Liberated: The (Practically Post-Covid) BISS List Interview with Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, Part II

By Josh Danson, Contributing Editor

When we left off at the end of Part I of my conversation with Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz of ALO, we were discussing the joy Lebo derives from indulging all aspects of his musical persona — from band member, to musical director, to sideman. In Part II, we continue following that thread, then segue into a discussion of ALO’s recent Creatures EP’s and why EP’s are the perfect format for our ADD era, and close out our conversation talking about a couple of Lebo’s favorite side projects, Bone Diggers and Brokedown in Bakersfield. 

ALO recently completed a mini-tour down the California coast and Lebo just played at Terrapin Crossroads with a new side project, North Country Astral All-Stars, featuring Lebo, Tony Leone, Adam McDougal, Greg Loiacono, Pete Sears and Barry Sless. Look out for new tour dates for ALO and Lebo coming out soon.

This interview was lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Lebo: I know people who are only really comfortable in certain aspects of music, you know? I know guys who are like, gunslinger-type guys.  

BISSList: Yeah, sidemen. That's their thing. 

Lebo: Yeah. They just want to... they don't want any of the added responsibility. They just want to show up and play their instrument well. And some of those guys do an amazing job with that. But I've just never been into one thing, I guess. I like all those parts.  

BISSList: Well it's great that you've been able to do that in the Bay Area. And for all these years.

Lebo: Well, this community is such a great place for it, because there's so many excellent musicians around, there's so many music lovers and so many opportunities to play. The community is really supportive. I grew up in the Bay, in the South Bay, but right after I finished college I knew I wanted to come back and move to San Francisco. I pretty much knew it right after I went down there. I mean, I loved it down in Santa Barbara, but I always knew I wanted to live in San Francisco. Like when I first went to college, I would borrow my neighbor's ID, because I wasn't 21 yet, and I would drive up to visit my brother who lived in the Mission. And I would stay at his place and go to every club I could and see as much music as I could all on Valencia Street. This was in the 90's and all the acid jazz stuff was going off.  

BISSList: Oh yeah!

Lebo: Yeah, and also South of Market. And I remember being like, 'I can't wait to move up here! I love this music community.' And that was even before I really knew the Grateful Dead community very much, which has become such a positive force for me. I mean, it's always been here, even long before I was born, but it's been wonderful to get to know. 

BISSList: Yeah, they've brought you into the fold, for sure. And it's a perfect fit.

Lebo: Yeah, for sure.

BISSList: Well, tell me a little bit about some of the recent music you've been recording with the band. I was listening to the Creatures EP's and just wanted to know a little bit more about those. They sound a little more... I don't want to say darker, but definitely a little more ruminative, a little more ambivalent than some of your earlier stuff. 

Lebo: Yeah.  

BISSList: Maybe that’s just a reflection of the times, but tell me a little bit more about the concept behind those, if there was an overarching concept. Or what you guys were thinking when you were recording those EPs?  

Lebo: Yeah. So, if you go back to ALO's first... I mean, again, we've been together since middle school and put our first album of original music out when we were like seniors in high school or juniors in high school. It was a cassette, actually. [Laughs] 

BISSList: An 8-Track? [Laughs]

Lebo: We couldn't afford to print CDs, it was so expensive to get CDs burned back then. But, my point being, we've been at it a long time. But our first real album that got released — and I call it "real" because it came out on Brushfire Records, which is part of Universal Music — wasn't until I think 2004, or somewhere around there. [ALO's first album on Brushfire Records, Fly Between Falls, was first released on Lagmusic Records in 2005, but was re-released by Brushfire in 2006]. Back then, we would write tunes and we would just start playing them at gigs. It was like, sound check, rehearsal day, 'Oh, I wrote a new tune.' Show it to each other, you know? We would write a tune together, or work out a tune together, all different kinds of combinations of that. So that first album that we did on Brushfire — and even the second album to some extent — were tunes that we had already been playing a lot that we then recorded. But shortly after that with Man of the World (Brushfire, 2010), which was recorded and produced by Jack Johnson in his studio over in Hawaii, that was one of the first albums where every song on the album, we wrote it for the album. And ALO really stayed in that mode for a long time, for the next many albums, where we kind of got into that thing of working on a collection of tunes for an album, and then we would go out and play them live. Maybe over the course of the year, between albums, something might sneak in [to ALO performances] a little bit here and then. But we really made a conscious effort so that new tunes got debuted on the records. So then, fast forward, you get to the point where there's all this remote recording. And we had been such an album band in that way that we were feeling like it would be cool if we recorded music a little more frequently, with more frequent releases. And the nature of things these days, with so much of the music being streamed, is that EPs are just such a... It's just a great format for the era.

