My top musical memory of 2003 was of Grandaddy, publicly claiming to have “taken every drug we could lay our hands on”, blasting out their charming hybrid of hi-tech and pastoral prog at unthinkable volume to a field full of wasted but adoring Glastonbury-goers. The synergy was perfect, and it’s a moment Grandaddy won’t forget either, a highlight of what, for them, has been a brilliant year. Speaking backstage at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, Keyboard player Tim Dryden recalls: “Glastonbury was one of our best shows, and it was a very special moment for us, because we’d never played in front of an audience that size. It was even a little bit frightening, but it meant a lot to us because it showed we’d come out of our shell a bit more and the band had matured. And the technology behaved itself” (frantic knocking on wood).
It’s all a long way from the gang which grew up in Modesto, in the Santa Cruz area of California, a place of surfers, pelicans and silicon chips. This is definitely a band which is a community rather than a business. “Jason and I were in high school together and pretty much all of us met through skateboarding. We were all friends long before we were in a band, we skateboarded together; we’re not one of those bands that had to advertise for members”.
A band as unique as Grandaddy could only really have emerged from the inherent contradictions of life in Southern California. “I can honestly say that all the music is written because of where we came from and the fact that we grew up together. ‘Sumday’, particularly, contains a lot more personal stuff from Jason about things that were happening to him, but anyone listening to our albums will understand that they came about because of where we’re from.”
So what’s with the “sprinklers that come on at 3 am”, then? Tim smiles before explaining the song “The Group Who Couldn’t Say”: “The song is written about people who are cooped up in offices, in a cubicle with a computer, and they don’t have a different experience, you know, they go home, watch TV and go to bed, and they don’t really experience what’s going on around them outdoors, until finally someone takes them to the forest and shows them what life is really all about. It renders them speechless.”
Apart from being the most artistically and commercially successful year of Grandaddy’s career, there was one frightening moment which occurred during their fall tour of the US: “Jim go run over by a truck.”
What?
“Yeah, he was just walking off the tour bus and he tripped on the steps. He was drunk, of course, everyone in this band drinks too much. Anyway, he just fell into the road. It just happened that he fell under a production truck just next to the bus. The truck was moving and Jim somehow managed to roll out of the way so that the wheels just missed his head and caught his shoulder.”
Grandaddy is a unique and precious band. Let’s hope they learn to look after themselves better.