Has it really been two years since MAGNET poked around in Howe Gelb’s garbage? Sharp-eyed readers will recall, of course, our in-depth look at Gelb and Giant Sand way back in issue #45—at the time the Chore Of Enchantment album had just been released by Thrill Jockey—not to mention assorted reviews, views and comments on the Tucson, Ariz., band as well as Sand offshoot Calexico (bassist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino’s much-lauded group) in subsequent issues. (Tellingly, during a recent MAGNET staff luncheon, we were accosted at a subway stop by a homeless person reeking of patchouli and South Philly merlot who, in an unsteady and vaguely menacing tone of voice, inquired, “So, how many Calexico references ya gonna have in the new issue, punks?”)

Obviously, it’s time to update the file via the following bull session with Gelb. And we’ll let you in on a dirty little secret of magazine publishing, too: You just can’t review every record by every band every time around, much less have full features. (OK, Guided By Voices is an exception, never mind that Bob Pollard’s alumni association is a major contributor to MAGNET’s charity of choice, the Save The Record Collector Geek Foundation.) That’s why God created the Internet, and for the time being, until AOL/Time Warner figures out a way to levy property taxes in cyberspace, Web turf is incredibly cheap compared to magazine pages. So keep your browser pointed to www.magnetmagazine.com, and meanwhile, enjoy the Sandage herein.

Following the release of Chore Of Enchantment—an album whose long, tortuous gestation just about killed Giant Sand—Gelb started making up for lost time. In between solo gigs and road treks with Giant Sand, he shifted into an extraordinarily productive phase, issuing no less than three solo albums—Down Home 2000, Confluence, Lull—and three Giant Sand archive releases—The Rock Opera Years, Selections Circa 1990 - 2000, Unsungglum—in less than two years. Several of these titles are available exclusively at shows or at www.giantsand.com; the elaborate Web site is another recent manifestation of Gelb’s personal resurgence.

Gelb, Burns and Convertino also did some much-needed air-clearing and fence-mending following a turbulent period that by all accounts was fraught with fractured communications. One day in 2001, following respective Calexico and solo Gelb tours, the trio convened in a Tucson studio and started screwing around with a handful of left-field cover tunes, stuff like “The Beat Goes On,” “King Of The Road,” Johnny Cash’s “I’m Leaving Now (Adios),” even Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand.” Assorted guests turned up at odd times to lay down tracks as well, yielding such deviant delights as Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” (Matthew Ward plus members of Tucson’s Libre de Gracia), X’s “Johny Hit And Run Paulene” (PJ Harvey, who also performed the song live with Giant Sand one memorable night in Tucson when she had a break from the U2 tour), Harvey’s “Plants And Rags” (Ward again) and a medley of “Wayfaring Stranger”/“Fly Me To The Moon” (Neko Case and Kelly Hogan, who rolled into town late one night when everybody had left the studio except Gelb, who greeted them at the door with beers and microphones).

The resulting album is called Cover Magazine (Thrill Jockey), quite naturally enough, although advance copies floated the original title Retirement with sufficient market penetration to spark concerned calls to the record label along the lines of, “Is this the last Giant Sand album? Are they breaking up?” In point of fact, the group did have discussions on whether to soldier on. As you’ll read below, both Calexico and Gelb as a solo act had become the respective members’ financial security, not the mothership’s operations. Yet instead of forcing Giant Sand out into the pasture, these matters—along with the intense pleasure the trio had recording the cover tunes—served to inject a newfound dose of freedom into the group. So press reports notwithstanding, Giant Sand lives.

Albeit as a seven-piece. In the past, Giant Sand has practiced the healthy art of collaboration, both on record and in concert. To that end, the lineup for its recent U.S. tour looked like this: Gelb, Burns, Convertino, violinist Susan Voelz (Poi Dog Pondering), trumpet player Noah Thomas (Libre de Grasa), guitarist/vocalist Saholy Diavolana and bassist/vocalist Laureline Prod’homme (the latter two appear on Cover Magazine). The lineup debuted in November at London’s Barbican Hall as part of the venue’s Americana-flavored “Beyond Nashville” concert series. The event, dubbed “Howestock” by the British press, featured guests Harvey, Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse), Evan Dando, Vic Chesnutt, Kurt Wagner (Lambchop) and John Parish & His Big Band.

So as with all things Giant Sand, nothing is permanent, yet everything somehow stays the same, too. That’s good, by the way.

I moved from Tucson to North Carolina last summer but had kept in touch with Gelb pretty regularly. We agreed to chat by phone recently to get the current lowdown recorded on tape as only a professional journalist and musician can do. (Full disclosure: a small segment of the Q&A below comes from an brief interview we did last year about the Giant Sand Web site and his Internet-only releases. As it addressed some matters pertinent to Gelb’s current situation, I decided to include that here.)

