AND THE BAND IS: Joe Travers, drums; Bryan Beller, bass and vocals; Mike Keneally, lead guitar, keyboards and lead vocals; and Rick Musallam, guitar and vocals. |
In his 14 years as a recording artist Mike Keneally has released a series of albums that continually astonish listeners. Stylistically restless and ceaselessly imaginative, albums such as the all-instrumental Nonktompf (1999) and The Universe Will Provide (2004, with the Metropole Orkest) speak to his deep-reaching abilities as a serious composer, while other records -- such as 1992's hat and 1998's Sluggo! -- display his keen sense of humor and gift for commentary on a wide array of topics.
But Keneally's perhaps best known as a guitarist and songwriter and at the moment it's the six-stringed instrument that seems to be object of his attention. Released earlier this year, Mike Keneally Band's Guitar Therapy Live serves not only as the San Diego-based musician's first full-fledged live album but also as a kind of career retrospective, as it touches on every major stopping point in Keneally's recorded output. It also reunites him and bassist Bryan Beller with drummer Joe Travers on record for the first time in nearly a decade.
Recorded during the quartet's 2005 Guitar Therapy tour, the album is a compact collection, featuring favorites such as "Top of Stove Melting" and "Cause of Breakfast" (from 1994's classic Boil That Dust Speck) and more recent tunes such as "Machupicchu" (2001's Wooden Smoke) and "Panda" (from 2004's DOG).
The intention behind the tour, Keneally said, was not so much to promote an album -- DOG had already been out for a year at that point -- but to get out and play some blazing guitar. Keneally Band drummer Nick D'Virgilio had prior commitments with Tears For Fears and so the bandleader looked to his old friend Travers for help. Travers -- immortalized in the song "Joe" from 2000's Dancing album -- had been unavailable for any Keneally-related commitments. Deeply ensconced in the Zappa organization, the drummer had remained on board after Keneally and Beller left the Zappa family umbrella in 1996. There were tensions between Frank Zappa's widow, Gail, and Keneally and it took the better part of a decade for them to subside.
"After I parted ways with the Zappas, it wasn't in the cards for me to have access to Joe Travers for long periods of time because he was employed by Gail and she wasn't crazy about him going out on the road with me. It took a long time for everything to get sloughed away," Keneally said. "It was obvious, once we got into rehearsals, that the band was at some kind of performance peak and that the shows were going to be really good and they did turn out that way."
The Keneally Band -- which also features former Wichitan Rick Musallam on guitar -- took to the road with the idea of recording a live album and DVD in Sellersville, Pa. But that gig didn't go off as well as planned.
"We'd had two really trying days in New York and Boston beforehand," Keneally said. "The venues we played in Boston and New York were already booked. They wanted us there but we ended up getting booked into early slots before their previously booked acts. We were in a rush, traffic was bad and by the time we got to Sellersville we were kind of exhausted, kind of enervated and not at our best performance-wise. We had a heavily documented show that was a C+ for us. We came off the road thinking, 'That's kind of a drag.'"
For one reason and another the quartet had also booked a gig at the legendary Baked Potato in Los Angeles a month later. With rest, relaxation and rehearsal the Keneally Band was primed for peak performance.
"We had had a month to rest but we were really seasoned and really playing the songs well from having just been on the road," Keneally said. "We had a good combination of being technically prepared to play the material and mentally excited. By the time we got to the Baked Potato, everything exploded. The album is 90 percent taken from that show, which happened a month after the tour. The DVD that accompanies the special edition is entirely that show."
The album also finds the guitarist revisiting earlier material. "That was one of the very specific choices that I made," he said. "The songs are overwhelmingly from earlier albums -- hat, Boil That Dust Speck and Sluggo!. It was easier for Joe to get back into the swing of things with that material. He'd played on a number of the recordings and also live with us during that time and that material happened to require less preparation on his part. The Zappas were being generous by letting him tour with us but at the same time they weren't saying that we could take all the time we needed to rehearse. But I also wanted to revisit that material anyway. With Nick in the band we'd overwhelmingly been playing newer stuff and there's a lot of those earlier songs that have a lot of life in them."
