INDIOINDIO
A&M Press Department, Biography, © June 1989
Musically speaking, Indio is as elusive as its moniker. Neither a group in the conventional sense nor a solo project, per se, this Indio is shifting, evolving cast of characters playing the music of singer-songwriter-instrumentalist Gordon Peterson. And the music itself? That's best understood simply by listening to Big Harvest, Indio's debut album for A&M.
Peterson, a self-taught guitarist and pianist, is a native of Hamilton, Ontario, and has made his home in Toronto since the age of 19. "I taught myself to play so I could write songs," Peterson recalls. "As the music developed, I found it was easier for me to play certain things myself than try to verbalize my ideas to somebody else and hope that their interpretation would be the same as mine."
Peterson put a band together when he arrived in Toronto. But after more than two years of playing the local club circuit, he found himself frustrated by the confines of a set musical unit. "When I started recording my material," he explains, "I found it somewhat restricting to have to rely on the same three players all the time; it was easier to bring in the musicians I thought were appropriate for each particular track, so we broke up the band."
That process took a major step forward when Peterson was introduced to David Rhodes, guitarist with Peter Gabriel and others. The two struck up a musical and personal friendship, and began recording the material that would define Big Harvest.
Other Collaborators followed: bassist Larry Klein, who along with Peterson and engineer Peter Walsh, became Peterson's co-producers; Brenda Russell, who provides the ad-libbed vocal filigree on "Hard Sun, " the album's first single; Joni Mitchell, who sings a variety of background parts; Bill Dillon, best-known for his guitar work with Robbie Robertson; Indian violinist L. Subramanian; percussionist Alex Acuna; drummers Vincent Colaiuta and Manny Elias; arranger Van Dyke Parks, who plays accordion on the album and others.
The drummers played an especially crucial role in the evolution of the Indio sound, what with its dense, world rhythms. "I'm a lover of rhythms and interesting grooves," Peterson notes. "For some reason, when I write on an acoustic guitar, I happen to write around those non-Western rhythms. I gravitate towards them without even trying, and the next thing I know I'm working in some kind of strange 7/4 time or something. "
"When I do finally record, I have a very clear idea, groove-wise, of what I want to do; everything else is left up to spontaneity, and trying to capture the feeling I had when conceiving the song. I was fortunate to have two great drummers on the record to translate those ideas."
Those ideas also resulted in the general, if unconscious, avoidance of conventional pop song structure. "I conceive the songs around a feeling and an emotion rather than a particular pop form," Peterson says, which gives them a more natural, organic nature. The same can be said of the lyrics, which he describes as "either spiritual, personal searches, like 'Big Harvest' or observations, like 'Hard Sun,' or a combination of both. A lot of the songs are just written around feelings that I get about certain things; they're not real specific, or tied to current events."
As for the decision not
to put the name Gordon Peterson above the title, he says, "I didn't feel
comfortable using only my name. I like to get people 
together
and work in a a group with them; Indio is a band with changing members, not
a solo project per se. I find it's a great way to work. You have a group of
people contributing regularly to the music, and yet it's my own music. So it's
the best of both worlds.
"Most of all, I try to never intellectualize the process of making music--I don't think about it, I just do it." And his hope for Big Harvest? "I hope people listen to the record and get out of it what they can...I just want people to get a feeling from it that they can enjoy."