Published: 2011/05/06
by Brian Robbins

How do you describe dub versions of reggae music to someone who’s either never listened or (even tougher) has listened but doesn’t understand it? I recently gave it my best shot in a review of Dub Is A Weapon’s new Vaporized album:

“Think of the art of creating a dub mix of a given song as deconstructing and then reconstructing an already-recorded piece of music. The players may all still be there, but now they’re sonically reshaped. A front-and-center melodic theme is now a ghost that passes effortlessly through the piece, while a countermelody that was almost invisible in its original form washes over everything. Bass lines become the skin rather than the pulse; drums become voices for a moment, only to disappear and then return as bone. The song is the universe and the engineer is the Great Spirit; reality is reshaped by the faders.”

If that even begins to do the deed definition-wise, then swell. But how do you describe Dub Is A Weapon’s live-on-the-spot dub music? Well, you could take the explanation above and replace the faders with real, live human beings; fade-outs, blend-ins, and re-shapes are a function of fingertips, toes, breath, and a collective creative mind. Last night’s performance of a given tune is not going to be the same as tonight’s; and what was happening 30 seconds ago may never happen quite the same way again. (Or maybe it will.)

And ringmaster for it all is Dave Hahn, who rose to his own challenge of putting together a live dub band a decade ago. From backing reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry on stage to the release of Vaporized, it’s fair to say that Hahn and company have made it work in grand style. And they’re far from done.

Our interview with Hahn took place live from the sidewalks of New York City via cell phone. Only seconds into the conversation there was a sudden explosion of sirens, horns, and roaring engines as a pack of emergency vehicles raced by.

The cacophony faded; then there was a heartbeat of silence.

“You okay?” I asked, not sure if we were still connected.

“Wow,” answered Hahn, rather dreamily. “I should’ve sampled that.” And then he laughed.

Ladies and gentlemen; boys and girls; children of all ages: we present Dave Hahn – a true dubmaster.

BR: Let’s start with talking about the path that led you to the world of dub. First of all, what got you started as a guitar player?

DH: Well, I got really fixated on Hendrix as a young kid. My dad had the original Woodstock album – it was a triple LP, right? It was the one that had all the people who performed there. Listening to Jimi on that really got me into wanting to play the guitar. In fact, I still use that kind of tone in the band.

BR: And what were you listening to for reggae as a lad?

DH: Actually, The Police.

BR: Really? I wasn’t expecting that. (laughter)

DH: Yeah – you can tell that they were heavily influenced by reggae if you listen to them in a deep way.

The first groups that I played with when I moved to New York were part of the ska scene in the late 90s, which really was a fusion of a few different things, with deference toward Jamaican music. Some of the bands I played with were into the Bosstones or No Doubt kind of sound – a little bit more punk rocky with the upbeat ska guitar riff. It had the Jamaican foundation.

BR: How about your first exposure to dub?

DH: I was playing in bands with a lot of older musicians at that point. We’d be driving in the band van and somebody would pop on a cassette of really trippy, say, King Tubby stuff – with all the echo and reverb drenched on it – and I’m like, “What is this?” (laughs) That’s when I started to seek out that kind of music. And that’s when I first got the idea: “Having a band that could do this would be really cool!”

BR: Ah – the scene of so many musical discoveries: the road trip in the band van. (laughter)

DH: Exactly! But, yeah, that’s where my interest in that sort of music came from. In 1999 I moved into a loft in Brooklyn and set up a music studio there. That’s where the idea of the group really began. At first, I did some experimental recordings; it was in 2001 that we really began the “band project,” so to speak. I was playing a lot with Antibalas at the time and there were a couple of good friends of mine from that band who I recruited, along with some people that I knew from the ska world. I started off just recording an album’s worth of material – it wasn’t as if we were going to be a band, per se, but then one of the guys who played on it said, “You ought to take this live, you know?” That’s when we began to work on creating the sound of what we’d done in the studio on stage … and I believe the first show was in November of 2001.

