http://www.kyndmusic.com/monthlyissues/ ... howard.htm
I thought this was especially cool
KM: How did The Stick fit in with the Dave Matthews Band?
GH: There was a very diverse music scene in Charlottesville back then. Dave was a bartender at Miller's, which was the nexus of what was happening, at least in our little jazz world at the time. I remember the first time I heard him sing was in 1989 when I was doing sound for TR3 (Tim Reynold's band at the time) at another local club called the C & O. He sang Bob Marley's "Exodus", which Tim had developed into a great rendition of the song. Later that year he sang a tune in a modern dance production, that John D'earth and Dawn Thompson had written the music and lyrics for, called "Bypass." Dave sang a song called "Meaningful Love," a very up-tempo tune. Dawn and John were fixtures on the Miller's scene, and big forces in the Charlottesville jazz community. They worked with Carter Beauford, Leroi Moore, Tim Reynolds, Robert Jospé, Johhny Gilmore and me, all in different bands. And there were many groups, all playing different kinds of music. Some were very funky, some more spacey, others, jazz-oriented. Dawn and Leroi and I had an improv music and poetry trio called Code Magenta and we recorded all of our shows, so I had a lot of material for the CD we put out a few years later. Dawn and John had a fusion band that had a kind of rotating membership called Cosmology, which had Carter and Tim and I in it for a while. Tim and Johnny Gilmore had a crushing funk improv trio with bassist Houston Ross called The Cosmonaughts, and I played sax for a while with Leroi and Johnny and Houston in The Basics, a funk-fusion improv quartet. So we all hung out and made music, often at Miller's, and eventually got to know bartender Dave's music. He didn't play out then, but was working away at his songs. We also drank a lot of bourbon in those days and stayed up very late at night. Often.
A friend of ours named Ross Hoffman assumed a managerial role with Dave and brought him to my home studio in the fall of 1990 to make a demo of four of his songs. I played Stick on a couple of them, and I played sax and sang backup on a couple as well. I liked the sound of the acoustic guitar and Stick a lot. In many ways I fell like it meshes really well, like extending the range of the guitar down more than an octave. At the time he was more interested in electric bass, so Stefan became the bass player in the new band they were forming. He came back again in late 1991 to record demos of several more songs, which we added Stick to.
KM: When you made your records with Tim Reynolds, what issues did you run into trying to get the two instruments to mesh?
GH: Tim and I started jamming together in 1986. Originally he was playing drums, but he switched back to guitar after a few gigs. It was all improv music. Sometimes it was just a lot of noise, but it was always a lot of fun for us. At this point he was only playing electric guitar. After we'd played for a few months we decided it would be fun to make a tape, so we borrowed a four-track from John and Dawn and set it up in my bedroom and just plugged in and played. While we were setting up we drank about a pot of coffee each and were listening to this very stark medieval Japanese court music called gagaku.
The results of the recording were unusual for us. Extremely spacey and soothing, but also with this explosive and chaotic energy. That tape we called Sticks and Stones: a collection of spontaneous improvisations. It was the first of three studio improv recordings we made under the name Sticks and Stones. The second was called Face of Sand (1989) and the third was Transmigration (1991). By 1989 Tim had really started to diverge from the electric guitar. He was playing sitar, violin, acoustic guitar and a lot of percussion. I was still playing Stick, alto sax and synths, but I had started to integrate a lot of live MIDI processing like arpeggiators and drum machines into things. It was all still live improv. By the time we recorded "Transmigration" I had an 8-track reel-to-reel, so we couldn't resist the temptation to "jam along with ourselves." The first and third of these tapes have been re-released on CD. I suppose I'll get around to Face of Sand someday.
Well, it looks like I haven't answered your question, probably because there were never any issues. The sounds just worked. I guess we were good at listening to each other.
I'll be opening a few shows for Tim in the Midwest in July (July 11-15). the last few times we've done this we've jammed together at the end, so maybe that will happen again.
