courtesy photo
Now 45, Roger Clyne still comes off as an activist musician, but with a splash of tequila and the gusto of having done it all his own way.
Spreading messages of love and social responsibility across six records and every tour — and sometimes it’s socially responsible to just kick it cantina-style — Clyne and his band, The Peacemakers, have made a career out of do-it-yourself rock ‘n’ roll.
When the successful, but short-lived Arizona rock band The Refreshments was dropped from its major label and broke up in 1998, the remnants formed The Peacemakers, instilling Clyne with a mentality of independence. From owning his own biodiesel-capable tour bus to sharing a half-album’s worth of unreleased songs for free via internet Cantina Casts this year, common music industry practices carry little weight for a band that’s crystallized its identity defying them.
The band released Unida Cantina in 2011, their sixth full-length record, and though their not currently touring a new album, The Peacemakers hope to have material prepared for a seventh LP by the end of the year. When Roger Clyne and company return home to Tempe, Ariz., they’re widely known for their notorious Circus Mexicus concerts, held annually in the Mexican beach town of Puerto Peñasco.
Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers will play Friday at Lincoln’s Bourbon Theatre with Paul Thorn. Clyne spoke to Hear Nebraska about anxiety over letting a worldwide audience into an unfinished record and how the Peacemakers have solidified their “ethos.” Read on.
HN: Touring is one of the first things I wanted to ask you about. For a band that tours as much as Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, both your music and your public image seem very much still rooted in the Southwest and in Arizona. How do you maintain that sense of home?
Roger Clyne: First of all, the music and the image are the same thing. There’s no artifice to the art. I’m from Arizona, I was born in Arizona, my whole family lives there. Everything I do is there: my past, present, and future. And as they say, you have to write about what you know. I get to use characters and metaphors and all sorts of the mythological figures from our great Southwest. It’s a natural expression for me.
It seems like a lot of bands on the road a comparable amount to you guys will, I don’t know, sleep for a month when they get back home or kind of lie low. It seems like you guys are always doing things when you head back to Tempe. Could that be part of it, as well?
Yeah, probably. Cause there’s really no rest for the independent artist. You always have to be creating and also working on the business platform that will support the art. Beyond that, I’m a husband, a father, and an active citizen, so I’m busy all the time. But I do usually indulge in a day or two of sleep after tour to get my circadian rhythm back. But I have to get back in the frame of mind for writing music and also going to kids’ soccer games, so it’s a pretty well-rounded existence.
Good for you, man. You guys are on the fifth Cantina Cast right now and I read in an interview that those casts are how you guys are planning on writing and sorting your way through the next record. How’s that process going?
It’s going well. The idea is a lot easier than the actual execution of it.
How so?
Well, we’re an independent band. We don’t have to ask permission from any record label — or anyone for that matter — to share our music. We discovered in the last two years, with the emerging live performance platform on the web, that we could share our music month by month. We began those in January and yesterday was our fifth one.
But it was pretty start-and-stop. It’s pretty tough to view. But then we came on with essentially our own encore. We signed off and I said, “Let’s go back on.” But it’s been fun. In four months, we shared five new songs.
Did you have any qualms at all about letting people see kind of how the sausage gets made before it ends up on the record?
Yeah, we actually do have some trepidation about that. There’s no guarantee it’s not going to change, and hopefully it will. But the point is … we’re sharing. We don’t try to put forth the air of completion or perfection. I guess, implicit in The Peacemakers ethos is that it’s OK to make mistakes. That’s how we evolve and grow and we feel comfortable as artists in this community with our audience. We feel comfortable making those mistakes.
With the new songs, do see any comparisons or contrasts developing with Unida Cantina (2011) or is it too early to say at this point?
For me it’s too early to say. I’m actually still waiting for that common thread in the songs to materialize. I know it’s there, but I don’t know what it is yet, which is usually the opposite of how I write. I’ll have an idea of how I want to express myself and put it forth in the songs. This is the opposite. It’s exciting, but it’s also a little bit nerve wracking. We hope, in the end, that lens is focused and we know … what we were doing (laughs).
We start off wandering and we’re going to end up somewhere. I hope at the end of the journey it looks like an agenda to get somewhere. Instead of having a map, we’re just making it up as we go along.
How is it nerve-wracking?
It is in one way, but in another it’s really liberating. It’s interesting to know that in one way we don’t really know where we’re going, but we’re also pretty good navigators. We’ve been professional musicians and had a good relationship with our fans for a long time. Even if we drive off a cliff, it’ll be an interesting moment.
The scream on the way down will sound really nice.
I think it’ll be more of a cheer. And it’ll probably come from the audience.
You know, at this point not being on a major label is a big part of what people see as the identity, you call it the “ethos,” of The Peacemakers. In an alternate reality, do you think you would have gotten where you are now had you been continually seeking out a major label?
