QRO sat down to talk with Cedric LeMoyne and Jeffrey Cain of Remy Zero before their show in at Dante’s Portland, OR on October 7th, 2010. They talk about the passing of Gregory Slay, Remy Zero’s drummer who passed away from complications of Cystic Fibrosis on January 1st, 2010, and how their upcoming short tour, their first in eight years, is in tribute of him:
QRO: These shows are tribute to Gregory with proceeds going to benefit his wife and daughter. After the memorial you played a show in New Orleans, what then transpired after that to do these dates?
Cedric LeMoyne: I mean, we didn’t really have a memorial, we had a party for him. We played a show; our friend did a film.
It was strictly the spirit of doing that after having not done it for a long time. There has been lots of static over the years between people in the band and stuff. We’re all friends and continue to work with each other but in Remy Zero there are clouds.
Jeffrey Cain: Just a heaviness, yeah.
CL: And so that experience helped us to part those clouds to some degree so we wanted to see if we could continue that process. So we’re donating the proceeds to the Honeymoon Trust (http://thehoneymoontrust.com/) and doing the film, but actually it’s the act itself that is a tribute to him…
JC: …Yeah that we’re actually communicating that way again ‘cause that’s the deepest way for us to communicate. It’s cathartic but it’s also healing and all those things and I think us even giving a statement about playing is just a tribute to him really.
CL: And he, of all of us, was the one who would be the champion of us, like burying the past and let’s just do it because all he wanted to do was be in the studio making music and be on the stage, and it’s very sad that he’s not a part of it on the physical plane for that reason but that’s what we mean by tribute and that’s how it happened.
QRO: And that’s a horrible disease, [Cystic Fibrosis,] because you know that it’s coming.
CL: They told him at twelve that he was going to die soon.
JC: In his twenties probably, he won’t get out of his twenties.
CL: And he went to forty. And he was the least victim person in the universe. He raged and protested against it and had some miraculous comebacks and embraced life in a way that most people do not as a result of it.
QRO: In a sense, he won.
JC: Definitely, definitely.
CL: He was in the bonus round for a long time.
QRO: So the documentary by Nina Parikh, is that something that will be a full-on release at some point?
CL: The idea behind it, she drew the footage out of film that she had been taking throughout our whole career. I’ve known her since I was 14. So she’s seen the band come together and she’s known us all and she was a filmmaker in college so she’s literally been collecting hand-held and little clips and all kinds of stuff for twenty years and the idea was, before the band broke up we were talking about doing a Remy Zero film. And then we broke up and she caught the break up and she caught the aftermath of everyone’s projects and she’s like, "they’re never going to let me release it now because they hate each other". But probably some sort of Remy Zero film will happen at some point.
QRO: So I imagine she’s going to shoot some footage of these shows?
CL: She is unable to be here, she lives in Mississippi, but she has someone coming to every show to shoot footage so you’ll see a guy with a camera roaming around tonight.
JC: It’s all filmed.
QRO: So why just the west coast (Remy Zero are only playing four shows)? Because I noticed especially on Facebook when you posted just four shows everyone was writing "come to Atlanta" and everybody wants you to go everywhere. And someone from the band posted, "We may never pass this way again." That this might be it.
CL: I mean, Gregory’s family being here and in San Francisco and the fact that Los Angeles is our de facto hometown now. You know we were there for so long and the lion share of our career we spent there. So those were three natural cities and we just loved Seattle, and Gregory toured with me in my side project O+S (QRO album review) in 2009, and these were the four cities we played so there’s a little symmetry. Those are sort of the reasons; it seemed like a natural logistically harmonious thing to organize.
JC: Right and if we over-extended ourselves and put a bunch more dates which we, part of us want to do that, but doing that and certainly being as independent as we are now without record labels or anybody else, that’s a huge over-extension of ourselves in a lot of ways without any net at all so I think this is kind of a litmus test just for us to kind of get our wings again and just be together. It wasn’t about going out and making money or anything like that, we just really wanted to play, so we were like let’s just make this string of dates, because we know we can can do it, we can pull it off, and let’s just go kind of get some momentum.
QRO: How’s the response been to the new single, "‘Til The End", because it’s a free download and what is the history of the song? Is there an era it was a part of?
CL: When we split up, because we remained so close, we’d always get together and write songs and "‘Til The End" was…
JC: …it was right after we stopped touring the last time.
CL: It was right before we actually split up in 2002 or ‘03. No, we did it on tour so 2002.
JC: We went to a studio and cut it and had kind of a rough mix of it and then we went back, got the rough mix out, kind of remixed it, remastered and put it out. It had Greg playing live with us and it was kind of one of our last kind of new songs we’d written on the road.
CL: And Michael Patterson who recorded and mixed it still had the master, and he worked with us on our current projects as well, so it was easy to get it out and shined up without having to find old tapes.
JC: But what we did, which we didn’t know we were going to do, we have a CD here tonight of seven songs, we started going through our libraries of music and we had cut all these songs over the last seven years since we’d been broken up, demos, just songs and we started putting them together and we were like, you know what, we’re not going to save them for some other day so let’s take them to the road and we had artwork done last week really quickly and printed them up and so we have a CD of seven songs that nobody has heard.
QRO: I guess that kind of answers my next question about if there was going to be any new Remy Zero material coming out or a back catalog of songs…
CL: There’s a lot of stuff. In addition to all that stuff, Gregory was very prolific, he had a lot of beats, songs, chord progressions, melodies and we’ve gotten his drives from (his wife) and Jeffrey and I have gone in and started to find pieces, put things together, make beds so that we could sort of write with him now.
