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The Gris Gris
1/14/05

It's easy to think of music, especially recorded music, as this heavily calculated thing. Maybe it's because I used to work in a studio, and I saw how a single overdub can eat up hours into days. Perhaps non-artists ascribe to artists a superhuman state of awareness. They've made the music, they know it's place in history, and they've written the review in their heads. Greg Ashley, singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter for Oakland, California's The Gris Gris, reveals a more intuitive understanding. Ask him about some of the more freaked-out tracks on his band's self-titled 2004 debut -- and why they sound like a surveillance tape of a funhouse death ritual -- and he'll probably tell you he was just trying to make them fucked up. Ashley doesn't know what to call his music (other than psychedelic), but he knows that he digs The Mummies, early Pink Floyd, and the first Dr. John album. I told him his stuff was a bit scary, and he reminded me that he writes some pretty songs too. True enough. Here's what else he had to say from the road this past fall.

How's the tour going?
It's been going pretty good. There's only been maybe one or two dates where it was real shitty.

What makes a shitty gig?
I don't know. Maybe just like, there's nobody there. Or I've been having a lot of equipment problems. All my equipment's pretty fucked up and old and just rigged up. It seems like every week something else breaks.

Is the name Gris Gris a tribute to Dr. John's first album or to the voodoo itself?
It's to the album. I've heard little bits of his other albums, and I don't really care for them, but yeah, that record, I got it and it's fuckin' awesome. So that's what I named the band after.

Are you going for some of that swampy element?
Yeah, one of the songs, maybe track five on our CD, has a little bit of that feel. But yeah, the production on that album is fuckin' killer. And all the weird instrumentation.

Your murky, cavernous production style, was that a creative choice or a technological necessity?
It's probably a combination of the two. I have a half-inch Tascam reel-to-reel tape machine. You get pretty decent fidelity with it, but at the same time I ran the vocals through my guitar amp with a harmonica amp, so that right there just makes it sound like shit. And that's how I always do it live. The guitars I'm using, I play a classical guitar, but with these piezo pickups -- it's the same piece of metal that's in a stethoscope. You can get 'em on the Internet for like 50 cents. They're just a little metal disc with two wires, and you just wire it into a quarter-inch input jack and drill a hole in your guitar. It makes a classical guitar sound kinda like an old, fucked-up blues guitar on a recording.

Tell me about the 8-track basement studio where the album was made.
That was the basement of [bassist] Oscar's house north of Berkeley. It was just a big, all-concrete basement with a few different rooms. It got pretty decent sound. There's no carpet or anything, so you get a good, full, echoey sound.

Is that where the CD photos were taken?
That was actually the next basement that we were doing stuff in. I think I finished a couple things on that record there. There's another basement of a storefront that my friend was renting in downtown Oakland. I think it used to be a butcher shop or something. This place was perfect, except we got evicted later -- that's a whole 'nother story -- but it was the same thing: all-concrete room, old building. There was this little room that was all brick, kinda this little cave. All the brick was burned. I think it was a meat-smoking room. If you put a drum set in that room, it was the fuckin' most perfect sound. That's where those pictures were taken. It's kind of a creepy-ass place.

It seems like you're trying to put some evil in garage rock. Is that accurate?
Evil in it? [laughs] I don't know. I hadn't even thought about that. If I am it's just kind of a silly-ass psychedelic... but that's cool. It just happened, I guess.

Is there a certain mood you were going for?
That was just the stuff I was writing at that time. I don't know where it came from. It wasn't a pre-planned idea. I like all that creepy, evil-sounding shit -- like the first Pink Floyd album. That shit was great.

On track four, "Me Queda Um Bejou," there are some noisy, experimental passages. What were you going for there?
I don't know. I don't even remember where the idea came from or whatever. I had worked on that song for a long time. When I first was writing that song, I was writing it as a Cuts song, and I was gonna try to get them to play it. But I finished it and I liked it. I don't even know what I was going for. I just figured it sounded fucked up.

You just spontaneously jam those parts out?
When I recorded that, of course that was put in later. We laid down two guitars and the bass at once, then we went back and put the percussion on it, and then we put in that noise stuff afterwards. It wasn't a live thing or anything like that.

Am I hearing some Theremin-type things in there?
It's a photo Theremin. It's like a cheesy little box that was laying around, so I used it. It reacts to light instead of magnetic fields, so if you use a flashlight and you just shake it around on it, it changes the pitch all crazy. You can't really play it, though, because it's so relative or whatever. It's impossible to get it to hold a note, but for making a bunch of noise it works. That and a pot being banged on with a mallet is the other sound in there.

Is your music psychedelic, or is there a better way to describe it?
Yeah, that's probably the best way to describe it. I'm no good at that -- whatever meets this on whatever. I don't know.

Is there any other exciting psychedelic music happening in the Bay Area?
I can't really think of anything I would consider psychedelic. There are some great bands that are playing there right now. There's this two-piece called The Nature Boys that's just two guitars. It kind of has experimental elements, good songs. There's a punk band called Battleship that's really good. And then there's The Cuts. They're great.

I like that new Comets On Fire record. They have a similar production style to yours.
Yeah, I forgot. I always forget that they live in the Bay Area now, 'cause they're all from Santa Cruz. So yeah, that's definitely the shit.

You're from Houston. Did you feel like you had to get out of there, or did you just gravitate to the Bay Area?
A combination of things. I had a band in Houston called The Mirrors that did a couple records. I grew up there. I mainly just hung out in the suburbs with my friends, though. I moved to Oakland about six months after I turned 21. Only could I really go out and do anything in that last six months that I lived there. All in all, there's just not a whole lot to do there, at least if you're into whatever, this kind of shit -- people who play music and stuff like that. There's tenfold that many people living in Oakland.

What's the plan for the next record?
We're workin' on it. We're like a third done. I think we're gonna try, maybe after this tour, to move somewhere for a month or two and rent a big house to record it in -- an old house with all wood floors -- and just try to put a lot of time into it. We were thinking about doing it in Mexico. Two of the people in my band can speak Spanish, and the bass player still has some extended family there. So that would be fuckin' really cool.

You figure you'll keep producing your own records?
I've just always done it by myself. They sound exactly the way that I want them to sound at this point. [Birdman Records'] Dave Katznelson is always, 'You have to go in the studio, you promised,' and all this shit, so I don't know. I really don't want to. I don't see the point in spending $500,000 or whatever it's gonna be to go do something I can do myself. I like the homemade records. I think one of the best-sounding records is The Mummies' Never Been Caught album.

You guys get high?
Yeah, I smoke a little pot every once and a while. Nowadays all my brain can handle is drinking. Fuckin' paranoia when I smoke pot or take any actual drugs anymore. I tried to take some mushrooms a month or two ago, and I fuckin' freaked out.

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