A Conversation with Great American Taxi’s Vince Herman – HuffPost 12.29.11

Mike Ragogna: Oh, is that Vince from Great American Taxi on the line?

Vince Herman: Hey, good morning.

MR: How would you describe what a Great American Taxi is?

VH: A Great American Taxi is about the largest vehicle you can ever imagine you know. You may look at it as the whole country that, of course, has a lot of room in it. You know you can always pick someone up in a taxi. Or, it’s a band that celebrates all of American music from Tex-Mex to zydeco to polka to bluegrass to reggae to what ever comes into our heads. We’ll drive you along with it.

MR: Let’s take a tour of some of the tracks on your new album, Paradise Lost, starting with “Poor House.”

VH: It’s all over the country that people feel like they’re about to walk down that road and walk through the front door of the poor house. On our album Paradise Lost, we’re talking about some of the things that have led us to there, and hopefully about how we can bring our own paradise to the situation and maybe forget that we’re in the poor house.

MR: Looking at the state of things, what do you think happened?

VH: I think we forgot to keep making things. I think we’ve forgotten that nobody can buy anything unless they’re doing a little work to get a little cash. The cash all flows to the top. It’s got to all re-circulate somehow or the whole thing is gonna grind to a halt. I think we forgot to re-circulate.

MR: Now’s the time to bring up a quote from a fine young future cabby in his prime: “I believe in the power of music and songs that can generate the energy to do something. Politics should be in music; everything’s politics, especially music. Songwriting can draw attention to appropriate issues of our times.”

VH: Absolutely. It’s a great mirror to hold up and let people see themselves in and hopefully move them towards creating more solutions together in kind of a communal way, which music begs you to do. Music begs to pay attention to your community and your friends and the folks around you. You know, pay attention and work for solutions.

MR: What do you say those who say, “Shut up and sing!”

VH: Well, go listen to Rush Limbaugh. He’s “singing” all the time, you know? I think…music does provide spiritual information and spiritual armor to go on and do the tough things that you need to do. It needs to exhilarate you and lift you up. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking altogether. That just deprives you of fully expressing yourself in your music. Music has to have it all coming out of it or there’s just so much wallpaper.

MR: Your last two albums, Streets of Gold and Reckless Habits, seemed more “jammy” than the new album. How come?

VH: We wanted to really concentrate on the songs and the storytelling, and with Todd Snider producing the record, we knew we would be doing some storytelling. We just didn’t think the story needed another guitarist along this time around.

MR: How did you go from being a Leftover Salmon to a Great American Taxi?

VH: Leftover Salmon took a hiatus and probably six months into that, I was asked to put together a band for a benefit in Boulder and pulled a wish list of Boulder players I always wanted to do a thing with. We played that one night and it was so much fun, we played again and again and eventually, those nine people turned into a five piece that was road-worthy to get out on the road and do that thing.

MR: And Tim O’Brien?

VH: Seven years later, we go to make this record and our buddy Tim O’Brien in Nashville agreed to sit in on a couple tunes, particularly on a song called “Blair Mountain” about Mountain Top removal in the state of West Virginia, and on a tune called “Silver Fiddle,” which he really, really lent a great feel to. Tim is a real musical hero of mine. Tim is pretty much the reason I moved from West Virginia to Colorado in the eighties, to chase down Tim and his music. So, it was a real honor to have him play on this record with us.

MR: Tim practically seems like a band member.

VH: Tim is actually not a band member. He’s a fella that sat in on the record for a couple of tunes. Tim goes back to the band Hot Rize, real major icons in the bluegrass world for us.

MR: Who are some of your other influences?

VH: In the songwriting realm, Woodie Guthrie and Jackson Browne and Todd Snider…great storytellers. The Del McCoury Band is major in my world. Of course, New Grass Revival and those kind of things. You know, songwriters like James McMurtry. There’s so much good music out there, it fills my head up. I try to navigate through the jungle of it.

MR: In your Great American Taxi, of course.

VH: Well, that’s it. There’s lots of room in a taxi, you know? And you never know who’s gonna get in.

MR: How did Todd Snider climb on board the Great American Taxi?

