So, how did you guys all get together?
Jeff: Well, how do we make this long story short... I met Richard about ten years ago, he was playing the same clubs that I was playing in Seattle with the Fastbacks, and whenever I've had a song over the last few years I'll call him up and say "you gotta come kick it," and he's been really helpful in that way...
Richard: I've valued his friendship ever since then... He's gone to astronomical levels.
Jeff: And Robbi... Actually, I saw him play in Boston with his band Tribe After Tribe, and we asked them to come open up some shows with us, Pearl Jam, a couple of tours, and we developed a friendship out of that. Shared some books, conversations, some camping trips, kinda normal stuff. The last thing was to play music together, so...
Robbi: Normal... Normal... (laughs)
Jeff: Normal as far as other people.

So the idea for the Three Fish just graduated out of your mutual friendship?
Robbi: Yea. We were camping one time, and I said to Jeff -- we were having such a good time in this place, we were in the hot springs and stars and the water was crushing at the bottom of this cliff -- and I said to Jeff, you know, if I had a guitar right now I could explode the Universe. So the next camping trip was actually the guitars. So we just jammed, and every... within every hour a song was formed. And I would sing the lyrics and look back on it and I'd write the lyrics down listening back to it and stuff. It was beautiful, but we had all these little tapes, so we decided to put it all on a CD for our friends and for myself, cause I really love what happened. And it became... What happened?.. We're on a tour now? (laughs)
Richard: There was no preconceived idea of making a record or the level of where things have grown into now. And I think that's the beauty of it, I think. There was no plan. A lot of bands have this idea, this plan...
Jeff: We didn't have a plan until they dangled a dollar bill over our heads... (laugh) No, no, I'm kidding.
Robbi: A dollar bill? (sings) Working for...

Did you get approached by the record company?
Jeff: Well, I mean, all we did is we made a few tapes for us and our friends, and I sent a tape to Goldie who's our A&R man at Epic...
Robbi: Yeah, but he's more than that, Goldie's been with them...
Jeff: Right, right. Mainly, just to show him what I've been doing the last two or three years, whatever, and just to hear what his feedback was, cause he's a huge music fan. And he called back, and there was three or four songs that he was super excited about and said "you know, you should put this out." And people, you know, in my other band, Stone called me within a couple of hours after I gave him the tape and was like, "man, it's so good, I've been listening to it all night," and so that kinda gave me the confidence to put it out. Up to that point it was like, well, it's just kinda our little secret, and that was good -- we could get together and do it as often as we wanted without having any sort of baggage over it. And that's what we're trying to do right now: we're trying to tour and do all the things that a normal band does but still trying to retain that purity and that place where we can go back to music and hopefully not allow too much of that garbage to... and it's a big meditation to get back to that place.
Richard: It's a good chance for Jeff to express himself outside of what been a big part of his life, obviously, and also for Robbi and I...
Jeff: It's all about music, man.
Robbi: Yes, this is one project where business is not in it. This is quite interesting. Because when you're in the recording studio and you're putting down a guitar solo, and the record company is giving you a hundred fifty thousand dollars to make a record, and you're playing the guitar solo and you blow one note. And you gotta basically redo the whole solo or find a way to cover that note, but subconsciously, I think, there's this ticking going on, the telltale heart... (sings) Working for the yankee dollar. It gets there, you know, it comes into your music, I think it does. But with this project, because it was just about having fun, it's taught me so much, it's reminded me so much of what it really meant... I mean when I was a kid I used to stand with the mike... with a broomstand, "hey mom, mom come here," I'd put on a Johnny Winter record, I was like, dancing all over the room for my mom. There was no business there. It was purely, "hey, I love this feeling, this feels so good, this note is so good..." And it's the same thing with us. Jeff would come with these acoustic guitar parts, and I'd say, "Jeff, I need to sing on that right away, I can hear it, I can hear the melody, it's so beautiful. Laced, for instance, if you listen to the guitar parts and the bass line on that thing -- Jeff played all of these things on this little cassette, and they couldn't find the 24-track. So I said, "but I love that piece of music," so we just dumped this straight on the 24-track. If you had $150,000 you wouldn't do that. That's not, you know... The record company doesn't want that.

