Jamming since 1999, New Hampshire-based Roots of Creation are bringing their “reggae/rock dubtronica” tunes on to the East coast. The band’s run includes a stop at Garcia’s in Port Chester, NY on May 14th as part of the “Road to Disc Jam” concert series. L4LM writer Jack Sheehan sat down with founding guitarist Brett Wilson to talk about the band’s music, influences, love of reggae, and more.

Photo credit: Tod Stevenson | Full Volume Photography  

L4LM: How excited are you to play Garcia’s?

Brett Wilson: Extremely excited. Its kind of funny how it turned out to happen. I’ve always been a fan of Shapiro’s work and venues. I went to The Wetlands when I was growing up in the jam scene in the early 2000s when I was a freshman in college and I got to see a band called The Slip, one of our favorites. It was an amazing experience. For or New Hampshire country boy going to NYC experiencing it. It felt like a festival inside of a venue, it was eye opening.

L4LM:  That must have been quite the experience.

BW: Yea I was super psyched. So I always wanted to play Brooklyn Bowl or do an event with him {Peter Shapiro} and then our manager introduced us when I went down and saw Dumpstaphunk at the Brooklyn Bowl. Then at the same time I met Peter our mutual friend Greg Horowitz, amazing photographer, was trying to set up a show, and someone else we met was trying to set up a show at The Paradise Rock Club in Boston. So all the planets were aligning, and we were playing Disc Jam; they wanted to do a Disc Jam pre party. The band was psyched, and our team got behind it. Jerry Garcia is a huge influence on me musically, as far as guitar-wise. We break out a reggae Dubified cover of the dead from time to time.  Having Hayley Jane there, we’ll probably do some hanging out and have her up for a couple songs. We’ve been friends for a long time, and we finally have the chance to display that on stage. It’s going to be a really amazing night.

 

L4LM:  So what was it, other than Jah almighty, that got you into playing reggae music?

BW: That’s great! You know, I’m from the woods of New Hampshire. A lot of people wouldn’t expect that a young kid would get into that stuff. But I grew up going to ashrams and I went to India when I was 6 so my mom was pretty progressive into yoga and meditation and got me turned on to a lot of really cool music. I joined Columbia House. I don’t know how old you are, but you’d get like 10 cds for a penny, so they helped me pick out all that stuff. I got Earth, Wind and Fire, the Dead, James Taylor and all sorts of classic rock stuff. I was also into punk rock, and a lot of the punk rock was pretty reggae/dub/ska influenced. The Clash, Sublime, Against All Authority. When I heard it I was like this is really cool, so I was vibing on that. At the same time, my mom’s best friend brought my friend and I to the Vermont roots reggae festival when I was 13 years old.

L4LM:  Your parents are really cool, could I just say?

BW: Yea. So we went up there and my mom was rolling her eyes like “Oh My God”. She was a part of the yoga and the counterculture changing-the-world and stuff but she wasn’t part of the drug culture so she was kind of like “Oh god what am I bringing my son to!” It was a pretty fun experience; Vermont has a huge reggae scene, and New Hampshire too. New England loves reggae, and really embraces the reggae fusion sound in addition to the roots reggae sound. My mom’s best friend was also making me mixtapes with Black Uhuru and I’d make her mixtapes of my punky reggae stuff. I’m staring at this little thing on the wall right now that says “to Brett, all the best. The world is waiting on you, Jah guide”- Black Uhuru. She would go to concerts and get people to sign stuff for me. So it was a natural influence.

L4LM:  Absolutely, which blends into my next question. Your sound is very guitar heavy, I hear the jam influence from your melodic lines on guitar. This song you do, “Mammoth,” has an LFO thing going on and you just break it down. I wanted to ask, how you guys found this unique sound, and what is the songwriting process. Is there one?

BW:  Yea, you really did your homework that’s cool! I can tell you really dig music. You’re not scratching the surface; you’re diving deep.

“Mammoth” is one of our fans’ favorite songs. It’s an instrumental, so it doesn’t run the full gamut of what we offer, but it runs the full gamut instrumentally of all the different sounds. It starts out really heavy with a Rage Against the Machine kind of sound with the riff, and then it breaks into the dub. We change the time signature a little bit and play around with that. Then there’s, like you said, a jam melodic keyboard guitar line, then we go into the late night raging festival, like you said, low pass filter wobble sound.

 

We were throwing electronic music parties as a band kind of before mainstream wrapped its head around it like the dubstep sound, then like, Taylor Swift started doing it (laughs). I just dig any kind of of bass culture. Just the bass thumping. Underground house out of UK, Dub out of Jamaica, stuff like that. We started to embrace electronic music with the jam music and reggae music.

Because we were an up and coming band we got a lot of “ok you’re not going to be the headliner, you can either play in the afternoon or play late night.” We like to play late night better; though afternoon we can throw down too. But we started to go with the late night slots because the kids are going to be pumped up. If we are going after the headliners and before the DJs, we have to be the musical segue between those two aspects, you know what I mean? At Bella Terra, we released DVDs and CDs, and we played after Mickey Hart and before the electronic acts. We experimented with this stuff. We played Bisco back in the day. We started getting those people in the scene, staring to pay attention to what we were doing. This new album were working on is more sound focused, but there’s still a couple breakdowns because we love that bass music.

L4LM:  What’s your favorite part about playing live?

BW: I think it’s consistently been the interaction with the audience and the energy that builds with the fans. I kind of started out being really enthralled with the fact that I would write a song and people would sing the words to it. We started playing basement parties. That’s something that’s continued to grow and grow. We might not have the lyrics online, the song might not even be released, but they hear it on archive, or they tape it themselves. The singing of the crowds, and the people dancing, building up the energy. You go out and see people smiling, and it’s the symbiotic thing.

L4LM:  My final question to you is: do you have any advice for musician trying to do what you guys do?

BW: You know, I think the first thing that comes to mind is an article I read about Krasno maybe a couple years ago and he was asked the same question and his answer really resonated with me. He was like “don’t take every gig you’re offered!” I think that that’s a good one. You start out and want to play everywhere you can all the time, and that’s really important, but it comes to a certain point where you have to turn stuff down because you value yourself and your art. Some stuff doesn’t make sense, and you don’t want to be playing too much in the same place, and you don’t want to be exploited.

One thing I didn’t know is just how long of a time it takes to succeed. When I first started out, I’d look at Phish, String Cheese Incident, and then I’d see regional bands like The Slip, Uncle Sammy, Jiggle the Handle, John Brown’s Body. Some of these your readers will remember. Just a bunch of these bands that were regional and thinking success meant playing this little club or that little club, and so we’ve done that. Then it was playing this festival or selling out that club, and knowing that you really have to define what success is to you. Is it the smile on fans faces? Is it making a living playing music? Is it playing music for fun and the love of it? Those goals will probably constantly be defined and redefined. I guess having a clear picture about what your goals are when you start out and actually being realistic about where you want to head, I think is good. I turned my passion into my career, which is amazing and I’m really lucky to do it, but I didn’t know it was going to take 10 years to do that, you know? (laughs) maybe it’s good that it took that long.

L4LM:  I hear you. Thank you so much for your time, I can’t wait to see you guys and Hayley Jane and the Primates at Garcia’s on May 14th!

BW:  Thank you!

 

Tickets for the upcoming show at Garcia’s are available here, and the band’s full tour schedule can be seen on their events page.