VH: We met Todd at a festival up in Michigan at Dunegrass and we were able to get him to run away for a couple of hours. We locked him a school bus and played folk music for hours on end until his road manager Elvis found him. We actually stole Todd. For a couple of hours, Elvis was freaking. He didn’t know where Todd was. We played tunes for hours that led to doing a little tour with the guys from Yonder Mountain Strong Band…Ben Kaufman and Jeff Austin and I did a little tour with Todd and eventually, we were able to lure Todd into a taxi at a festival and that led to a bunch of different projects including Great American Taxi, and playing on Todd’s live album, The Storyteller, recorded in Nashville. And we also have done a Jerry Jeff Walker tribute with Don Was producing that should be out in the spring for Jerry’s 70th birthday. Todd also produced Paradise Lost for us. So, we’ve been deep in the Snider camp for the last year or two.

MR: Todd also is an amazing artist, you’re so right about his storytelling and his unique way of phrasing things. I love that his points are very pointed. He gets right to it.

VH: That’s for sure. He pulls no punches and he tries to find a way on each song to expose not only a bit of the world around him but also himself and his kind of raw reactions to it. It’s what makes his songs so compelling, I think. They’re real, they’re honest.

MR: Speaking of real and honest songs, let’s talk more about your album’s material, which seems to have a political theme running throughout.

VH: Yeah, you know, we talk about things like mountain top removal mining. The “Blair Mountain” song is about a place that was the scene of the largest labor conflict in American history where over 100 miners were killed and now the place is scheduled to be mountain top removed and erased forever. That’s a major loss. It should be a major monument to the working class in America, but I guess no one pays attention to that “working class” stuff anymore.

MR: What’s the story behind “AM Radio”?

VH: You know, the paradise that’s been lost in the music business. You used to be able to have a budget, put some money into it, and sell some records. Well, people kind of don’t buy records anymore either. So, the music industry is facing a little paradise lost in trying to figure out how to rebuild and how you can create intellectual property and be compensated for it. There are all kinds of things we’ve lost our way on, you know, and I don’t know if we’ve provided a way out for anybody, but I hope we’ve described the scenario, at least.

MR: You might say it’s not like the “Olden Days.”

VH: That’s a great little journey into a moment, a second, where everything seemed to be just perfect. But then, it kind of went away.

MR: Yeah. Was that second the end of WW II until when?

VH: I think probably until the beginning of Bush II. That really saw the downfall, you know? I think things have taken a turn and I think it does come back down to finding a way to create a working class again. With fair trade and NAFTA and all those things that have opened up economic opportunity for that top one or two percent to trade internationally and reap all the profits from it, I think that’s when things got really out of hand. The corporations have lost all connections to the communities they’re in and any responsibility to work for the good of the communities they’re in. I think we have to get back to thinking twice about corporate charters for corporations that harm America rather than do good and provide jobs and work because we have to get a grip on our economy again and if that means making things, then we have to look at the world economy and how it relates to what we consume and change our ways on that. I think we need to be local.

MR. Be local.

VH: Work local.

MR: Be local, work local.

VH: Think locally.

MR: What do you think about the “Occupy” movements?

VH: It’s a really exciting time where people, I think, are free to say things they haven’t been free to say in a long time. Even though we knew there was this thing boiling underneath, we left-wingers knew that a lot of the country shared our thoughts. It’s really great to see it coming out and the 99 percent exerting that we’re still here is a really great thing. And I love the kind of anarchist organization of it all, the fact that there’s been no national leader emerge has given us time to really talk about the vast scope of all the things that are wrong. With the leaderless thing, the conversation can develop over the next few months as wide as possible as we begin to move toward solutions. Not having a leader and not having it be able to be hijacked, politically, I think, is key to the leaderless organization of it all, and I hope it continues.

MR: It contrasts the “Tea Party” movement where a lot of people with very strong identities–maybe it’s better to call them “characters”–came on board and identified themselves as leaders of that organization. In a lot of ways, it tainted what could have been genuine at the beginning.

VH: Absolutely, I hope the left doesn’t fall victim to that.

MR: What advice might you have for a paradise found?

VH: Well, it’s bring your own paradise these days. BYOP. Play music. Hang with your family. Try to make your community stronger. Enjoy the time we have. Life is real short. Even in the midst of increasing poverty and poor income distribution, the worst since the great depression, we can still find sources for joy and community. For me, music is what does it.

