October 07, 2009 Mary-Kate Roan

mkroan@connectstatesboro.com

Connect Statesboro (CS): How did you get into music?
Joe Layden (JL): My grandmother used to be a piano teacher and my mother plays guitar and piano, so I grew up around it and took piano lessons when I was around 10. I messed around with the guitar a little after that, but it didn’t last long, and I didn’t really get fully fledged into studying music until my senior year in high school. I was obsessed with The Doors at the time, and my first love was always writing.
After finding out that poetry only pays around $5 to $10 a pop, I thought I’d follow Jim Morrison’s lead in what to do with my lyrical skills. I started out playing guitar just so that I could write songs and make other people play them, but I ended up falling in love with the guitar! And I actually got voted “Most Likely to BE Jim Morrison in the senior follies!”
Kenny Savage (KS): I was a visual artist first, but when I saw a couple people playing “Horse with no Name” and a couple of other songs years and years ago in Savannah at a friend’s house and I just thought it was cool, so I bought a Hammon organ and later an acoustic guitar. I learned mostly from books and records at first, because nobody I was close to was a real musician. Also because a guy told me a long time ago that if I wanted the women, I had to be a musician!
Eric Layden (EL): A friend of mine wanted to start a band when I was 11, so I agreed to play bass.

CS: What's been your biggest achievement?
JL: Musically I would have to say playing The Atlanta Jazz Festival in “Saskia Laroo and The Looters.”We were scheduled to headline the smaller stage, but Sonny Rollins didn’t like the main stage’s organ and decided to switch with us. So we got to play between Medeski, Martin and Wood and DeeDee Bridgewater to about 15,000 people!
KS: Joining the Army. I was in the Army for one day. Spent the whole day in it! ….Actually, I don’t think I’ve had my biggest achievement yet- it’s still out there!

CS: How did you come up with the band's sound?
JL: It wasn’t a conscious effort, on my part at least. I write the music and words that come to me or which serve my lyrical purposes, and when the song is introduced to the band it is changed and tends to take on a life of it’s on through the addition of the other personalities, influences, fortes, and abilities in the group.

CS: What do you do in your spare time?
JL: What is spare time haha? Actually, I also write, research anthropology for upcoming stories, and run a cabinet shop with my brother Eric. I get my excersize through kayaking, swimming in the summer and through yoga and/or MMA in the winter. I also like seeing live bands, reading history and fantasy novels, mountain hiking when I get the chance, or watching the occasional football game or MMA match.
EL: Wakeboarding and fishing!
KS: I paint, draw, and partake in the spirits!

CS: How did the band come to be?
JL: We had a band called Ciaxa in Savannah that won a few regional contests, but when it broke up around 1998 we decided to become a professional backing band. Our first gig was with Rosa King, Amsterdam’s “Queen of Funk and Blues.” I had met her while visiting my cousin in Holland. We had been walking on the Leidseplein when it began to pour, and we ducked into a little pub called Club Alto to keep dry. Rosa was there practicing for the North Sea Jazz festival, and we were amazed by her stage presence, singing, and sax playing. When she played “Georgia” my cousin Jamey and I went wild, and upon introducing ourselves after her performance we found out that she was actually from Macon. Though she was famous from Israel to England, and had even appeared on Sesame Street Europe, she was still unknown here in the US and had never even played in her home state. We hit it off, and I ended up filling in for her guitarist in Europe when he took his vacation in order to learn the material, and then booking her all over the south eastern US while putting a band together to  back her up when she arrived. In order to practice, we enlisted a 19 year old girl who had an amazing voice named Kristina Beaty, and played a few local gigs to warm up. We called ourselves “Kristina Beaty and The Looters” or “Rosa King and the Looters” depending on who was the front person. I guess we came up with the name to embody the image of a rough and tumble hired gun blues band. Rosa’s US tour was a great success, and afterwards people were so enthralled by Kristina’s voice and fiddle playing that we started getting offers to play from Atlanta to Daytona. But before we played our second tour with Rosa, she died of a heart attack directly after playing to 80,000 people in Italy with her former student Alex Britti. About the same time Kristina left us to attend UGA and joined The Park Bench Blues Band in Athens. Soon after that she was signed to Blue Note, and actually comes out with her first major label album “Spilt Milk” next month, under her married name “Kristina Train.” Our next project was “Saskia Laroo and the Looters.” Saskia was also a former protégé’ of Rosa’s, like Candy Dulfer and Alex Britti, and was hailed as “The Lady Miles Davis of Europe.” We toured Europe and the US with her, but ended the relationship after the Atlanta Jazz Festival because of clashing personalities. I had always sung the first few songs at a performance before introducing the main artist, so we decided to just call ourselves The Looters and go it alone after that. We did briefly change the name to Ayur Veda when a singer/guitarist named Stephen Smart joined and shared lead duties with me for a brief period, but ultimately decided that people would remember The Looters best. We took a few years off to get the cabinet shop rolling and so that Kenny and I could write The Other Side of Yore, but we’re finally back and ready to tour like we used to!

