The Jeffrey Alexander Interview

Born in June of ‘68, Jeffrey Alexander grew up in a Baltimore Maryland church, where his father was the preacher and his mother the organist/choir director. He has produced works in a wide variety of genres over the past 30 years exploring variations and experiments in folk, jazz, rock and minimalism, including live performances in over 20 countries. He was formerly the Program Director of AS220 in Providence Rhode Island, where he curated four international music festivals, hosted artist residencies and booked hundreds of events. He has also been a carpenter, booking agent, FM disc jockey, espresso bar cafe owner, record label owner, driven an Amish farm truck, worked in record stores in three states, ran the A/V department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and lived in a van on tour with the Grateful Dead for several years.

Are you originally from San Fran, CA? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music and what was it that initially fascinated you about it? Was music relevant around your household growing up?

I am originally from Baltimore, Maryland. But I moved around a lot after college - I lived in Providence RI, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and now northwest Philadelphia. When I was a kid my father was a Lutheran pastor and my mom was the church organist and choir director. She was also a public school music teacher for many years. My mom had a piano in the living room and there was always music in the house, constantly, mostly classical and choral music, but my dad really dug jazz too - his favorites were Ahmad Jamal and Charlie Byrd. And I listened to the radio everyday, curling up with a little transistor in my bed making lists of Casey Kasem’s top 40. For my 9th birthday, I got a portable 8-track player and I picked out a few 8-tracks to buy based on which artists had the most entries on my top 40 lists. My older brother didn’t listen to music at all, and I didn’t have anyone else turning me onto stuff, so I had to figure it out all on my own. So I went to my lists, cross-referenced weeks and months – my first-ever music purchases were Earth Wind + Fire, Barry Manilow, Billy Joel and the Bee-Gees. I delivered newspapers on my bike to make 8-track money. I was a great consumer of music from early on. Just simply fascinated with the power of sound, the colors, the feeling.

Do you have any siblings? What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? When and where did you see your first concert that really made an impact on you in your formative years? Who were some of your earliest influences?

I am the second of four. Older brother, younger sister and a second, much younger brother that I didn’t really get to know until later as I left home when he was 8. But he turned out to have the same musical tastes as I do, and we share a lot of sounds now. It’s cool. I was a total nerd in school - one of those straight A kids they put in the “gifted” classes and one of those classmates quickly turned me on to metal and heavier sounds. I was also deeply influenced by the progressive free-form radio station WHFS. They played all sorts of weird stuff - a bunch of different genres with no playlists - a lot of new wave, esp Talking Heads, B52s and things like that. (Later in the mid-90s, I became a full-time DJ on WRNR 103.1 FM Annapolis-DC-Baltimore, which was then a brand-new station started by the old owners of WHFS to follow that very same totally-free format. And I was DJing alongside some of the same people who I had listened to on-air growing up like Damien Einstein, the legend!) Several of my friends and I were in a Scout troop that was very active with a focus on outdoor- adventures. That’s what we would do for fun - tons of hiking and canoeing with a new camping trip once-a-month, without fail, year round and sharing records and tapes – I was Senior Patrol Leader and later an Eagle Scout. Our Scout leader played mostly classic rock stuff for us - Cream, Hendrix and so forth. There were all these different kinds of music coming at me from different directions and I soaked it all in. As much as I could get. Eventually I got a record player and signed up for the Columbia House 13 records for a penny at least 4, or 5 times. My first concert was Blue Oyster Cult (in 1980) - I saw them a few times back then with Foghat and Sabbath. Most of my early concerts were at the Capital Centre in Landover, MD, or the Baltimore Civic Center. My parents were fantastically supportive of my music obsession - my dad would stand in line to buy concert tickets for me whenever tickets would go on sale when I was at school. Once he stood in line for me - in the rain - to get Prince tickets on the Purple Rain tour, but they sold out to the person in front of him!

(I finally saw Prince live in San Francisco 30 years later at a tiny little bar - amazing). My dad would even drop me off at these big arena shows and then pick me up after. I was 12 years old and my preacher father was dropping me off unchaperoned to a Black Sabbath concert. Incredible! I also went to a lot of concerts at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia. For many years, there was a hole in the fence in the woods behind the concession stand there and my friends and I would just go see anything since it was all free. King Crimson, Little Feat, Jimmy Buffett (haha), whatever. Later I went down a deep rabbit hole of punk and especially SST/Homestead zones. Around the same time my best friend Donnon said he got us Grateful Dead tickets. I was sucked in right away - the scene, the acid, the nomadic experience. It also helped that our Baltimore crew was a very open-minded group and there was a lot of musical crossover - we would meet up for weekly Dead nights and trade live tapes that included all sorts of punk and noise and experimental music and not just all Jerry or Jorma, but plenty of that too. There was no punk vs hippie divide in the Baltimore scene that I fell in with. I got lucky I guess. For about five years I lived in a VW camper van traveling back and forth across the country wherever the Grateful Dead - and rainbow gatherings - took me. I was completely obsessed with music, especially live music. During that time, I not only saw Jerry Garcia play more than a hundred times, but also went to plenty of other live shows - everything from The Smiths, Squeeze, Plastic People Of The Universe, Dinosaur (Jr) to Trouble Funk, Hot Tuna, REM, on and on - I dug it all.