Did you feel this need to simplify your music after Pearl Jam just exploded to such success?
Jeff: Well, I think there's probably a little bit of reaction to... Just wanting to do something different, you know, and I think there were a lot of times when maybe even a riff would be almost kind of like a heavy Pump kind of riff, an arena riff if you will (laughs), and rather than approaching it -- which typically in the studio you would say "this is a heavy riff, we'll put it through a couple of Marshall stacks and make it sound really big" -- instead of that, I would say, "well let's put it on an acoustic guitar," and we'll play it on a capo on a twelve-fret, and it'll sound like a mandolin, it'll sound like this wimpy little thing, but it's this heavy riff... So just trying to approach... Just trying to take chances, you know, that's what it was all about, it was all about... you know, there was no plan to put out a record or anything, so we could do whatever we wanted to. There was only four or five of us in the room when we were doing it, and so we didn't have to worry about anybody laughing at us or anybody judging us.
Robbi: And we tried not to simplify it because of the musical experience, because of the way it was written -- the whole songwriting process became so simple that we've tried during this whole tour not to simplify everything that we're doing. For instance, I used to have this thing where I'd have two shots of Tequila before I'd go on stage, just to loosen the rational side, and Richard would like to have a beer on stage...
Richard: Or a glass of wine.
Robbi: Or a glass of wine or something. So we decided now we're not even gonna do that, we're gonna go on stage totally clear and just... Because that was how the music came. And the way we talk and the way we communicate with each other, and I don't know, if you were at the show tonight you saw reading poetry to the audience. Now, in order to read a poem and really understand it you have to simplify and stop that machine in your head, the one that's always going...
Jeff: Chatter.
Robbi: "Chatter-chatter-chatter..." The computer in your head needs to be slowed down to the perfect point where you can reach the gap between the thoughts. So we're sort of using this tour to try and increase that experience. You know, simplify doing yoga, breathing and stuff before we go on stage, as opposed to "hey, let's go," you know, like "hurray, hurray, let's go," like a basketball team would maybe do, but rather go to a silent place, and then go spinning.

What was it you were actually reading?
Jeff: It was Rilke, it was from a book called Difficulties... What's it called?
Robbi: The Difficulties of Love...
Richard: Love...
Robbi and Jeff: Love and Other Difficulties.
Richard: That's something we've all shared in our friendship.
Robbi: The relationship stuff...
Richard: The intricacies of love... Primarily, we were influenced or have a fond likeness to Rumi, which I think we've shared reading that on some of the other tour dates... to kinda change it up a little bit... That's another great thing about this is beyond the musical experience. It's the first time, actually, in my life that I've been able to take it to another level and actually share some writing material, which a lot of bands are strictly about the music, it's almost tunnel vision, and I think it's a great thing when it can sort of go above that, beyond that, sort of use it...
Robbi: What was the poem that I used tonight... Lorca. I opened with Lorca tonight. Because I read this poem in The Poet In New York. Yeah. It's a cool book.

Could you recite it now? What exactly it meant and why you chose that...
Robbi: The wind one day came to my soul with an odour of jasmine. And the wind said to my soul,
For all my odour of jasmine I want your odour of roses.
And I said to the wind, "But I have no roses.
All the flowers in my garden are dead."
And the wind said, "Well, I'll take the withered leaves
and the yellowed petals," and the wind left.
And I wept, and I said to myself,
What have I done to the garden that was entrusted to me?
I think it's a beautiful poem, because it kind of captures... Sometimes I look, you know... When I go to the beach in Venice, in California, I go to the beach in Venice, and you go up to the water, and the waves are coming, and the sound and the seaguls, and you look at the seaguls, and they're all maimed, and you look at the water and it's junk, there's junk all over the ground, it's like, oh what have I done to this garden that was entrusted to me? Sometimes you might... Some people arrive at that place where they say to themselves, you know, "what have I done to contribute to the destruction of the planet?" Driving a car is an ordeal these days, it's like, you know, I'm pumping that gas from the ground into the sky... I love the way the poets do it. But I think the one poet that we love the most is Rumi because of his passion to go beyond those thoughts, straight into the heart of love.

 

Order Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties
Order The Poet in New York

The poetry, and the influences you have -- I read the bio, and there's a number of them that you had written down. I just wanted you to tell me about each one of them and how they influenced you.
Jeff: Each one?
Robbi: Can you remind us?

Sure. (hands Jeff the record company bio)
Jeff: Kind of spontaneous recollection of the bio... A lot of this was just stuff that was laying around in the studio, or it was conversations that we had while we were in the studio.
Robbi: I think that the Sufi music one will tie every... all of it up. Or not necessarily the Sufi music, but the whirling dervishes. They will tie all of this stuff up, because the whirling dervish, what he does is, he spins. Not like the ballerina who does the marking and stuff, very mathematical, but he just spins, and the whole thing is to achieve the silent place in between. And it's the silence between the thoughts. If you have one thought and you have another thought, between these thoughts there's this gap of silence. And if you can achieve that... When you see Hendrix playing the guitar, you can actually see that he is in a silent place. In his eyes, the way his mouth moves before that note comes out: "Ooa..." and the note comes. He's so in tune, he is so one with that guitar, there's a silence about it. And all these poets, all these people talk about that stillness that can reflect... You know, like the Zen people, they talk about the still lake that has a perfect reflection. A stormy lake cannot reflect life properly. So there's a silence, there's a silence that you can achieve in the music, in the middle of that chaos and all that stuff. The Grateful Dead, when they're playing, when they really hit the peak of their playing, you can see that Garcia is so... was so... inside. All the players are just listening. In order to listen you need to have a silence. I think that might... The whirling dervishes are good... it's a good tie-up of all that stuff... of all those poets: Rilke is talking about that, you know, the silence.
Jeff: You know, Lars from Metallica, when he's playing drums he just has this silence. (laugh) Nah... I saw him, he doesn't have a silence.

