INTERVIEW

Marty Lloyd of

The Freddy Jones Band

Chicago-based grassroots musicians The Freddy Jones Band recently toured through Austin in support of a fourth album, Lucid, playing a double bill at La Zona Rosa with Sister Hazel. Cisum caught up with vocalist and guitarist Mary Lloyd who was slogging back a salty margarita before an excited crowd packed into the club. He sidled up the bar with a salted glass, and chatted in that characteristically laid back midwestern style. CISUM: So why is your band called the Freddy Jones band when you have no one named Freddy Jones? MARTY: Wayne and I started playing together in college. We were in South Bend Indiana, across the street from Notre Dame. We were on our way to a place called Bridget's to play our first gig and we got a flat tire. This guy helped us out, and his name was Fred Jones. So we named the band after him. CISUM: And does Fred know this? MARTY: He has no idea. CISUM: Then you went to Chicago soon after. Is there anything in particular that attracted you to Chicago? MARTY: We wanted to move into the city, to have an opportunity to play some clubs. We kind of wanted to take things a little more seriously. We told our parents we were transferring to Loyola in Chicago and they bit it hook, line and sinker. Well, we moved there and started playing clubs and dropped out of college. CISUM: Did you pick up anyone else along the way? MARTY: Yeah, when we moved to Chicago we got all different people. It was just the two of us that went over there. A lot of the guys we were playing with at the time were just college students. They took studying much more seriously than we did. That's when we found Jim and Rob and Simon. CISUM: Was it an instant chemistry thing? MARTY: The chemistry was there absolutely at first. I don't know if we were very good musicians at first, but we were good buddies so we had a good time playing together. Eventually things just started falling in place with the songwriting, playing around town in Chicago clubs and then we started playing around college towns. CISUM: What was the most memorable college gig you had? MARTY: We used to go down and play Univ. of Illinois in Champaign a lot. Those were always really fun. A lot of Chicago kids, so were really killing two birds with one stone playing for rowdy college kids, and at the same time, playing for people who were going to move back up to Chicago when they graduated. CISUM: So you were recruiting future fans? MARTY: Kind of. That's how we started building our fan base. Then we went into a basement in Northbrook and recorded our independent CD, shopped it around to labels and sold it at our gigs in college towns. CISUM: That was the one with "In a Daydream." MARTY: The first one with it, yeah. It was self titled, The Freddy Jones Band. CISUM: So when was your first quality gig? The one where you knew... MARTY: We opened up for Widespread Panic in Chicago. The record label people were all there. Capricorn Records came to us after the show. Ted Guggenheim, who was the manager of The Samples, had mailed our CD down to Capricorn Records because somehow he thought they were the right label for us. They invited us down, and we set up a gig next door to the record label. The next day they invited us into the offices and offered us a deal. We recorded the record before we even signed a contract. I don't know how smart that was, but we were very excited. We signed a record contract backstage at the H.O.R.D.E. tour in Chicago. CISUM: What was that like? Did you go on the H.O.R.D.E. tour? MARTY: That was two years ago. It was really great. It's a very quick way to get your name around. because of what the H.O.R.D.E. tour stands for, introducing different kinds of music to people who are open to listening to new music. To be able to play for these people ten days in a row, who are very accepting and running out to buy your CD or look for tapes on the internet. CISUM: And what's your policy on tapes and the internet? MARTY: We completely encourage people to tape our shows or trade them on the internet. That's fine with is. CISUM: How do you try to develop a good energy with the fans? MARTY: We try to, we try to interact with them a lot. Wayne is really good at it. He's kind of taken the reigns, really talking to the crowd and getting them involved because there really is a barrier there. Unless you break through it right away, it can make a night really uncomfortable, especially when you're in a town where they don't know you very well. Wayne has worked hard, and it's working great. CISUM: What's the craziest thing you've ever seen anybody in the audience do? MARTY: We were playing in Montana once, I think it was in Bozeman at a cowboy bar, right out of the Blues Brothers. There was chicken wire covering the stage. This beer can came flying on