BR: Who of the current lineup was in that original band?

DH: Ben Rogerson, who’s now playing bass, was originally on guitar. I went to high school with Ben; he’s one of my oldest friends. When I was putting together the recording project in the loft, I borrowed people I knew from the scene but also wanted to get my friends involved. Ben also loaned me some recording equipment that helped get things off the ground.

Larry McDonald, who plays percussion in Dub Is A Weapon, was part of the original line-up, too. Larry’s my main partner in Dub, basically.

BR: I know Larry’s roots go right back to Jamaica and he’s played with a lot of folks over the years. Tell us a little bit about him; he sounds like an interesting cat.

DH: (laughs) He is, for sure. First of all, Larry didn’t actually start playing percussion until he was in his 20s.

BR: Really?

DH: Yeah – he’d been working as an accountant in Jamaica, actually … (laughter)

BR: Larry?

DH: Uh-huh. It’s this great mystical story that Larry tells about how he got into music. He and some friends were riding around and at a rest stop they changed seats. Five minutes later, they got into an accident and the guy who took the seat where Larry’d been sitting was killed.

BR: Oh, man …

DH: It was one of those moments where you start reevaluating your life, you know? “What am I doing? What do I want to be doing?” Larry had always wanted to play the congas and had never done it. After the accident, he decided to get a drum – and it changed his whole life.

He spent a lot of time recording in the industry down there in Jamaica. He tells some really funny stories of playing at the Playboy Club in Kingston – he was in a trio there. On any given night, they might be playing, like, in between comedy sets by Pat Morita, the guy that was in The Karate Kid or something … (laughter) Classic stories.

BR: Paying his dues, right?

DH: That’s right. And a lot of guys would have been happy just to stay right there in Jamaica, playing in the local reggae scene and getting what work they could. But Larry was just too musically curious to stay in Jamaica. The island was one thing, but he wanted to go to the US where all the best musicians were – he wanted to improve himself.

Larry went to the Bay Area in 1974 – I was born in Oakland in 1974, actually – and he ended up hooking up with Taj Mahal, touring around the country in an RV for a while.

BR: And at one point he played with Gil Scott-Heron, right?

DH: That’s right. That was in the late 80s.

Larry’s really somebody who’s “been there and done that” … it’s a really big compliment that someone that accomplished as a musician is involved with us, you know? The guy could be performing with lots of people, but he’s putting his time into Dub Is A Weapon and is such an integral part of the group.

I don’t really dictate what Larry does on stage. I write bass lines and melodies and stuff, but Larry is really there just to add his flavor – he can do whatever he wants. That may be part of why he’s with us; rather than be in some situation where you’re playing the same thing over and over and over for five minutes, he’s free to do his thing.

BR: That’s so cool. Let’s see … to get back to the band’s history, we should talk about when you had the opportunity to back Lee “Scratch” Perry on tour.

DH: I believe that happened around 2005 through 2007, off and on. I’d be lying if I said Lee wasn’t a big influence on what I do. Seeing him perform at the old Wetlands on Halloween of 1997 was definitely one of the things that got me thinking about performing dub live. The Mad Professor was doing the sound and dubbing out the band while Lee was doing his whole shamanistic routine on stage. It was all very cosmic, plus it was Halloween, so it was a really fun show. That night I probably thought, “You know what would be really cool? To start a dub band and work with Lee Perry.” It was amazing when we really did.

BR: How did you connect?

DH: It was almost like one of those classic “music business stories,” you know? It was like the scene in the movie when the band gets discovered. (laughs) We did this pretty lengthy tour that took us all the way down into Jacksonville, FL. And that Jacksonville show was … I don’t know … there were only about four or five people there. (laughs)

BR: Oh, no …

DH: Yeah, but there was one guy who was really interested in what we were doing. He bought, like, three CDs and four t-shirts and kept talking to me about the band’s history and all that stuff. A few months later, he e-mailed me and said, “Hey, I’m working on bringing Lee Perry over for some tour dates …” (laughter)

And that was it: we happened to play far enough south for this guy who had a contact with Lee to see us and he’s the one who made the match. He brought Lee over and hired us to back him.