Sure enough, as the interview begins, Gelb immediately starts telling me to hold on. He’s distracted, first by the loud banging and sawing noises I hear in the background, the result of a new addition being added to the Gelb family’s barrio abode. Gelb drops the bombshell that he and his wife Sofie are expecting their second child, a daughter, so extra space is required.

Are you excited about having another kid? As busy as you are, I don’t know how you found the time to stop and breed.
Well, there was that one time last summer! I’m overwhelmed, to tell you the truth. I love the way the other two came out (daughter Patsy, by his first marriage, and three-year old son Luka), so I’m pretty excited. But now the workload ... you’ll never be able to say, “I can’t do it. I want to take some time off.” It would be good to take time off for the family, but then if I can fit in a quick show—I’m already setting up these shows for before and after the birth in Europe. We’re going to Denmark to stay with Sofie’s mom to have the baby, for the duration of the summer. That’s why we’re doing this addition on the house. The kids will wind up getting my music room I guess, which is kind of ironic because one reason I bought the house is because the room sounded so good!

Let’s talk about the current tour. You ain’t gonna get rich taking a seven-piece band out on tour.
Oh. OK. Here’s the deal. We roll the coin over from tours, so John, Joey and myself don’t make any money from Giant Sand gigs. We throw any coin we make back into the band, and I get to make that call because of my “honcho” status. That being said, they make their living off their other gig, and I make mine solo, and we both do pretty good by that now. So we just make sure everybody else gets their coin when they tour with the band, and we spend the rest of the money on logistics. You can talk to John or Joey about their own reasons. Mine stem from this odd, elaborate slicing of freedom that seem to occur more now than ever.

So that was part of the tension that was lurking in the background for you guys for awhile?
In the beginning, I was hampered, then, by the rudiments of rudeness dealt from obsession on Joey’s part: “OK, I got something else to go by now, and I can just leave all this shit behind and I’m out of here.” I thought that his tact was in need of a buttkicking, the way you would a younger brother and who you know inside and out! Things just didn’t need to be so sloppy. But on the upswing, it always felt like a family and you could get away with those notions and responditures because of how tight everybody really is, and how you can call each other on your shit. The biggest, ah, crunkle, was agenda clashings; that was then, and now, things have been worked out to a point where they’re better than they’ve ever been.

Did you guys sit down and have heart-to-hearts, or did it just work out naturally?
See, you got John-speak, and you got Howe-speak, and then you got Joey, who pretty much didn’t speak. All that has been rectified and now there’s a brand-new Webster’s book of Giant Sand terminology. [laughs] We all kind of understand now more than ever that it was a good rerouting of the word and a tuning of the engines that seem to have run the machine for so long.

I’ve talked to you about these tensions before. It sounds like that age-old cliché: a failure to communicate.
Yep. And not enough time given to rectify. But also, my stance comes from an elder figure, 10 years the senior, very much the little-brother/older-brother syndrome.

Let me play devil’s advocate here: The last year or so you’ve gotten a lot of good, extensive press, especially in overseas magazines. But before that it seemed like it was Calexico getting all the attention. Did this kind of balance the scales for you, ego-wise?
You know, all that stuff never mattered much. It’s always just a side effect. Any form of fame is just a side effect to the workload here. So it’s always somewhat entertaining and educational.

Maybe not so much fame, then, but more an extended chorus of people in the press saying, “Hey man, I like what you’re doing.” I remember how before Chore Of Enchantment came out, there was a long gap.
But that’s because I was totally tethered to the V2 contract and couldn’t do anything else. When we set up that contract, we did it in such a way that John and Joey were free from it. They used the time to gain momentum with Spoke/Calexico. And I was completely vexed with the V2 agenda. Then when (guitarist) Rainer (Ptacek) went down, things got unforeseeably bleak. To turn around and lean on the inner circle for support—they were just gone, John and Joey.

That’s how things got so hard around Chore. And they ended up with it being probably the best record I’ve ever been a part of—but me not wanting to do another record like that. That’s why this new record—which was the first time we’d gotten together in the studio in a long time—was to see if we could still have some fun doing it or if we should just retire the whole episode. That’s why the covers started jumping out. That wasn’t foreseen. I started throwing out a couple of covers for fun.

I recall you calling me up needing a tape or CD-R of Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”
Yeah, exactly. You were there when it was starting. And we just had a good time playing.