BISSList: Yeah, for sure. 

Lebo: On many levels. Because it used to be like, 'Oh well, you better do a full album because you still have to print out the CD, or the cassette, or the album.' It's all that work to do that, what's the point of doing four songs, you might as well just finish out the record. 

BISSList: Right.

Lebo: Like, it's going to involve the same effort, it's going to cost the same, all that kind of stuff. 

BISSList: Yeah.

Lebo: So there was a real focus on that. But now with streaming, it's almost the opposite. It's almost something I would lament, the fact that people's attention is really being pulled in a million directions. I think that's one of the hardships of the era that we're in right now, and it's almost something that we don't notice until we reflect on time spent. Because that's the whole nature of it, your attention is being pulled and you don't even realize it. So that thing you were just all excited about, suddenly you're excited about something new. 

BISSList: Totally [Laughs]. 

Lebo: And you've already forgotten about that thing that could have actually fueled you for many days. I'm sure you've probably had that experience. I think about when I was younger, how albums were like... I would go out and buy an album, spend my $14 on it, $13 for a CD or whatever, and then I would go and listen to it. And sometimes what I was hearing didn't grab me right away, but since I spent my money on the CD, I wanted to give it a chance. So I'd listen to it a few times and sometimes it wasn't until the fourth or fifth time listening to it that I really discovered the beauty of it, or what was special about it. So, all that leads to the shorter attention span, and EPs making sense. We'd never done them before, but given that realization we were like, 'Let's try some EPs.' So we decided to do a series of them called Creatures. And it was actually really fun for us to sort of “pair” songs. That's another thing for us, on albums, since we are a band of many writers and singers and stuff, a lot of times when we do that one album that's going to be the only album that comes out in a year, year and a half, there's sort of pressure within the band to really find the 10 songs, and make sure they all work together. So it's been really nice to just say here's four songs that work together, and to create a little four song EP. So we just launched this series and it's been a ton of fun and we're supposed to do this next one... It's funny, during the pandemic, we've been working on just tons of music and not focused on the release of it. So, I think for our next [release] we'll probably go back to a regular, full-length album, because at this point we just have a bunch of tunes in the works. So, you know, why not just kind of roll that way? Kind of long-winded answer, but... 

BISSList: No, that's perfect.

Lebo: But EPs are cool. I like their compact nature for being able to focus on a theme and just go with it. And it's interesting you say that about the themes — the EP with "Fisheye Lens" and "Spark" on it, there's definitely a thematic focus on a theme of how life is the lens you see it all through. It's like something we all know, but it's such an easy thing to forget in life. Oddly, that part of the EP series came out before the pandemic, but I think that concept really relates to this time in the pandemic and how...Sure, there's a lot of horrible shit going on and people losing their jobs and people losing their lives, but simultaneously, there's also a lot of beautiful shit going on. So, while you don't want to bury your head in the sand, you also don't want to just focus on the bad shit. For me, it's really important to spend some time thinking about the good stuff too, you know, and celebrate that as well. I almost hate to call it an opportunity, but it really is an opportunity for positivity. There’s always those opportunities, it's just finding them. So I think it's good to spend some time with it.  

BISSList: Yeah, and I thought that what distinguished some of the songs on these EPs was the nuance in them, that they were not blindly or wildly optimistic, they're kind of ambivalent. You know, there's some darkness creeping in, despite the overall optimism. And maybe that was a reflection of, you know, the Trump era, the politics of divisiveness, or whatever. 