stage and hit me in the head, and I just stopped playing. We were having an off night, so I thought this was a perfect excuse to stop playing and collect our thoughts. I just ran off stage like "Oh, Oh! I'm out of here!" and the guys all started screaming in the microphone at the crowd. Our guitar tech did a flying leap off the stage, a tiny little scrawny guy, and he beat the crap out of this big cowboy. It was crazy. We ended up just going back on stage and finishing the show, like "Okay, anyway, back to where we were." CISUM: What are the worst and best things about being on the road? MARTY: The worst thing is that you're away from home. Every one of us is married, well except one, but they're pretty much married. Simon, our drummer just had his first child and she's only about three weeks old. The worst part is being away from family and friends. But the positive side is you get to see and make so many friends around the country. The more you visit a town, the more you discover its personality. So the more you tour through these towns, the more you feel like it's really not that far away from home. It makes it really fun, and then we get to play music every night. And what a life to live. You get to play your music for people and travel around with your best friends doing it. CISUM:If you could pick any one town to play in, what would it be? MARTY: I love New Orleans, I love Austin. There's music everywhere. The people are really cool, great food. We just played San Antonio last night and didn't realize what a great town that was. San Francisco is a great town. Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Atlanta are probably our biggest markets. It always feels like a home show when we play there. CISUM: When people come up to you in a bar and ask what kind of music you play, what do you tell them? MARTY: That's the hardest question to answer. Trying to put yourself into a category. The nature of the business is to put you into a category, to explain what you sound like to people who have never heard you. CISUM: Do you think being a grassroots band influences you music? MARTY: I think it makes you feel proud of your music, a little more than if someone just came along and heard one song of yours and gave you half a million dollars to record it. We're doing this in a way that makes you feel proud of your catalog of music. It makes you feel good to do it this way. CISUM: What song do you think mirrors who your band really is? MARTY: Well, it depends on the album. We had a lot of success early on with "In A Daydream." We've had good success with other songs too. On this album we've had really good success with a song called "Wonder" which went to number one in AAA radio. The new single out right now is called "Mystic Buzz" and its doing well. We've got a handful of songs that have done well on the radio, so we can use those to communicate to an audience when we play live. It's hard to pick one song that really epitomizes what the Freddy Jones Band is all about because we have so many different songwriters in the band CISUM: Basically you have two main vocalists. Why is that? Wayne and I do most of the singing because we started the band. Early on we started playing acoustic in clubs, and later on we got Jim to play bass, so it was just the three of us playing every night in really small bars and trying out new songs that we wrote. That's why it is that way, it's kind of the core of the band. If you fast forward to the new record Lucid, our drummer Simon wrote a lot of songs. He and Wayne wrote Wonder. The more time goes on, the more collective the effort it. CISUM: Is it always collaborative songwriting? MARTY: Pretty much. A lot of time. Sometimes someone will bring a song and we'll say, "Great, we don't need to touch that." Other times it will be, "Man, we're going to have to pick that one up hard. It doesn't sound right at all yet." Most of the time it's collaborative. It's a good way to get your sound together. If it's collective, chances are your sound will be more unique. CISUM: What's your relationship with Sister Hazel? MARTY: We played at a bar in South Carolina, and their singer Ken was on honeymoon. They asked us to play with them and made Ken come back from his honeymoon. We got to know them a little bit and thought we should go out together. This is such a strange time for bands of our genre, so if you can join up and you music fits together, it just makes more sense. Both bands are in front of more people. Now there's so much to choose from, it's hard to get people to come out. CISUM: And what do you think of Austin? MARTY: It's a great place. Quality people, quality town. I'm looking for quality margaritas when I'm done playing tonight. I like good quality margaritas.

[Read the rest of CISUM REVIEW in frames] [Back to Contents]