Keneally first came to wide recognition as a member of Frank Zappa's ill-fated 1988 touring band. He remained in the Zappa family camp for the next eight years, the last few (1993-1996) as a member of Dweezil and Ahmet's band Z. That group recorded two albums -- the beloved Shampoohorn (1994) and the less interesting Music For Pets (1996). Z also featured Keneally's best friend, bassist Scott Thunes.
An imposing figure notorious for his intolerance of ignorance and ignorant behavior, Thunes had a falling out with the band during a 1993 tour. Thunes -- who'd been a member of the family for more than a decade -- was sent packing and Travers' old chum from the Berklee College of Music, Bryan Beller, came to the fold.
Keneally eventually invited Beller to join his then-fledgling solo band, a unit that would eventually become known as Beer For Dolphins. (The name would later be abandoned because of its lighthearted nature.)
As BFD grew its reputation, a chasm between Keneally and his boss Dweezil developed. Keneally wanted to spend time recording and performing his own music, not waiting for tours and release dates that always seemed to get delayed. His eventual departure from the band and Beller's subsequent defection led the Zappas to replace the bassist and guitarist's photos on the inner sleeve of Music For Pets with those of family dogs Bing Jang and Arkansas.
Reflecting on his final days in Z, Keneally said, "It ended poorly. It ended in an unexpected way. It was a complex time. While I was happy to be handed my freedom and allowed to make what I wanted of my career and my life, it was bittersweet because of the way that it ended. It was also ironic because Bryan also left the organization to show support; we were going to be Mike Keneally and Beer For Dolphins and take over the world or whatever but it was barely two months after I left Z that Steve Vai made his offer to have me come and join his group. It wasn't so much like me against the world. It was just me taking another job and being employed for about four years. It was tough, though, because Bryan tried to get into the Vai band but that didn't work out."
Poised to claim his status in something approaching the mainstream once and for all, Vai launched an extensive tour in the fall of 1996. There would be few nights off. And each gig would mean a set that ran up to -- if not over -- two hours. But Vai, aware of Beller's talents and sympathetic to Keneally's plight as an up-and-coming artist in his own right, asked Beer For Dolphins to open the fall leg of the Fire Garden tour.
"It was a big can of beans, not an easy tour -- opening for the group and then being in Vai's group. It was strange not to be part of the Zappa group but also freeing," Keneally said. He remained in the Vai camp for five years, appearing on albums such as The Ultra Zone (1999) and Alive in an Ultra World (2001), plus recording Piano Reductions (2004), a collection of Vai-penned pieces performed on solo piano.
At the end of 2001, Keneally decided once more to become his own boss. He dropped out of Vai's band, threw off the BFD moniker and, along with Musallam, Beller and D'Virgilio, launched a quartet tour of the East Coast.
In November of that year, just a few months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Keneally found himself performing "Top of Stove Melting," a tune that features the line "I like ground zero/it makes me smile." He frequently changed the lyric but in New York City, he found himself confronted with the notion of singing the lyric as it was written.
"It was a physical impairment," he said earlier this year of his seeming inability to sing the line. "Every time I got to those words, I wanted to be able to sing the words I'd written but I couldn't make them come out. Finally, when I got to New York, I started the song, tried to sing it, couldn't. I explained to the audience what was going on and they encouraged me to sing it for real. That was a pretty emotional moment. But, like a lot of the stuff I write, I didn't know specifically what I was referring to when I wrote that. There was a general apocalypse scenario but nothing specific. So, to have those lyrics come to mean something like that and be so close to home and having to sing them was unnerving. I don't have trouble singing the song now but it was shaky during that first tour."
One of the songs that appears on Guitar Therapy Live that brought out Keneally's lighter side in conversation was "Pride Is a Sin." While the tune takes up fairly serious matter -- the issue of taking "pride" in one's nation -- the bandleader joked about the live version's absence of cowbell, one of its pronounced features on the DOG version. "Just ask Will Ferrell about the importance of cowbell," he said, then added, "Every musician in the band is given the space to interpret the songs the way they like," he said. "All I knew was that Joe was rockin' back there. I wasn't about to say, 'Hey, you need to get back on the cowbell!'"
