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It's a rare band that can play three-hour sets of hyperkinetic dance music in a different city every night and perform every show like it's its last, feeding off the energy of a crowd, half of whom may have never heard the music before. But don't tell New Orleans funk ambassadors Galactic, quite possibly the hardest working band in show business.
Take a recent six-week stint for Galactic: Their April tour has them up and down the Midwest, then home again to the Big Easy for a vaunted spot as the young princes of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Thursday and Friday of Jazz Fest's first weekend, April 25th and 26th, they'll play the legendary Tiptina's and the historic Saenger Theater. Saturday, they play the daytime festival itself. Sunday they hop a plane to Indio, California, for the Coachella Music and Arts Festival. Then it's back to New Orleans for the second week of Jazz Fest, where the group -- drummer Stanton Moore, saxman Ben Ellman, basssist Robert Mercurio, organist Richard Vogel, guitarist Jeff Raines and vocalist Theryl "The Houseman" DeClouet -- will play two more shows.
It's enough to make someone dizzy . . . and tired. "We're pretty used to doing things like that," says Vogel, calling from a tour bus outside Indianapolis' Vogue Theater. "The fact that we're essentially home during the Jazz Fest times makes it cool. Just another day at the office."
For the last eight years Galactic have been transforming clubs, theaters and outdoor festivals across the country and around the world into the smallest, sweatiest juke joints imaginable. The group consistently proffers a musical concoction heavily weighted toward its own post-modern funk compositions but with the occasional reconceived cover thrown in for good measure -- Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf," anyone? Duke Ellington's "Blue Pepper"? With little radio play, and flying well below the radar of the mass media, the band has been forced to make its name and its music on a night-by-night basis, and has established a huge grassroots following in the process.
After recording and releasing its debut album Coolin' Off on Fog City Records, a San Francisco label literally started because its founder wanted to work with Galactic, the band took the road in the summer of 1996. "We had some initial success right off the bat in a few places -- we'd play for ten people the first time through town, and maybe next time there would be fifty or 100," says Vogel of the group's Meters-meets-Funkadelic stylings.
A live set by Galactic is frequently an exhausting experience -- rooted solidly in Moore's rock-steady rhythms and DeClouet's soulful vocals. The band's songs, ranging from instrumental long-form jams to R&B-flavored barn-burners, owe a equal debt to the far-reaching jazz of Miles Davis and the easy accessibility of Maceo Parker. But the band's M.O. is not to bring jazz to the masses -- it's to get people moving, and they're willing to win over fans one at a time.
"We realized when we started out that our music would not have mainstream commercial acceptance," adds Vogel. "We started at the tail end of the grunge era. We were in New Orleans, which is sort of a world unto itself. We didn't think that just because we were popular in New Orleans we'd be popular anywhere else."
Coolin' Off sold more than 20,000 copies without any airplay or significant label support, and attracted the attention of mini-major label Capricorn, which released the band's next two albums -- Crazyhorse Mongoose and Late for the Future -- before it was sold to BMG-financed Volcano Records, whose biggest act is Tool. In late 2001 Volcano released Galactic's blistering live CD, We Love 'Em Tonight -- which reveals just how tight the six friends and bandmates are -- before unceremoniously dropping the group.
Vogel believes losing their label might be the best thing to happen to the group in a while. "We're not a band making a living off of record sales, or anything else at this point," he says. "Our live show is definitely who we are and how we've found our place at having a life in music at all."
It's increasingly likely that the next Galactic record might be released by the band itself. "We've set up a little studio at home in New Orleans, and we're doing more recording than in the past. It's nice to have the technology now that allows us to do that -- we don't have to schedule studio time anymore." Between Internet discussion boards, tape-trading among hardcore fans and a grassroots network of people who always seem to bring along a friend or two, the band would likely reap the most financially from a self-released album.
Galactic's next album will also be moving further away from the free-form jazzy funk jams that might get jam-band spinners twirling but turn off your friends from Seattle. DeClouet, who was the last addition to the originally all-instrumental sextet, has taken on a more upfront role in the band, and Vogel says its likely that the next album would be weighed more heavily in favor of songs that feature the soul man. "Over time as we play more together, the sort of more experimental instrumental side and the more straight ahead groove funk side those things are integrating themselves more into one thing."
In the meantime, the band is just happy to be playing in front of audiences who appreciate it. Vogel relates one unfortunate live pairing where the group, early on, opened in San Francisco for LL Cool J: "LL is a hearthrob. The first five rows were filled with swooning girls. That was probably the coldest reception we ever received by an audience, and even so they weren't throwing things -- but they were chanting 'L-L' through a large part of the show. Thankfully, that only happened once."
ANDREW STRICKMAN
(April 23, 2002)