Prior to Dire Wolves you formed Iditarod in the late 90s. Can you tell me about this outfit and how this initially came to be with members Carin Wagner and Margie Wienk? You guys released a number of albums on labels such as Hub City, Bluesanct and Camera Obscura. Can you tell me about the recording years of the band and some of your favorites from those times?

Summer of 1990, I stopped following the Dead. My last show was Brent Mydland’s last show - in Chicago. I started working at record stores back in Baltimore and really got into folk music. Initially, I got turned onto The Pentangle as they had a cover of “Cold Rain + Snow” which was also one of my favorite live dead covers. I also was heavily involved with my college radio station and was record librarian there for a spell, where I had access to thousands of LPs. I went deep with Fairport and Pearls Before Swine and ISB, but also started going back to my dad’s jazz collection. And expanding on that with more modal and astral jazz zones that I pulled from the record library. I learned from years of witnessing live Dead, that all of my interests like pop and jazz and folk and rock and jangle and rhythm and blues could all be interchangeable and sometimes combined into a free flowing experience. That’s what I started doing a tiny bit with the Iditarod in 1996. Before that I played guitar and moog in indie rock bands for a few years - Science Kit and also Big Heifer, an indie pop trio from Tennessee that moved to Baltimore and wanted to add a second guitar. I met Carin of Iditarod when she came to see my band Science Kit play at the old Memory Lane down in Pigtown. She had these great short folk-pop songs of her own and we started working as a duo - I would add experimental elements and stretch things out with improvisational parts, and also adding more trad-folk ideas to the mix as well. Around this same time, I started a small record label called Magic Eye where I invited artists to contribute side-projects or new/different material that was out of their normal comfort zone.

It was initially a series of 7” singles with stuff from folks like Modest Mouse, June Of 44, Rodan, Tara Jane O Neil, Samara Lubelski. Seam, Silkworm. And later, I organized a Pearls Before Swine tribute LP in 1997 and released some solo discs for members of Lungfish. We also booked loads of shows during this period at our huge warehouse loft in Fells Point. So Iditarod was just the two of us for a few years and then after we moved to Rhode Island together, Carin and I started adding additional players - cello, viola, drum kit, woodwinds, accordion, and so forth. We collaborated quite a lot with others and played a lot of live shows, toured Europe and Canada. Hard to pick a favorite of those Iditarod releases - the double CD on Camera Obscura was released after we split and was a fine send-off. The 2002 Bluesanct CD was reissued on vinyl in 2022 as a new “20th anniversary” LP version by Feeding Tube Records. This version was newly mastered by Caleb from Big Blood/Cerberus Shoal and it sounds just fantastic. We also skipped some of the fluff tracks as it was too long for vinyl anyway, but the condensed version is way better. My editing skills thankfully grew over the years. After Carin and I split, I continued to perform with just Miriam Goldberg, who had been playing cello in Iditarod. We took a cello-guitar duo as a base format and then really stretched it out with experimental sounds, electronics and long improvisational pieces. That group was called Black Forest/Black Sea and we existed from about 2003 to 2009, sharing tours with great friends like Tara Burke / Fursaxa and Christina Carter of Charalambides.

‘09 saw the formation of The Dire Wolves. How did this outfit initially come to be and what were some of these mutual interests/similarities you shared with your bandmates outside of the music? The band’s debut release came out on your label, “Secret Eye Records”, one of many labels you head. What was the overall vision and approach to the music when first starting out?

Around 2008, Miriam and I moved from Providence RI to Pittsburgh PA. For the five years or so prior I had been the Program Director of an arts space in Providence called AS220, where I booked shows every single night and managed the space. I had also started a new record label called Secret Eye which was heavily into arty folk - released stuff like Spires That In The Sunset Rise, Avarus, Larkin Grimm, Kemialliset Ystävät. And I organized and curated the big Terrastock 6 festival (featuring all of those bands and many more). I was burned out. I quit my job and the label, moved to Pittsburgh and opened a small cafe espresso bar which I named Morning Glory Coffeehouse. Just my own place, I hired about 8 part time employees. I continued to book shows there and host art openings, but it was small and way more manageable. I had my favorite coffee roaster in Providence ship us beans and Autocrat coffeemilk syrup. Anyway, so in the basement of the cafe, I had stored all of my amps, instruments and recording gear. Some of the baristas and I would go down after closing time, drink impossible amounts of beer and make free noise. This became known as Dire Wolves. I was burned out with the business of bands, the business of shows, the business of labels and especially distributors... I wanted to simply get back to making music for the joy of it, the best approach. We just decided to make tapes, like in the old days, duped ourselves and traded around. Shortly after, Miriam’s job relocated to San Francisco and we decided to make a go of it on the West Coast. I had been to California a bunch of times for Dead shows in the 80s and also touring with BF/BS, but never really stayed for a while.

