply use those lessons. We don't have to say that the Colonel taught us this, or we learned this by osmosis from exposure to the Colonel. It just flows.
That's the thing, and that was the key with him. Get the ego out of the way and become an open conduit and listen. You know, you listen with your ears, not your eyes. I miss the guy every day, we miss him all the time and so when we play music, he's never far from our hearts.
Ever present, the Colonel is eternal. Photo: unknown
I was recently sleuthing your Instagram, and I see that you are an avid collector of Hot Wheels. Is that correct?
Dave: I don't collect as much as I used to, but I have way more than any adult human should have. Yeah it's a piece of my childhood.
Do you remember when you got your first one?
Dave: Oh god, it was probably 50 years ago. It's hard to believe these things are 50 years old. I don't have any of the original, unless I can dig them up from my mom's house, but they're, the term that collectors use is 'well-loved'. I mean, I played with them. They were toys. And kids can be rough on their toys, but yeah, there was called The Red Baron that I was fond of.
It's like a drag car that has a German helmet for a canopy kind of lookin' thing. I used to have a big model of one of those that sat on my amp for years. I don't know what happened to it. I might have given it away or something. These things get lost in the sands of time like so many Godzilla figurines.
It's great when you enjoy and appreciate things from your childhood and it becomes part of your adult life.
Dave: Yeah, I like it too. I started collecting in the late '90s and they weren't ridiculously expensive yet. eBay was making the world a collector's market. I didn't have to go to pawn shops and Goodwills and try to find them. Suddenly you could just put it in the search field and find them. It's hard to believe that something over 50 years old is considered an antique, but there it is, and I guess I'm considered an antique too. Glad to be one.
Photo: Dave Schools via Instagram
Speaking on the topic of antiques, do you think cassettes will make a comeback like vinyl?
Dave: Didn't they already do that? I thought that hipsters had moved on to 8-track tapes being the hip thing now.
It's funny, a lot of the cassettes I have, I still have some of the oldest ones I've got that are from high school that are like mix tapes I made off the radio. You know, trying to snip the DJ's front sell or they cross-faded out of song I liked into a song I couldn't stand, so you get the very beginning of a terrible song.
But the format is probably more stable than people would've thought, but it's still a remarkably unstable format. I mean, vinyl will be around a lot longer than cassettes and possibly even CDs. I've got some early CDs that it's almost like the information on them has vanished. It just depends on what you like. I like vinyl, it's the format that got me started listening to music when I was a kid. I've still got the very first record I ever bought, which is a 45 rpm of Deep Purple doing the song Kentucky Woman. It's like gray with age. I would suspect that if you are of the generation that had your Walkman, your cassette Walkman and there was nothing better than making a mix tape. Now you just make a playlist and post it on Spotify.
There's something special about the work that was put into making a mix tape. No one could make their own mix record, unless they had a lathe at their house. But it was easy to make a mix tape. And I don't ever recall seeing an 8-track tape that was recordable. If you like cassettes, then I think that you'd be happy right now, 'cause people do seem to enjoy them. I mean, I've still got a car that I bought in 2002 that has a cassette deck in it.
It doesn't work anymore, but it has a cassette deck it. With a Grateful Dead cassette stuck in it for a long time, which angered my wife.
We have so much readily available at our fingertips with technology that is essentially delivering information to us. I think of the phrase that was coined, “the information age”. With recent events in the world, the age of misinformation is perhaps a more accurate description. My question to you is, how do you find authenticity when the lines are blurred in today's society?
Dave: Well, you know, that's a good one, because look a few posts back on my Instagram and you'll see a couple of quotes talking about fake news... It's a whole 'nother meeting, a whole 'nother conversation, but there are a lot of pundits out there that think that everything at our fingertips that we are more isolated and we have less human to human contact than ever before. And when it comes to information, it's certainly hard to discern what's authentic. What the facts are. It seems like everybody could look on any website there and find a bunch of "facts" that back up their belief system.
Whether it's the truth or not is arguable. I think the media's really dropped the ball when it comes to the basic tenants of reportage. You don't usually go into why. It's like Dragnet, “just the facts please, ma'am.” What we have is a divided nation running on alternative fact and fake news and it's just more divided then ever. People seem less inclined to hold two differing opinions in their heads at the same time. Less inclined to have any kind of discussion that moves the conversation from one of the poles closer to the center.
Unity is what we need, and to get to unity, we have to have some empathy and understanding, and it would be a really helpful thing to have the media uphold a tenant of just the facts. When it comes to music authenticity, sometimes we need gatekeepers. It's kind of part of what your local radio station used to do before they were all nationalized franchises that operated off the same playlist. You could trust your local DJ. You liked that guy that did the 8:00 PM to midnight shift on Fridays and Saturdays and that's where you got your new spin, 'cause he'd spin it.
It's hard to find gatekeepers these days. So the search for authenticity seems to be an even more difficult one.
Post: Dave Schools via Instagram
I think it's important to dig deep and have conversations about these things because it helps to get people thinking and questioning instead of just absorbing. There’s a lot happening in technology, in particular with Facebook becoming a media company guised as a social site. Anyone can take out an advertisement and create media splendor. We are living in scary times now…
Dave: There's a real dearth of actual literacy in people these days. I think they can read the words. I'm not sure on how much context they pick up and I think that there's a lot of use of hot button that get people fired up. There's a lot of sort of subtle propagandizing that points you one direction or the other, which is really in a sense editorializing. And it belongs on the opinion page.
When Fox started calling itself the No Spin Zone during the build up to the Iraq War after 9/11, it became obvious and then the more centralized media had to become leftist just to try and balance things. I mean, I was a journalism student, and I got out of it because I kind of saw this coming with the advent of the popularity of USA Today, a nationwide newspaper, owned by a corporation driven by profit. So you know, what you said is absolutely true. It's about driving the profit and at any crime scene, the detective says, "Alright, who benefited from this crime?"
That's where they start to try and find it, and I think maybe one of the ways to get to authenticity these days is to take a good look at who's profiting from division and misinformation. Who's making all the money? Who profits from a generation of children that are not educated in critical thinking, that cease to become individuals? Who's threatened by a populace of educated individuals?
But like I said, this is a different meeting.
Indeed. Final question. This Sunday you are playing Gasparilla Music Festival as your first show of 2018. Are there any other tour dates planned for Summer or Fall?
Dave: Would hope so in the Fall. There's no plans for a tour. There's some scattered dates, some festival things. And always wanting to record. There's still some subject to be discussed among the band about how to release this record and we'll only put two thirds of the material we've recorded on the record, so this remains to be seen, and also there's a whole new paradigm of releasing music in to the world.
And so we may not release the whole record at first. We may leak it out song by song. You just never know, but keep your eyes focused and your ear to the ground, and you'll be hearing some Hard Working American music soon and we are super excited about our first gig or 2018. And I have some friends that participate in that festival, so I'm excited to see them and get some of that vibe. It's going to be cool.
Hardworking Americans perform at Gasparilla Music Festival in Tampa, Florida on Sunday, May 11th.
Heather Nigro is a modern day renaissance woman and the archivist behind Widespread Panic Fans. A woman of many passions, she balances her time as CEO of Moxxii and photographer for Moxxii Photo. Follow her @heathermoxxii and @moxxiiphoto