Lebo: Totally. They were written square, right in the middle of all that, and then as we were starting to come out of that. 

BISSList: But with an eye to the positives and what can we take out of all that and turn it towards the positive. I got ya’. 

Lebo: Yeah, totally. And I'm like that in life. That's definitely something I'm drawn to, you know, that's compelling to me. Making light out of darkness.  

BISSList: I hear you. Well, with that I should probably let you go, because I know we're coming up on our time, but I just had a couple more questions that maybe I'll try to combine into one. That being the idea of doing the one-offs and being a band leader/music director and playing with other people outside of ALO. I know you did the Bone Diggers gigs with Greg from the Mother Hips and Reed Mathis and some other folks. How did that project come about, and do you foresee doing any more of those in the future? And likewise, how about Brokedown in Bakersfield. Is that something that might happen again in some form? 

Lebo: OK, yeah those are good questions. Bone Diggers is such a fun band. And I'm trying to think of how that came about. You know, the core of that band is really Reed and me and Scotty Rager. You know, from Tea Leaf Green?  

BISSList: Yeah, for sure. 

Lebo: And then in addition to us three, there's been a few different lineups where we'll have a second guitarist, sometimes Greg's done it. Originally it was this guy Clay Welch, who plays with Reed in Electric Beethoven.  

BISSList: Right.  

Lebo: So there's been some other second guitar players, and the keys chair has definitely rotated; Danny Eisineberg, Todd Stoops... Adam McDougal just did some. We just did a show down in LA a few weeks ago actually, which was really fun. And we've had percussionists before like Jeff Franca (Thievery Corp.), who's awesome. So basically, there's a core of three of us and we kind of round it out from there. It's such a fun band, because the whole idea was that it was formed out of our love of Paul Simon's music, but we're also total improvisers, so none of us were interested in being in a "tribute" band. But it turns out those songs are just such great songs that they really lend themselves to improvisation, you know? So we kind of joke around that it's like, Bone Diggers: Disrespecting the Paul Simon Catalog. [Laughs] But basically, we take the melodies and lyrics and chord changes and just kind of have at it. Some tunes we might do pretty straight and really keep it in the original groove and stuff, but then take a left turn somewhere in the song [and improvise], and then come back. And other ones we might totally reinterpret the tune with a whole different feel. But it's basically just us having at the Paul Simon catalog. And I feel like the crowds that come out seem to get it and really appreciate it. It's people who are into improvised music, you know, kind of like from our scene, you know? Like if someone was just a straight up Paul Simon fan and was expecting a Paul Simon tribute, they would probably be pretty disappointed. 

BISSList: [Laughs] They would storm off, like, "What are you doing here?"  

Lebo: Yeah. Like, when we're ten minutes into "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," and we're not even halfway through the song. [Laughs] And they're like, "What's going on?" But for the people who want to go on that ride, which is us and a whole lot of other people, it turns out to be a ton of fun. So that project's really cool and we did one of those right before the shutdown, at The Chapel, actually. And then, like I said, we did one down in LA that was a private event in a backyard in Hollywood, actually. And it was really cool what they did for that one. They did rapid [Covid] testing on site. A lot of us were actually already vaccinated, but for the ones that weren't: You showed up outside the gate, you took your rapid test, you waited 15 minutes until you got your clearance, and when you got it, you’re in.  

BISSList: There you go! 

Lebo: Yeah, it was a ton of fun. People were stoked. 

Lebo: So that's that one. Brokedown in Bakersfield is... I love that band. I don't see that band coming back any time soon, but we all have a lot of love for it. That actually started at High Sierra, because one of the things I like to do at High Sierra is do these "playshops," you know? For people who don't know what the playshops are, during the day there'll be like an unscripted set, but with a theme. There's something like five playshops a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons and they're all with different themes and all being led by different people. It's where a lot of amazing collaboration happens. I had just gotten into playing pedal steel guitar — I guess this would have been maybe around 2011 or something.  