It’s just one of those things: to be traveling that far from home and only have that many people come out to see you … and then everything come together. It’s all about timing and where you are.

BR: Everything happens for a reason, man.

DH: Exactly. And I think we played really well that night, even though there were only four or five people there.

That’s one of the things about this band: everybody is in it for the music and trying to make it be as good as it can be every night. We’re going to have a great time, no matter how big the audience is – five or five hundred. People who are just in it for the accolades or whatever are only happy if there are a lot of people – they need that.

BR: You mentioned seeing Scratch perform at Wetlands with the Mad Professor running the faders; now your band came into the picture with your live dub approach.

DH: I think of myself as being the chief dub organizer on stage, which requires a couple different things: you can’t “ride the faders” like you can in a studio, so I mimic that by cueing instrumentalists to come in and out – lay out for a few measures here; come back for a few measures here; and so on. Plus, all the instruments are wired through a mixing board that I have on stage, so I can add the dub effects that way, as well.

When we backed Lee, I just added another channel for him with his vocals going through my mixer and I’d dub him out and cue in the band like I would with my music. Lee had things he wanted us to do, but a lot of times I was trying to feed off what I was seeing in the crowd and feeling from the music … manipulating the band, so to speak, to complement what he was doing.

BR: I’m guessing you had to be on your toes with Lee.

DH: Oh, yeah – there was one night when Lee just decided he wanted the bass line to be different so he turned around, grabbed the neck of the bass, and started singing the bass line to my bass player. (laughs) Lee’s kind of a diminutive guy in stature – he’s like 5’-something – and Big Dan, our bass player, was 6’4” and weighed maybe 250, 260 lbs. It was pretty comical to watch.

BR: And the band line-up at that time?

DH: By then it was myself, Larry, Dan Jeselsohn on bass, and Ben on guitar – plus, we’d added Maria Eisen on tenor saxophone. David Butler was on drums – that was before Madhu Siddappa joined us. We also had a keyboard player who isn’t with us any more – a guy named Dave Wake, who’s playing with a couple of other cool groups in the Milwaukee area these days.

BR: Now that we have the core band established, let’s talk about the process of what you do. Recently, when I was writing a review of Vaporized, I described the art of creating a dub mix of a given song as deconstructing and then reconstructing an already-recorded piece of music. Is that a good way to put it?

DH: I think that’s exactly what it is. I don’t think enough people focus on the deconstruction/reconstruction part. They think more about the sound effects, you know what I’m saying?

BR: Yeah, I do. So I’m wondering if you write your songs specifically for the dub process – or do you come up with a good, solid song and then work out a dub arrangement?

DH: The dub arrangement is never worked out ahead of time at all; that’s totally off the cuff. I mean, there are some patterns that we follow with a certain amount of regularity, but the arrangement of the songs – when the elements are deconstructed and reconstructed, as you said – are something that I’m coming up with off the tip of my head. I’m feeling like the bass should be brought up here or the drums should drop out or we should have the rhythm guitar lay out – I’m just hearing these things in my head. It’s just like I’m in the studio and doing it with a mixing board. The songs are composed of a melodic statement, a chord progression, and a bass line.

BR: So the basic arrangement is a constant – and as far as the dub process goes, what goes down in any given performance is totally improvised?

DH: Exactly: the composed portions of it are the elements we just talked about – but the dub treatment is something that we’ll do differently every night of the week. I would hate to say it’s pure improvisation, because I don’t think that actually happens. When someone takes a solo, there are certain licks that they like to play, right? There are certain things that they go for – they have a repertoire of things they use.