How did your joining of the mighty JOMF come about? As much as I’d like to run through the band’s (Dire Wolves) very thick and incredible discography, I think we’ll shorten this by asking what albums/songs have been your favorite and why?

I had started a new radio program in San Francisco called Pome Pome Tones. It was live, weekly on Mutiny Radio, in a store front in the Mission. I often had live studio guests in to chat and/or perform and I ran into Tom Greenwood from JOMF around this time, so he came on Pome Pome Tones to play a few songs. About 15 years earlier, Jackie-O came and stayed at the studio warehouse I was living in back in Baltimore when they were there to record Flat Fixed and Wow. Those records were engineered by Craig Bowen who had played in the band Science Kit with me back in the mid-90s. Tom and I had a bunch of friends in common and I had booked JOMF to play shows at my old spot in Providence over the years. Anyway, Tom was looking for new folks to populate the band as he had recently relocated to Oakland. I started playing synth at first but eventually moved to electric guitar. We played a lot in the Bay Area and I also booked us a comically disastrous European tour. We put out a few tapes and CDRs with this lineup - a kind of jazz fusion period for JOMF, really great actually. In fall 2015, when we were in the studio in Oakland recording our last full-length LP (Bloom), Tom asked if I knew of anyone who could do some improv violin overdubs. I suggested my friend Arjun, who I had actually met at Miriam's cousin’s wedding in New Jersey the year before. He had recently been on my Pome Pome Tones radio show playing as a live violin - guitar duo with Andrew Weathers.

He came in and did the JOMF session and it was super great. And that’s when I quit JOMF and immediately invited Arjun to join Dire Wolves. But also, I need to back up a bit... Once we moved to San Francisco, I also started working in museums - running the theater at the Exploratorium and then managing the A/V department and running the theater at SFMOMA. Early on at the Explo, I met a co-worker BrIan Lucas who surprised me by saying he was a big fan of our Dire Wolves cassettes from Pittsburgh. He said he played bass and his friend Sheila was a great drummer, we should start a new trio version of Dire Wolves. And it was as easy as that. We started jamming in my bunker basement in Bernal Heights and it was magic from the start. And then with the addition of Arjun, we were unstoppable. Well until covid, I guess, ha. My favorite LP is Paradisiacal Mind. It’s a great collection of improvisations that was half recorded by me in our old Bernal bunker and half recorded in a proper studio by Zachary Watkins, so there's a little bit of pro-sound and DIY-sound mixed up. Also, we had worked with a few different vocalists over the years and this particular LP features a little bit of Lau Nau, who is a very old friend from when I toured Finland with Miriam back in 2004 and also Georgia Carbone who is an incredible musician and artist, now living in New Mexico. Also, guest performances from friends Michael Whittaker (JOMF) and Taralie Peterson (Spires That In The Sunset Rise). Killer cover art from Kyla Quigley, another old friend from my Providence days and Glenn Donaldson shot our band photo for us (who was also in a band with Brian back in the 90s). So many friends, old and new - and such a beautiful piece of art and music, all around.

What do you find yourself expressing, or exploring the most through your music with The Dire Wolves? What have you got in the works as 2023 continues to roll out nearing Spring/Summer? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?

Dire Wolves has always been about free jamming. Feeling over form. We just play and play and play - record everything and then cut and paste all the interesting bits. It doesn’t always work, but when it's on, it's ON. Miriam and I moved back East in 2018 and Sheila relocated to Amsterdam. Brian and Arjun remain in the Bay. We had still been flying in from our far-flung spots to meet up for festivals and tours, up until that pesky pandemic. There was a mini Midwest tour and also a Canadian tour in 2020 that were both scrapped, obviously. But recently we all convened back in San Francisco for a recording session and one club show. Our first since Copenhagen in 2019. The recordings should be out on LP in late 2023, and we have shortened our name to DWLVS. Believe me, yeah, it's a new dawn. In addition to DWLVS, I have released a few solo recordings under my own name over the past few years on labels like Feeding Tube, Astral Editions and Garden Portal. There is an all-new solo collection due for release in August 2023 on the Aural Canyon label. I’ve also put together a new band called Jeffrey Alexander + The Heavy Lidders. Jesse Sheppard and Drew Gardner (both of Elkhorn) play bass and guitar and Scott Verrastro (of Kohoutek) plays drums. As opposed to the loose spontaneous compositions of DWLVS, the Lidders also play songs, (gasp) like actual songs. But not always, don't worry. We released a few well-received LPs and tapes during the pandemic on Arrowhawk, Centripetal Force / Cardinal Fuzz and my own Pome Pome Tones label. Coming up later in 2023, we will have two new Lidders releases on Arrowhawk. Very exciting. And I really got back into radio again - currently, new versions of Pome Pome Tones air on Camp Radio, France and also Electromagnetic Radio. Everything old is new again.

http://www.dwlvs.com/jeffrey.html

https://www.instagram.com/jeffrey___alexander/

https://jeffreyalexander.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-look-hosted-by-jeffrey-alexander