MR: Speaking of music, what advice to you have for new artists?

VH: Man, tell the truth. Sing what’s deep in your brain and in your heart. Sing it loud. We need you.

MR: Vince, when you get on stage, do you feel like the mission is beyond just making music, maybe trying to communicate bigger messages or meanings to the listener?

VH: Yeah, I’m not trying to explain anything or trying to lay out a 12-point program or anything like that, you know. It’s really commiserating, really, if nothing else–here’s what we’re experiencing and we’re kinda in this thing together. Here’s my take on it, you know, let’s dance. It’s kinda how I feel.

MR: Any other thoughts about being on stage?

VH: One of things I like to do on stage is to improvise, maybe the whole song or maybe make up a verse to another song or something that locates people right into the moment, that night, in that place. You know, improvise about the town, the venue, you know the beer bottle that just broke or something like that and it brings people into the real time, right there, right now. Even if you’re talking about politics, that’s what people are after entertainment for, not to acknowledge just where and who they are, but what’s going on in the broader picture, and bring it all together in a swirl of dance and joy. That’s what I’m after.

MR: “Bring it all together in a swirl of dance and joy.” Love it. Have you ever said that line before?

VH: No, I haven’t but I’m just waking up, you know, and morning is the freshest time for everyone’s brain.

MR: (laughs) You’re on tour?

VH: We’ve been on tour since October 4th with a couple of days at home. We’re doing our thing. We’ve been hitting both coasts, we’ve been to Texas and West Virginia and California. We finished what we call the Harvest Tour 2011 where we went from Santa Cruz up to Seattle on the California promised land where everyone is harvesting. There’s a little migrant workforce digging up weeds. And that’s always an annual celebration. It’s a whole economy emerging in California and Colorado and other places around medical marijuana. It’s a beautiful sprouting of freedom that I hope continues. It leads a lot people to the West Coast so we’ve been playing a lot of harvest parties.

MR: Harvest parties as part of the culture. Who saw that one coming.

VH: Well, you know, I would have. I always figured the politics of marijuana prohibition was a generational thing. As we all kind of grow up here and see that it’s not the villain that it was made out to be by the older generation who had all kinds of myths put on them that they fell for. I always knew it was a matter of time before it went away.

MR: I’m not pro or con about legalizing it, but it’s strange that marijuana is something that you would pick on, so to speak, when it seems like everyone’s smoking it. It’s like picking on sex. Everyone’s doing it.

VH: There are a whole set of associations with it. Of course, if you’re smoking pot, you’re probably into free love and voting like a Democrat and stuff like that, you know? I think that’s how politics works–you hold up something up and the set of associations that go with it kind of talks about your unexpressed agenda. And it’s all coded.

MR: Wait, isn’t Great American Taxi code for something?

VH: Yeah. It’s actually a front for a bunch of socialist-thinking, kinda Jesus-thinkin’ guys. You know, “Give me your poor…” and all that kind of stuff, and thinking about social justice and all those things. That’s what it really is. But we’re just posing as a musical organization. And a socialist conspiracy.

MR: Speaking of Todd Snider, which we aren’t but did earlier, is there a song wittier than “You Got Away With It,” the one he wrote about Bush and the fraternity?

VH: Boy, that’s such a great lesson in songwriting too, you know, to start with the premise of this guy kills people and has been doing it for a long time, painting it as the story of two fraternity brothers saying, “I can’t believe we got away with that.” And it still goes on and on. What a great perspective to create, to be able to tell your story and not be so direct about it, to have a scenario that reflects it rather than boldly puts it in your face is brilliant. He’s great at that sort of thing.

MR: Did Todd have some creative input as far as suggesting nips and tucks at Paradise Lost‘s lyrics?

VH: What he did for me was really ask questions about the songwriting, like, “When was the first time you saw this? What got you there? Write about that. Pull on this emotion, pull on this image.” It was great to have him ask the right questions as we wrote.

MR: Any last words of wisdom?

VH: Happy holidays!

MR: Thanks for your time, Vince.

VH: Thanks, Mike.

Transcribed by Brian O’Neal