Jon Herington interview 2014 part 1

* This interview originally appeared on themusicroom.me in 2014 Special thanks to Tony Keefer

Dishing With Jon: Health and Happiness On The Road With Steely Dan in 2014

Jon Herington interview by Ric Hickey for the Music Room

Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill yielded two huge hits with “Do It Again” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”. Band leaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen racked up several more hit singles with Steely Dan throughout the 1970s and continued to make very successful records even after they decided to quit touring altogether in 1974. The band’s membership underwent continuous changes as Becker and Fagen handpicked players for their increasingly sophisticated music. The duo quietly struck camp after 1980’s Gaucho LP, with only a pair of Donald Fagen solo albums appearing in the decade-plus hiatus that followed before the band resurfaced for a U.S. tour in 1993 with a completely reconstituted line-up. Though the supporting cast surrounding Becker and Fagen continues to change and evolve, Steely Dan has now been an active touring band for the past 21 years.

Guitarist Jon Herington joined the band in 1999. His 15-year stint is the longest that any individual has remained a permanent member of Steely Dan, second only to the band’s originators Becker and Fagen. In addition to his road work with the band, Herington has made crucial contributions to the Steely Dan albums Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go (from 2000 and 2003, respectively) as well as appearances on Becker and Fagen’s solo records. Clearly, he is the guitarist of choice for the Steely Dan organization.

Steely Dan is currently in the midst of their 56-date Jamalot Ever After Tour that spans, apparently with very few days off, from early July through September, with an appearance at Cincinnati’s Taft Theater scheduled for August 12. I recently spoke to Herington about tour prep, rehearsals, and life on the road. While still in the haze of the tour’s first week and the groggy wake of an overnight commute between tour stops, still sorting out hassles with his L.A. hotel as we spoke, Herington nevertheless chatted at length in a calm and relaxed tone, his seemingly endless patience never challenged, his Zen-like humility flavoring his every utterance, his observations from the eye of the storm deceptively simple, chuckling all the while, acutely aware of the greater truth that life on the road defies logic. Spend a week on the road with your closest friends or family and I promise you will feel yourself begin to come unglued. Jon Herington, master guitarist and singer-songwriter in his own right, has been living on the road off and on for 15 years and, for the 40 minutes or so that I spoke to him anyway, he sounded like the most grounded person I have ever encountered.

I spoke to Jon on July 11, 2014. Our conversation began with me asking if he had the day off.

Jon Herington: Uhh… Sort of. Yeah. We’re not working. We traveled after the show last night up in Concord (in Northern California) and we’re in L.A. now. So yeah it’s sort of a day off. We play L.A. tomorrow.

Ric Hickey: You’ve been out for a week or so now?

JH: Yeah, I think we’ve done six or seven shows. We started in Portland. We had a couple rehearsal days. And a couple places where we stopped we did two nights in a row like up in Seattle and a place near Saratoga, California called the Mountain Winery. So it’s been sort of a leisurely start and the band has gotten up to speed quickly this year, which is nice. It’s mostly, I think, because we worked last year as well. And we did a lot of tunes last year, so getting it back together was pretty easy this year.

RH: Does it take a few shows to hit your stride or get into a rhythm?

JH: Yeah, it does. In the past, we’ve actually had some great first shows, because the band was playing well, like right away, even at the first rehearsal. But what usually takes a little time is trying out different setlists. The last couple of shows we actually had two nights in a row with the same setlist because it was such an effective one. For the first week the setlist was changing every show and that kind of makes it a little harder to settle in quickly when the show doesn’t have the same order of songs and same flow. But now we’ve got an order that feels good. And even just doing it twice in a row, you feel like you’re a little better prepared each time you do it. It becomes much more natural. And I don’t know how long that’ll stay. The trick is to find setlists that feel good to play and that work for an audience. But over time, you know, the band can kinda get into a rut just because of the sameness of the sets. Then it’s nice to mix it up but you run the risk of changing that flow and having it not work as well for the audience. So it’s a tricky thing. And I think you do learn by doing but it changes over time. It’s not always the same thing that’s going to work at the beginning of the tour and at the end. And so for our sake I hope it occasionally gets changed up just because it’s fun. And because there’s so many tunes. We can’t fit all the great tunes in one show. It’s a serious catalog, as you know!