No, there’s no way I’d be what I am now. I wouldn’t change a step. It’s been really challenging. The business part of the independent music business is really challenging. It’s made me have to expand areas of my brain and skillset that have been uncomfortable for me. You know, I don’t have to be a businessman as much a writer and performer. But in an alternate universe I definitely wouldn’t have been here. It’s been a long strange trip, but definitely one I wouldn’t change even at times when I wonder “what the hell am I doing here?”
When you talk about the bureaucracy or the quantitative assessment with a major label being uncomfortable for a musician, do you think you can get a more accurate reading on what people think of the music when it’s not filtered through a large corporate structure.
I sure hope so. I feel we do. Our connection with the fans is the best thing that we have. It’s the most sacred connection there is. If we don’t have the best show, like we had in Chicago last time or the show was too short, we’ll definitely hear it.
Really?
Oh sure! And by contrast if we had “the best show” in some city, people will let us know. It’s a pretty tactile relationship. We’re pretty hands-on with our fans and they’re the same with us. I really think we’re part of the same community: less an independent band than an interdependent band.
Ah, nicely put. “Honesty” is one of the words that comes up a lot with you guys either in reviews or with the fans. And it does seem like a two-fold thing. They could be saying the music is truthful or could be describing that they see the music as being done “the right way.” How do you relate to the word “honest” when someone says a Roger Clyne song is “honest?”
That’s an interesting question. That could be both how did they interpret it sonically or philosophically. I’m happy either way. Anytime the word “honest’ is used with us, I’m happy. To add to it, sometimes they might mean “transparent” because we share what’s in our heart pretty readily. And that’s the best stuff. I like a song when it makes me happy or makes me cry. If it falls flat or feels hollow, no matter how hooky or catchy or commercial it might be, I’m less apt to want to share it.
Are you always the first barometer then for a song? If you don’t like a song, it’s not going out there?
There have been songs that I thought I would throw away, but I brought them to the band and they thought they were worth keeping. One that comes to mind is “Maybe We Should Fall In Love.” I was about to drop it, but P.H. (Naffah, drums) and I were working together. I showed him some other song and he said, “What else do you got?” I said, “I’ve got this one, but it’s in the trash bin.” I played it for him and he said, “Like hell.” He helped me fix it up a little bit and added some stuff and now it’s an audience favorite: one that I think encapsulates what I said before, that Peacemakers ethos.
As far as your activism is concerned, on your website you have that big list of all the ways you’ve tried to make your tours fully sustainable. Was that putting your money where your mouth is? And is that a challenge, too? I can’t imagine anything harder to make sustainable than a tour bus of people driving all over.
It’s not. It’s not sustainable. Touring ultimately, we gobble diesel fuel, period. But it’s all we’ve got right now until we can tour on light rail or horses. We try to walk our talk, though. Someone recently said that we need to talk more about our walk, but I just don’t want to appear disingenuous. We’ve lived this eco-conscious way for as long as … it was inculcated to me as a kid. You see pretty early on how everything is connected and usury is not a good thing. It’s out of balance.
So we just work hard to keep it in balance. From everything from the pain in the ass that it is to keep a recycling bin on the bus because of space, to trying to find a biodiesel station here and there and whenever we can we augment our power with the solar panels on the bus. But finally somebody in publicity said, “You have to tell people you’re doing this.” But I was always a little reluctant to do so, because it’s something we’re going to do whether people talk about it or not.
I wanted to ask you — because I’m with Hear Nebraska and our mission is to shine a light on music and its culture from all over Nebraska — for you, maybe from Tempe looking outward, how cohesive is Arizona music and how have you seen it kind of evolve?
That’s a good question. Once upon a time, I could answer that question very definitely, because I was part of that Arizona music scene 365 days a year. I was lucky: I was living in Tempe and going to a college near my home and cross-pollinating with artists in the middle, late ‘90s and into the 2000s. And it was awesome in that club scene. I was electric and vital. It was cohesive.
Then for a better or worse, I started living on a tour bus playing my music in other states and I did lose touch with that Arizona music scene. Now I come back and I’m a different person … and I don’t go out to the clubs that much, so anything I answer is second-hand.
I do know a lot of my friends are still out there on Arizona stages sharing their music. But what I don’t feel is that there’s that strange hotbed — that one moment of magic that happened for a few years in Tempe like it did in, say, Seattle or Athens, Ga. or Austin. Those hot spots just kind of happen here or there and there’s no way you’re going to engineer them or predict it. I don’t think that’s happening right now, but I was there when it was and I probably should have paid better attention at the time. There’s a still a ton of awesome talent, but right now I don’t think that lightning is in the bottle.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is a Hear Nebraska intern. He’s extremely thankful for all the support these last two weeks and wants to pay you back in writing. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.