CS: What can people expect from a live performance?
JL: Besides our originals and songs by our former band mates, you will hear funk, soul, blues, 80s hits, southern rock, and maybe even a little neo-bluegrass. I think we have good stage presence, because it’s almost a lost art form in America; bands here either get pretentious and do too much or get sedentary and do too little.  The European musicians are not the musical improvisers that the Americans are, but their stage presence is far and above, and we’ve learned from the best. When the audience is big enough to warrant it, I like to interact with the audience by doing handwriting analysis or hypnotic visualizations Ayur Vedic style- it’s a lot of fun and helps the audience to feel they are a part of the interaction.
KS: A diversity of music, because we don’t stick to any one genre. We strive to make good music and to please the crowd, so you can expect to have fun! Oh, and partaking in the spirits!

CS: What's your favorite song you've ever performed and/or written?
JL: I really like playing “I Am the King” because it gets really funky and is always a great springboard for power solos.
KS: Midnight City, because the music and lyrics are colorful…like a painting.
EL: To MJ, because I like the base line.

CS: What would you be doing if it weren't for music?
JL: I can hardly imagine a life without music, because even if we’re not performing we play on the back porch or on the dock, but I guess I’d be working with wood and writing more.
EL: Wakeboarding!
KS: I’d be painting and partaking in the spirits!

CS: Got something new coming out?
JL: We’re currently recording our first full-length album and hope to have it out by the beginning of 2010.

CS: In your opinion, what makes a song stand the test of time?
JL: The emotions of the artist have to come through in the writing and the performance, the playing has to sound like it comes from a person with roots who has lived the story and not from a studio musician “athlete” or digital processor, and it has to be something that hasn’t been done before, even if it’s only in a small or subtle way.
KS: It has to have profound music and profound lyrics.

CS: Got any advice for anyone who wants to become a musician?
JL: Don’t balk at cover songs in the beginning. In “Ciaxa” it took us a long time to get over our sophomoric distaste for playing other people’s music, without realizing that we needed the discipline in order to make our own writing and playing stronger, and that the audiences needed a bridge through which to understand our highly progressive style. Also, get a group of people who you get along with and stick with it, without getting discouraged about how long it takes to build a reputation. There is an audience out there for every type of music, and eventually you will find your niche!
KS: You can’t give up, you have to keep working hard constantly, can’t get tired of it, and you have to be dilligent.

CS: What's the band's creative process?
JL: Kenny Savage and I have been writing together since before Ciaxa.
Usually one of us introduces a riff and the other will create the bridge or chorus, then we argue over the lyrics for weeks. But sometimes one of us writes a song all by our lonesome. Once it’s written and introduced to the band, Eric takes the lead role in the song’s arrangement. But lately Eric has been introducing some tunes of his own and taking a more active involvement in lyrical contributions.

CS: Who are the band's influences?
JL: Though we don’t sound like them, in the beginning we were really influenced by bands like King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull, Primus, Pink Floyd, and Blind Faith. After we started gigging in our early 20s, we became more and more influenced by the people we played with. Eric Culberson, our former manager, taught me a lot about blues guitar just through osmosis. Rosa taught me an infinite amount about stage presence, band leading, vocal dynamics, and arranging. Kristina Train also taught me a lot about how to use my vocals, and I learned the most about professionalism and directing the group from Saskia Laroo. Now I think we’re also being influenced by the bands we cover, like Ray Lamontagne, The Allman Brothers Band, and Simple Minds. This might sound like a plug, but at the moment I’m also being influenced by Southern Still, the project that Ron Boyd, who promotes us in the Boro, is currently working on. He really is an awesome songwriter and has a mean lead guitarist! Personally I’ve also been inspired by Pat Metheny and the ancient bard Turlough O’Carollan a great deal.
KS: Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, Van Halen, ZZtop, and everyone is influenced by Hendrix!
EL: Ottmar Liebertt, Stanley Clark, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, and Flea.

CS: In your opinion, what is it that makes this band work so well together?
JL: Eric and I have an almost telepathic musical ability, and we seem to play better with each other than with other guitarists or bassists. Kenny and I are a lot alike creatively, in literature and in music, and have a great system of checks and balances where writing is concerned. And Adam is just an incredible drummer who’s easy to get along with!
KS: We’re all friends.

CS: Who is MJ in the song "MJ?"
JL: It’s Mary Jane Watson from the Spider Man comics! There is a scene in the first Spider-Man movie where Peter Parker is describing in third-person to Mary Jane how there comes a time when two people are looking straight into each other’s eyes, and they both just know that they are into each other, and what he is describing is exactly what is happening between them as he’s talking to her. I just thought that it was the perfect way for a man to describe his feelings to a woman, and that it showed that Peter Parker has awesome “game” after all, despite his shyness….

CS: What is the idea behind the song "Spicy Romantic?"
JL: Unrequited love. I had a major crush on a lady friend of mine but it wasn’t meant to be, and though the lyrics are not just from that instance but also from other adolescent crushes, writing it was how I found closure.

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