And I think I have a repertoire of things that I use to orchestrate the deconstruction/reconstruction process … but it’s not pre-planned – it’s just done.

What’s cool is, when we first started playing, we really didn’t know how to do it – it was uncharted territory for everyone. But now that we’ve had an existing core lineup for a while, everyone kind of knows when to lay out and when to come back in. All the musicians have started to participate in that process because they’ve been in the band long enough. I’m still, like, the main arbiter of what happens … every now and then, I’ll turn and tell somebody to lay out, because that’s what I’m hearing right then and that’s what I want it to sound like.

It’s an improvisational thing. The way we drop in and out and the way the effects are added – that’s all done live. We recorded the album it like an old jazz record: we went in and did maybe three live takes for each tune and chose the one we liked the best.

BR: Cool – I’m a sucker for situations where the musicians are live in the studio, rather than e-mailing their parts in from opposite ends of the planet or whatever. So you are the “conductor” in a sense – you’re cueing people on when to drop back or blend in or whatever – but you’re also manipulating a mixing board at the same time during a performance, right?

DH: That’s right – and calling the role a “conductor” is right. I mean, that’s really what it is. What I oftentimes call it is being the “dub organizer.” What you’re trying to do in a live setting is control the individual players just as you would the faders on a mixing board in a studio. That’s what I’m trying to recreate on stage.

BR: Your primary instrument is guitar?

DH: That’s right.

BR: Do you have a go-to axe that you favor?

DH: I sure do: I have an Ibanez hollow-body that’s styled after a Gibson ES-175. I was really into jazz in high school – I idolized Wes Montgomery – and I wanted a hollow-body; a big jazz box. I’ve had that same guitar for 20 years or so now.

BR: And do you write on the guitar?

DH: Yeah, the guitar is usually the primary focus. I also own a bass and I’ll use that for working out the bass line. Actually, I wrote one of the songs on the new album – “Turmoil” – on piano. I was at my parents’ house and they have a piano. I was just goofing around on it and came up with that little lick that I liked … the melody isn’t so complicated on that tune, but I like the statement – it’s cool and to the point.

BR: Where these songs on Vaporized written primarily for the album, or had you had some of them in your pocket for a while?

DH: Well, I don’t know as I write songs for an album as much as when I have the inspiration to do so. I think most of these were written in 2006 or 2007. In general, I write when the inspiration’s there; it’s not like, “Oh – I need nine songs for an album.”

I think we recorded twelve songs in total and it ended up we could only fit nine on Vaporized.

BR: Ah! The beginnings of the next album. (laughter) That’s what people always ask, just as soon as you finish something, you know: “That’s nice. Now, what’s next?” (laughter)

DH: Hopefully, more of the same. (laughs) I don’t know, though – we may do something a little different. I think we’re going to try to incorporate some new things. For instance, I’ve started bringing a theremin to gigs. Actually, I’m playing a theremin on the last song on the record.

BR: Cool – I wondered if that wasn’t a theremin. Nothing else sounds quite like it.

DH: That’s right. I really like the sound of it – it’s a really great noise effect. I have some dub albums from the UK that have theremin all over them.

BR: I love the idea of the theremin, because it’s just not a matter of flipping a switch or pushing a button; you’re controlling it by how you work your hands around it … it has soul.

DH: Yeah – it’s responding to how far away your hands are from the antennas. It’s getting to the point where I’m getting that real “mad scientist” look: I have the mixing board, the theremin … (laughs) … it’s looking a little outlandish up there on stage, but it’s perfect for us.

BR: Dave, thanks for taking the time to talk. Words can’t really do the process of creating live dub justice, but hopefully we can spark the interest of some folks who’ve never put an ear to it before.

DH: We like our music, but I’m sure it isn’t for everyone … some people don’t really get into the repetitive elements that exist in what we play, but for people who like being hypnotized, it’s great. (laughs) And that’s kind of the way it is.