RH: There must be, as you said, pros and cons of doing it either way. You don’t necessarily want to play the same set every night, I’m sure, even though there comes a comfort from that. There’s gotta be that desire to mix it up…

JH: Exactly. Yeah. You want to be a little challenged and you want some freshness in there as well. And that becomes more important usually later in the tour. Right now we don’t need that so much because we’re happy just to be getting a handle on this particular set and getting it feeling good. But you know, this band is so great, it happens right away. When we’re in a song, it’s always an amazing thing. The challenge for me is usually at the end of a song when I’m thinking, “Okay, I gotta switch to this guitar” and switch gears in my brain. It’s the sort of choreography that’s a little crazy. When we’re inside of a song, we know them well enough so that it’s a much a more comfortable flow there.

RH: You mentioned having a couple rehearsal days. What are those pre-tour rehearsals like? Do you have any pre-tour rituals that help you feel like you hit the ground running?

JH: Well, I think it’s an interesting design. We were talking about it last night, actually. It’s a curious habit that we’re in. And I’m not sure exactly where it comes from. But we typically start with maybe five days of rhythm section-only rehearsing. And we cover a lot of ground because there isn’t any fussing over vocal parts or horn parts. There are very few people in the room, compared to the big 13-piece band when we get everybody in there. So we can cover a lot of music and we usually brush up on all that stuff. And it didn’t take long at all. And that was like the simplest part of the process for me just because this rhythm section is a crack one. We did so many songs last year on tour and we had prepared so many that it hadn’t been long enough for anybody to forget much. Little details here and there could be a little foggy for the first time we run through it. But these guys are so quick to recover that the second time we’d play a tune it’d feel as good as it ever does and so that was fast. And then the habit is to add the horns for a few days. And we basically run all the tunes. The final stage is to add the vocalists and they come in for a couple days. It seems to me that that’s a little odd. I think maybe the vocalists ought to be there right from the beginning with the rhythm section. But perhaps, and I don’t know this, perhaps that habit is maybe kind of a carry-over from the recording days. Because, you know, when you’re recording an album you almost always start with the rhythm section only. And you add the vocals and the horns as overdubs later. And that’s the way these guys have always made records. So my guess is there’s something about that. But the rhythm section, we didn’t need five days to get it going. I mean, I think two or three would have been fine. And often because they don’t leave that many days for vocalists at the end of the rehearsals they’re struggling to get it together quickly. And with that many people in the room, you know, it just slows down the work. There’s just too many possible distractions and little details that take time. But we also had about six days off after the rehearsal phase this year. You know - time enough for trucks to lug all the gear from New York to Portland. And in Portland we actually had a couple days of rehearsal. Because the room in New York where we’re rehearsing is so small that the lighting guy doesn’t even show up. Well, he may show up but he doesn’t have any space to light or any room to work. And the front of house engineer, who is a critical guy for any show, you know, he’s basically working in a small room which is nothing like any of the rooms we’re going to play for the rehearsal phase. So in Portland – usually they do this, too – we’ll take a couple of days to do what we call “production rehearsals”, where the full lighting rig is set up, and the full P.A. is set up. So that those guys can get a couple days of real rehearsing in, because they can’t really do it in a smaller room. I mean, it’s actually not a small room by rehearsal standards, but it’s not nearly the size of the venues we play. But that helps too. That’s when we start running a set and kinda get an idea what the show might feel like. Although that’s always subject to change and, like I said, for the first week or so our setlists have changed every day. But that’s basically the process.

RH: Are there any additional rehearsals along the way, say if you have a week or two off between legs of the tour? Are there additional rehearsals or do you just sort of work out the kinks at sound checks?

JH: There have never been additional rehearsals, even when we’ve had breaks between tour legs. Unfortunately we don’t have any breaks on this tour! (laughs) It’s uhh… It’s a pretty intense schedule and we have 56 shows. So I guess we’ve got about 50 more to go! And there really isn’t… There’s only one 2-day break in the entire run, and probably one of those days is a travel day. Otherwise there’s only occasional single days off between gigs. Typically, they’ll want to mix it up and add a few tunes that we haven’t been playing somewhere along the line in the tour. And those we’ll typically run at sound check. Sometimes we’ll run it once one day, and once the next day, and then it’ll show up in the set. But the sound checks are long enough that we can do more than just sound check. We can rehearse if we feel the need.