BISSList: Yeah, I was going to say. I looked back at our last interview — when I interviewed you and Bo together, if you recall — that was almost 10 years ago and we talked about you getting into playing pedal steel then.  

Lebo: Yeah, right! So, I had just started doing that. And getting into pedal steel and that classic country is going to quickly lead you, if you're anything like me, it's quickly going to lead you to the Bakersfield sound.  

BISSList: Of course.

Lebo: Yeah, from the 60's, you know? I love that music and it's like a pedal steel playground. 

BISSList: So good.

Lebo: Yeah. Merle Haggard. Buck Owens. Writing these amazing melodies and lyrics. So anyhow, it turns out I have some other friends who love that music too, namely Tim and Nicki Bluhm and Scott Law and Steve Adams and Dave Brogan from ALO. So, like I said, I always do some sort of playshop there [at High Sierra], at least one. So that year I thought it'd be cool to theme one on the Bakersfield sound. So we kind of just batted the idea around and came up with the name and then I was thinking about the people to do it with. And part of the reason I even thought of it was because I knew Tim and Nicki were going to be there that year and they love that music. So I thought it would be a great opportunity because we'd been talking about doing a project like this for a long time and I figured this would be a perfect time to do it. They hadn't even met Scott Law yet, but I knew Scott from other stuff and I was like, 'Oh, he'd be the perfect guy AND he's going to be at High Sierra too.' So I asked him. And basically I did the old musical director thing: Got all the music together, made sure everyone had what they needed and was ready to go, and then we just showed up forty five minutes before the set with a bunch of charts. Part of what I do in the musical director role, one of the things I like, is sort of assessing who you have in your lineup at that moment. And in this case, I knew it was all people who were good at doing their homework. Because, you know, there's some amazing, amazing musicians that I love working with, that I know are just not going to do homework. It's just not what they do. They're all about being in the moment. And I love working with those people, too. It's just different. You work with different people in different ways.  

BISSList: Yep, for sure. 

Lebo: But then there's other people who are really good about doing homework. So you can do some other things with that. And I knew in this case that everyone was like that, so I was like, 'Cool, we can do this and really dig into it.' And it was cool. We stayed true to it and we did these like three, three and a half minute arrangements, you know? I think our set was like 27 songs. And Scott and Tim and Nicki and Scott, they all met pretty much on stage, as we were setting up. I was like, 'Scott Law, this is Tim and Nicki. Tim and Nicki, this is Scott Law.' They’ve since gone on to do so much music together, even outside of Brokedown in Bakersfield. So that was a cool project. But you know, a lot of that was based on having Tim and Nicki as the lead singers in the band and they were married at the time, and they aren't married anymore...  

BISSList: Riiiight. That combo might not work. 

Lebo: Yeah, but it's cool. I stay in touch with both of them and do music with both of them. I was just actually working with my across the street neighbor on a track — she's a great singer, Paula Fraser — working on a vocal track with her for a Nikki record. And Tim just came out and was a special guest at the Rex Benefit we did this past December, right before the second lockdown happened, we squeezed in a gig. It was like a recorded gig, actually, but at the Sweetwater for the Rex Foundation, and Tim came out and did some tunes with us. And he sounded as great as ever. So the community that was Brokedown in Bakersfield are all people that I'm in touch with, play a lot of music with. Someday though, we'll get it back together again. There'll be someday. And it might make more sense when we're all like in our 70s, to be totally honest. Wouldn't that be amazing, like 70 year-old versions of us? 

BISSList: [Laughs] Yeah, a little crustier, a little older, wiser?  

Lebo: Yeah. We gotta wait another 30 or 40 years, but it's going to be cool. We'll all be sitting down on our stools, playing these little old three minute country tunes. It's gonna be awesome. 

BISSList: Love it. Love it. Well, that's a perfect place to end it. Thank you so much for your time. Great catching up with you again.

Lebo: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Great to talk to you.

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