Tea Leaf Green: rock with a side of jam

Click to Enlarge Browse Aspen Times Photos San Francisco rock quartet Tea Leaf Green performs Sunday, Feb. 11, at Belly Up Aspen. (Eric Luse) Get Arts and Entertainment Feeds

Stewart Oksenhorn
Aspen, CO Colorado
February 9, 2007

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ASPEN — If you’re a music group — especially a young one, whose name pulls little weight with most of the public — and you give your new live DVD/CD package the lofty title of “Rock ’n’ Roll Band,” there should be a good reason behind it.

In the case of Tea Leaf Green, a promising California quartet, there are explanations behind that title that go beyond rock showiness. The repeated line in “These Two Chairs,” the opening song on both the CD and DVD, a tune about how rock music can be a savior for a bunch of wayward kids, is “they got a rock ’n’ roll band.”

Beyond that is a bit of an inside joke. “People ask us what kind of band we are,” said Trevor Garrod, the lead singer, principal songwriter, and keyboardist of Tea Leaf Green, by phone, while waiting for a flight in the San Francisco International Airport. “A lot of people make up these convoluted genres. But we always say, ‘We’re a rock ’n’ roll band.’ And that kind of pisses people off. They say, ‘Well, I know it’s rock ’n’ roll ... .

“But we are a rock ’n’ roll band. And that’s the theme of the whole DVD. We are just a rock ’n’ roll band.”

Garrod and Tea Leaf Green will perform at Belly Up Aspen on Sunday, with opening-act Storytyme.

Garrod, like most self-respecting musicians, shies from further categorizing his band. But Tea Leaf Green — comprising bassist Ben Chambers, guitarist Josh Clark and drummer Scott Rager, in addition to Garrod — fits, in fact, comfortably among that breed known as jam bands. On the “Rock ’n’ Roll Band” CD (recorded last May at Boulder’s Fox Theatre), songs stretch to 10 minutes, with Clark launching into extended, sometimes thrilling guitar solos. There are passages that clearly come out of spontaneous experimentation. The rhythm laid down by Chambers and Rager is conducive to the sort of loose-kneed dancing favored by fans of Phish, Widespread Panic and String Cheese Incident.

That brand of music stems back to the Grateful Dead, the progenitor of all jam bands. And the link between the Dead and Tea Leaf Green would seem to be particularly tight, since the two share the home grounds of San Francisco. Tightening the bond, the “Rock ’n’ Roll Band” DVD is credited to Justin Kreutzmann, son of the Dead’s drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and director of the Dead’s popular music video for the hit song, “Touch of Grey.”

But to Garrod, who helped form Tea Leaf Green in 1998, three years after the Dead pulled up stakes, the Dead are more of a distant relative than a direct musical model. Tea Leaf Green — in its rhythmic thrust, the prominence of keyboards, and especially the tone of Garrod’s singing — resembles Georgia-bred Widespread Panic far more than it does the Dead; Clark’s guitar is closer to that of Trey Anastasio, of Phish, than to the late Jerry Garcia’s.

“To an extent, as far as the Grateful Dead are considered the grandparents of the scene,” said the 30-year-old Garrod, explaining the depth of the tie between his band and the Dead. “As far as the state of the music today, San Francisco is not the Mecca of it. It’s diffused. The East Coast is pretty strong with it. The truth is, we’re all like roving pirates, making the whole place our home.”

Garrod was raised in the mountains around Santa Cruz, some 50 miles south of San Francisco. His bandmates all hail from the Los Angeles area. None of the four, says Garrod, was much influenced by the Dead. But all were strongly attracted to San Francisco. Garrod, Chambers and Rager all met at San Francisco State University — a locus of early Dead activity in the mid-’60s, even though the members were not students there — while Clark went to a San Francisco art school.

Garrod was not a big fan of the best-known band to emerge from ’60s San Francisco. Nor is Tea Leaf Green interested in taking listeners back to, or even reminding listeners of those times and sounds. “As far as making our music as a tribute to the city, it’s nothing so overt,” he said. Still, he claims a love affair with his adopted hometown, calling it the most beautiful city in he has seen. And he seems to have been infected with whatever was in the air — freedom, spontaneity, joy — that touched the Dead, and many San Franciscans.

Garrod moved to San Francisco right out of high school. In college, where he majored in botany, he played in several bands, mostly of the indie rock variety. But Garrod was searching for a sound of a different sort. He found it at a warehouse party, where the entertainment was provided by a nameless band that featured his current bandmates.

“I saw something,” said Garrod. “I saw what I wanted to do. It was just jam, dude. It was no plan at all; that’s what I could get off on. I was really taken by Josh’s guitar playing. He was just ripping it up, and I found it to be really exciting guitar work.”
Garrod gave them his phone number, with instructions to call if they wanted him to join their rehearsal sessions. “We got together, smoked some weed, experimented with a few other members, tried to get some gigs,” he said. “As soon as I graduated, I hit the road in a rock ’n’ roll band.”

Garrod had been introduced to music by his father, who informed Trevor, when he was 10, that he would be taking piano lessons. Turns out, the elder Garrod had traded a place to keep a horse on the family’s ranch for piano lessons for his son. A few years later, Garrod had his early formative experience, when he fell in with a group of slightly older musicians who played in garages and barns in the area. It was those loose gatherings that first instilled in him the tendency toward informal jamming.

Among the high-profile musicians who have joined Tea Leaf Green onstage is the Dead’s Bob Weir. The band has toured as the opening act for Trey Anastasio and Gov’t Mule. But their entree into the jam-band world was perhaps sealed last year, at the 2006 Jammy Awards show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The event was hosted by Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. Tea Leaf Green came away from the evening with Song of the Year award for “Taught To Be Proud,” the title song from their 2005 album, their fourth. Among the heavyweights they beat out for the honor, voted on through Internet polling, was Ryan Adams.
Garrod says the link between Tea Leaf Green and the Dead is more cultural than musical.

“We didn’t sit down and study the Grateful Dead,” he said. “We’ve just inherited this thing, a way to play music at a gathering. And a business strategy of touring all the time in a very blue-collar way.”

Stewart Oksenhorn’s e-mail address is stewart@aspentimes.com