JC: The last piece on there is beds of him playing drums so we actually got to play with him and cutting to his drums and manipulating them in different ways. You definitely feel him in the tracks, guiding us.
CL: In the preamble to tonight, we have definitely started to get excited about the process of being together. It’s been really enjoyable. [Singer] Cinjun [Tate] is very excited and actually started writing a song yesterday, so probably before too long something will come out.
JC: We’re already in rehearsals, already writing, we tried out the set list then we just start writing again.
QRO: So going backwards, you did two tours with Radiohead (QRO album review): The Bends and OK Computer. Yet with all that exposure, you’ve said you were essentially broken up before the recording of your 2001 album The Golden Hum. What happened?
JC:
We had been doing it for over a decade and certainly I think we were more down and especially with Golden Hum we didn’t say "no" to anything. We did every interview, played every show we could, every acoustic show, every radio show, we just went and went and went and we still had another record that Elektra needed from us. We started writing songs and we saw that we still, we were always the underdogs for the labels, and we’d always fight to do the records the way we wanted to do them. But they had resisted again. They wanted more sales, they wanted more this, and we just wanted to make artistic records.
We just looked at each other and felt this could blow up in our face, like we could really make a misstep if went further. We were all kind of unraveling at a point that we wanted to save each other. We wanted each other to love music and make great records and I knew everybody still wanted to write, but Remy Zero had such a weight to it at that point. So many other people around it, in our ears with different opinions about things. It had just become unworkable and so we kind of killed it to save ourselves. Everyone else had to go off and do, all the people around us, the A&R guys, the managers, had to go figure out what else to do, when we were just like, "Let’s go make a fucking record." So I think it was survival mode for us.
CL: Like he said, we’d been around for a decade, never really crested in the way that we wanted to or the business wanted us too. We’re not really, at heart, a commercial band honestly…
JC: …A few songs that they’ve tried to make commercial, but left to our own a devices, we really go the opposite way. We just want to make great records. The kind of records they wanted us to make at that point, the love for that wasn’t there. We didn’t feel the platform was there for us to make what we wanted to make. We didn’t have the support of that so we split. And we weren’t scared. I don’t think we were scared at all. We were all ready to shake something up. We didn’t want to go on the same treadmill again.
CL: For a band of brothers there’s always been a healthy stream of chaos in our relationships. Just before The Golden Hum we were sort of in the mindset he was just explaining. The post-Golden Hum mindset was also the pre-Golden Hum mindset. We were changing labels for a third time; people were getting married, getting divorced. We can talk about it now, there were substance problems in certain quarters. There was all kinds of shit going on. And we actually had to sit down and have a meeting amongst ourselves and make a conscious effort to say, okay let’s try to reign all this in and tune all that out one more time. Because at that time we still felt we had one more burst of expression.
JC: We saw an opening. And the truth is, The Golden Hum, post our break-up, has kept us alive and allowed us to make all these other records. We had no idea that would happen. I guess we did plant the seed of that so it needed to make that record. So then over the years after we broke up we started to actually become successful musicians. The first time we could ever pay the rent and make other records and do things. Just crazy. It just going and going and going.
QRO: Your licensing of your songs, you were kind of on the cusp of that. It wasn’t cool back then but is necessary for some bands now.
JC: You know, our labels didn’t have a plan. When we had made The Golden Hum, they didn’t know what to put as a single out there and [saying,] "It’s too difficult and people won’t get it," and then we saw the opportunity with [the TV show] Smallville and we took that and that got the record out there. They had no plan for that record. It all rode on "Save Me" so we had to make those kinds of decisions.
QRO: In your experience with the record label and the industry as it was when you were in it, and how it’s changed since, do you think there’s a chance you can have more success now on your own?
CL: Fiscally speaking, yes. The elimination of the middleman and the stranglehold the labels had on the distribution definitely makes it so bands can find a way to make a living. You may not disseminate to a million people any more.
JC: There’s no superstars anymore anyway, but if you’re in your niche, with your crowd, and you’re not in debt to a label you can create music straight to your fans. It takes a juggle, you have to be smart about getting things made, but it’s great. For us, the process of it is really enjoyable from the artwork to the recording of the records and figuring all that out. We have hurdles to climb when it gets to the touring and the extra cash to make things float at first but I think it’s a way better situation. To be in debt to a company and know you have that hanging over your head and you’re out on the road trying to recoup, I mean it really is like being a slave. It’s not a fun feeling looking for handouts from your label. It just kills your spirit.
CL:
JC: The one smart thing that we did during that time being on the labels, which was a cool time to have budgets to do things, we acquired a lot of recording equipment when we had record budgets and we kept the equipment. So we knew if they dropped us or they went under, we could always make records. We knew we’d always make records and we have all that available to us to make the records we need to make.
CL: It’s a lot more responsibility as well. There was a time it was great to know someone else was doing all of that.
JC: You can’t just be oblivious riding on your tour bus going, "Where uh, where’s the stage?" You can’t do that. You have to know what’s going on. Which is fine. It’s good to know what time it is.
CL: I think that young bands now are developing in an era where there’s never been anything different and I think that’s a really healthy thing. It trains you to think on things on that level and I think that’s an important tool for musicians to have in this era.
