Howe Gelb - The sound of the desert

After touring with his band to promote “Is All Over The Map”, the latest album released under the Giant Sand name, Howe Gelb returns to Italy for a couple of shows that will see him on stage alone.

I realize I'll never manage to convince him to go somewhere else and beg for a little more time, and I also realize I've already wasted at least eight very precious seconds. All that's left is to sit down on the stairs and start the chat…

Is it true that you travel without luggage?

Relatively, yes, but, you see, I always end up bringing too many CDs when I'm on my own and the suitcase ends up being all CDs, plus there are the cables. Then I've got a few clean t-shirts, some socks and another pair of jeans.

Because I read that you were actually arrested for this…

No, no. I wrote my biography and I didn't want to write it again, because writing my biography is the thing I hate doing most, so I wrote it for the next two years, in which I imagined I'd be arrested for travelling without a suitcase, just with these cables and these few things I'm wearing. I'm sure it'll happen, yes.

“ Is All Over The Map ” is an album released after a “farewell album” (“Cover Magazine”, 2002). Why didn't you choose a new name for the band, why did you choose to keep “Giant Sand”?

[Sighs] Because [very firmly] Giant Sand… is not John (Convertino) and Joey (Burns) (both left the band in 2002 to focus exclusively on the Calexico project), but most of the people who come to the shows know Giant Sand “as a band” (i.e. with John Convertino and Joey Burns, ed.). So, instead of holding the name hostage and feeding a wrong idea, I thought it would be healthier to explain, to whoever is too young to know, what Giant Sand is and what it was before John and Joey, and how it will carry on.

This record has a different sound from the previous ones. Is it simply a matter of working with new elements (Andres Pedersen on second guitar, Thoger T. Lund on bass and Peter Dombernowsky on drums), or was it something deliberate?

I try to make every record different from the last one, at least as different as I can. But, you see, Giant Sand is a flavor, and I recognize it whenever I get to taste it. I knew it was happening again, just as it happened the first time I played with John, even before Joey, just as it happened for the whole decade before John joined the band. It's that particular flavor that's needed, and you recognize it, there are signs. So if the record sounds different to you, it's only a sonic illusion: in reality it's always the same flavor.

“Les Forcats Innocents” Une chanson en français. Pourquoi?

My neighbor is French. I met her 15 years ago and for all this time she's lived in Arizona. I went to her with this hint of a song that, I thought, had something of the old French songs about it, and I asked her if she had any lyrics, and she had some songs already written. This one seemed to fit the music, but I know my French and my pronunciation aren't perfect, I gave it a try.

“Anarchistic…”. How come you chose to cover a song that so many other bands, before Giant Sand, had already redone?

What?

Your version of “Anarchy in the UK”.

What?

Come on!! You picked a hard title, I can't even pronounce it!!! I do better with French! (I have him read the song title from my notebook)

Oh, “Anarchistic Bolshevistic… Cowboy Bundle”

There, that one.

Because it seemed like all those things tied together. It was interesting. My daughter (sixteen years old, ed.) was walking around the house singing that song and others by the Clash and the Ramones, and it took me back to the end of the Seventies, when we thought those songs were great, but everyone, all the critics, said it was just crap. That's what it was: ugly. It was new, and nobody liked how new it was. It was important to us, and we thought that, after a few years, you could still see it hold up, and my daughter proves it, walking around the house singing those songs.

I'd like to ask you about “Chore of Enchantment” (2000).

Absolutely. Thanks for pronouncing it right.

Doesn't everyone?

No, around here they say “core”.

Oh. (I'm probably blushing, though in exchange I can't say “Anarchistic Bolshevistic Cowboy Bundle”!) It's one of your fans' favorite records. How did it happen that the label (V2, at the time) rejected it?

Well, with them what happened is... I'm sure it was more a matter of fate than a conscious decision on their part. They'd just changed their president, he'd left the company because his ears were causing him trouble. The new president was this English guy. They'd already dropped a lot of bands and had already gotten rid of all the people I used to work with. They kept us and a couple of other bands, and this new guy listened to the record and told us they were going to shelve it for financial reasons, and that it sounded too “indie”.

So it's not really because they thought it was a bad record.

Absolutely not. It's never a matter of “good” or “bad”, it's just a matter of who, within the company, has the ability to understand or relate, or has the knowledge of what's needed and what to do with it. That's all. It's almost like a family, where you understand what another family member does, while other people just don't get it. No, it's never about being “good” or “bad”. That's simply how it works at that level.

The support act is heading on stage, but there's one question I particularly care about.

I'd like to close with a line I found in the review of “Is All Over The Map” in the Italian edition of Rolling Stone (September 2004): “A fine record, shadowy and honest, sadly a minority voice in an era that, rather than cultivating roots, prefers to sever them”.

[Howe laughs] That's good. With the utmost respect, because anything good, anything tied to roots, so to speak, is valid. Anyway, everything has roots somewhere else, it's all tangled up, it's what's now called “Americana”. It's a new form of whatever it's always been, and it gets blended and chopped up and, there you have it, kind of like what we do. In America we've got things all blended and chopped up.

(Mezzago, Milan – Bloom, March 12, 2005)

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