There’s some twisted stuff on the new record, some of the funniest things that have ever come out of your mouth as well.
Yeah. “Man’s got no corpuscle.” That’s evidence to what kind of stuff still lies there in the camp and is there to be mined if we choosed to keep picking at it. See, the thing had to be Chore-less this time around.

You mean along the lines of “this is my personal vision that informs the songs I have written, blah blah blah”? Taking that pressure off by doing other people’s material?
Yeah. It’s more of a responsibility when you’re the writer and you’re recording something you’ve written and you know that up until you mail the tape off you can change anything you’ve written. That’s always sticking at you. It’s why Friends Of Dean Martinez ever happened within the band. I wanted to get away from it more and I wanted someone else to carry the load and I could be just a player. That’s kind of what happened with this record, because not being a writer of the songs I could step back as just a player and applicate myself, the way John and Joey did, all equaled up again and having more fun playing.

How many takes or rehearsals for the stuff on this album?
There weren’t! A few of them we’d been doing on the road, so we were bringing them back up to see what they could do for us. As it stands right now, if this was the last record we ever do—that’s why it was called Retirement—and it could be, and regardless of what anybody thinks or says, it is the last record. Because there is no “other” record unless you’re lying to yourself about your future; all you know is what you’ve got, and this is the “last” record. So if you celebrate that moment, it is a form of retirement and it’s a great freedom. This place called Giant Sand has become this place of desire more than a place of necessity where we needed it to stay alive and eat and make an income for us all to survive. Now, since we do that with our other endeavors, it’s become this place we don’t have to be anymore but for some reason we keep going back to. I think that has to do with our evolution as players; that be-bop mentality where we have to change things every night as if we were playing the same place every night with the same people coming every night. We ARE the same people, so we change things accordingly.

Tell me about Howestock. The reviews I read made me grit my teeth that I wasn’t in London for that!
I mean, it’s weird the way that happened! John came to me offhandedly, mentioning something about “the Barbicon”—which, up until I walked in, I had no idea what he was talking about. He said they guy there was doing this [concert series] called “Beyond Nashville” and they wanted Giant Sand and Calexico for a night. So far we’ve managed to do three of those: yYou saw the “Tribute To Rainer” and the KXCI Benefit shows here in Tucson, then there was also one on New Year’s Eve up in Chicago. That was a ton of fun, out of control and beautiful, although the ones down here are always troublesome because I’m usually too preoccupied with the matters of the day and my family life. [laughs] That’s why my shows in Tucson kinda suck!

So anyhow, John mentions it and I think, “OK, one more time.” Because you never know what will happen. It’s a wild card when both bands play together. I feel like I really gotta step up to the plate: “Uh, I feel competitive.” Yet I hate that feeling of competition; I started the band to AVOID any form of competition, and it really irks me when I have to be “better than” or at least “as good as.” I’d rather things come more slouchingly, or at least more laid back, more naturally.

They asked me to provide a wish list of who I’d want to play, some guests. So OK, Vic, Mark Linkous, Evan ... But I still wasn’t taking it seriously, and I went back out on the road. Then when I came back they told me they’d confirmed the show and all those people! I went, “Oh fuck.” The way it was gonna be was just me sitting in on piano or something with these people, just a singer/songwriter thing, not bands. A few more weeks go by and the guys from the Barbicon and some magazine guys show up in Tucson, and that’s when I had to start taking it seriously. Meanwhile, some festival offers from Europe came up, and could I get a band together? Well, I could get a drummer over there, use the two girls on guitar and bass, although it still wasn’t going to be Giant Sand just yet.

I’d been jamming with Noah here in town, with his band, Libre de Gracia, and asked Noah if he wanted to go. Somewhere in there I’d talked to Susan about her fiddle playing and that she’d fit in there too. Then John gets off tour, and we’re sitting around in the yard when I tell him that I guess I’m going over to do that Barbicon thing. He kinda looked weird, like he’d made the wrong decision, or confused as to why he’s not there. What I heard later was that the Calexico agent might have put a word in their ear that they could do a bigger show later and make a lot more money; those kinds of politics do come into play, but I don’t know if that’s the real reason. So I asked John if he wanted to go now, and he said yeah. It’s hard for me to deny those dudes, especially John, because ultimately I just love playing with them.

Next time I’m gonna ask if I can tag along.
Man, I gotta get meaner! [laughs] Then Joey says he wants to do it, too. We had a great deal of fun. The other irony is that in the advertising it didn’t say Giant Sand, it just said me.

So you were both a player and the MC for the evening? I guess it was easy, since you knew the folks. And you could lend some consistency throughout the proceedings.
Yeah, they’re all friends, man. That’s the thing. It’s easy to be comfortable with them. It’s not like I’m Jon Stewart up there, handing out awards to people I don’t know about.