Yeah, they're off... What I was... I guess, you don't find this in music -- there's so much poetry, spirituality, religious overtones, and that's at least new to me.
Jeff: Yeah, and you have to be really careful, see, because I mean, you can't just go full-on into it and make it this religious experience and expect to... for people to understand it and for people to get into it. People come to these venues to see rock-n-roll or whatever, and so... We've been really careful about how much poetry reading that we do or try to balance out the set with livelier numbers with more quiet numbers. So far I think it's worked pretty good. Like, you kind of wonder initially how people are responding, and it seems that somewhere halfway through the set you see people kinda like...
Richard: Identifying.
Jeff: Yeah, somehow finding some focus. But you know... There's probably some people coming expecting some sort of Pearl Jam experience or something, and it's just... it's just so different. You know, it's really different.

(to Richard) What you were saying earlier that some kids, like, come up and run to Jeff for an autograph, and that's new for you.
Richard: Well, I think what I was saying is that there's obviously gonna be a certain number of the crowd probably a little eager about the Pearl Jam connection, and I think Jeff's been really great at doing... being honest to... this is a definite separate experience, but... There were times when, I think it was in Philly, when there was someone that obviously wanted something else than what we were about. So there's been occasional...
Jeff: It's been so good though, I mean...
Richard: Yes, for the most part.
Jeff: The people that come to the shows have been really, really respectful, which is... I mean, before the tour I was actually sweating a lot and calming myself ahead of time thinking, ok, there's gonna be people yelling stuff, and I'm gonna deal with that in a really calm manner, you know, I'm not gonna step outside of what we're trying to achieve, which is that calmness... And there are times, I mean, Philadelphia or wherever we were, and my instinct was like... (makes a severe face) I wanted to get into the guy's face or whatever, and it took care of itself as soon as I kinda just let it take care of itself. There were people in the audience that were in his face, like "shut up, we're trying to watch the show," whatever. And that's a huge tribute to people coming to these shows with open minds.
Robbi: In fact, that guy actually bonded the audience that night. Because straight off when he was so on about that thing the whole place was just like, "get out."

Was he yelling "Pearl Jam" or something?
Robbi: Yeah, he was saying silly things. I can't remember exactly what he was saying. But while he [Jeff] was speaking now, you know what it reminded me of is, I saw this documentary on hurricanes and people that study the hurricanes, and when they were doing it the government didn't think it was something worthy of being studied, so they would get these smaller, little planes, really weak, and they would go through this thing to hit that silent spot in the middle, and that's where they were doing all their research. So they would get these little planes and they were going through hell: cheap equipment, cheap planes. And I think something like that is what we're achieving: it's like a small little airplane, it's not something a lot of people would put their money into, big corporations, you know... At the moment. but in a few years' time I think things that we're doing are going to become more manifest.
Richard: That's something also, when you're getting into that music you can't expect people to go to that place with you, but I think we've been very sincere about... when the set and on-tour playing gets to a certain level it seems to me that people are there for the most part. It's a nice response.

Tell me about the name Three Fish and the story about three fish.
Jeff: It's based on a Rumi poem. [Read the entire poem here]. There was a point when we were in the studio, and Robbi asked me if there was any particular poem that I'd read lately that had hit me hard, and so I showed him the story of the three fish, the poem by Rumi, and he started reading it. Meanwhile, I picked up a guitar and started strumming a guitar, and he just started reading over the top of my... what I was playing on guitar, and it turns out that the guy in the control room was rolling tape. It was this long piece, and afterwards we were like, oh yeah, it was fun, you know, whatever, and a few days later we put it up and listened to it, and we were like, wow, that was really cool for improv. And we got this idea, he was saying that we can do a children's record of these really great poems that have... This story almost has this really simple visual. A kid could hear that story and imagine... But there's a great message in it.
Robbi: (to Jeff) While we were mixing it you were doodling, right? He drew these little fish... Did I cut you off there?
Jeff: No, no.
Robbi: So he drew these little fish, and I was like, wow, that's pretty, that's really pretty. And then he wrote "Three Fish" underneath that, and... and then I don't know what happened, it's just like...
Jeff: It just was like the name on the tapes.

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