He has cards to read. Did you have any cards or notes?
No, the only thing I did was at one point I went over to John Parish: “Give me the names of everybody in your band.” Because there were 11 people, and I wrote all their names on my hand because I wanted to thank those guys.

The description in Uncut was “Howestock,” which I loved.
I didn’t hear that at all until I read about it. But those Brits are funny. It was sweet of Polly [Harvey] to come down. Kristin Hersh couldn’t make it. Mark Linkous, it was great to see him again because I hadn’t seen him in years.

Why didn’t Thrill Jockey sticker the CD jewel box for Cover Magazine “featuring PJ Harvey, Neko Case ...” and then just sell the hell out of it?
Well, it’s not exactly like we did duets or anything. And that’s why I like Thrill Jockey, because they’re subtle enough and level-headed enough not to go overboard with that crap. Then you poison and destroy it. But if it’s real, and not like a commercial exploitation—“Hey, what would happen if we get The Rock and Hulk Hogan together and have this big fight.” It’s not like that. It’s a genuine friendship that occurred and you don’t want to fuck with that or scare somebody off by making them feel used for commercial gain or something. At least that’s the way I feel about it.

I interviewed John Doe and told him about Giant Sand and PJ Harvey doing “Johny Hit And Run Paulene” in concert and he was floored, saying, “Get out of here!” He was incredulous and honored, just got a big kick out of it.
That’s cool he would even know who Giant Sand was. I saw Exene in the bar here a few years ago and went over to say hey. I told her, “I know you don’t remember it, but we opened for X a couple of times in the ‘80s.” She said, “Yeah, I can’t remember a lot of that ...”

We had a fantastic version of that song at the London show. We didn’t have a guitar hookup for Polly, so I gave her the CD player cued up to some white noise, the same that’s on the studio recording. I had it really loud, so I told her, “Polly, just push this button [laughs] when you want to kick it in, and hit it off when you want it to quit.” And it sounded great. At the end of the night we did Rainer’s “Losing Ground,” this monster version with everybody, and it was really beautiful.

I wanted to ask you a bit about your Web activity, too. You’ve got MP3s, lyrics, a message board, etc. as well as mail-order-only discs. Why did you decide to issue The Rock Opera Years and Down Home 2000 privately, through your site? Had you looked at other artists who had done this successfully in the past? For example, Aimee Mann's initial self-release of Bachelor No. 2 got a lot of publicity and no doubt offered food for thought for other artists.
No, it started with V2 dropping us and then deciding that the fan base at the Web site should have the promo copies (that V2 had pressed up before dropping Giant Sand) of Chore Of Enchantment. I had literally gone broke by then because of the restrictions and time it takes to get out that kind of contract, and I was not convinced that any more time should be put into Chore. So selling the limited pressings out to those that wanted it most seemed like a good starting place. After folks digested it they began to respond in an inspirational way that got me going to find a proper home for it. So it turned to an old friend of mine, Bettina Richards, who started her own label Thrill Jockey after being upset by the bigger labels she used to work for.

After that, the Web site then begat the notion of cleaning house of other clutterings of sonic dust bunnies that were clotting up the place. It began to make more and more sense to offer them up to the fan base at the site—and then of course to take some on the road so that those sales would provide a form of tour support. All in all, it allows more independence from the powers that be. And seems to give people interested in the band more of what they want. By doing this, it also takes on a “lithograph” mentality in an industry that would prefer there to only be a mass of percentage cuts on SoundScan items that they can track and bank on. This becomes more art friendly and less cursed by the restraints of output due to marketing strategies.

Any pitfalls or successes in your mind in terms of being both a signed artist and a self-releasing one?
It’s good to be both at the same time. A signed artist usually means there will be decent distribution involved, but not necessarily handled by folks who know what to do with it. A self-releasing one has a better chance of longevity if a realistic fan base is already established. The downside is just that you have to remember to be an office on occasion, which is hard for a scatterbrained mofo! But the CDs seem to get where they need to go.

Is everything working out to your satisfaction?
As far as I know. I haven’t had to give it as much of my time lately; it’s all Mike Brewer in England and Jim Blackwood in Tucson taking care of it. I’ve got my hands so full. It’s a really good way to stay in touch with the people that really want the stuff because you get the comments immediately from them instead of them being filtered over too much time through the auspices of record company people. The only way before was to read reviews to find out what people thought about the records, and then it was only what the critics thought. Here it’s people who really want to get their hands on it and it makes a big difference because they’ll let you know if they’re satisfied or not. It’s pretty cool. The Internet is a great thing—it’s literally saved our ass.

From MAGNET Magazine - www.magnetmagazine.com