 The last concert on the Los Lobotomys 2005 tour was at Fatter Eskild in Århus, Denmark, and after the gig we sat down with John Peña in the club's brand new studio.
- What have you been up to lately?
Well, the last five years I've been developing a production company, so I've basically been developing artists and writing a lot of songs. I've been doing that with a partner in Los Angeles and it's called CSMwordsandmusic (CSMwordsandmusic.com). You'll see a little bit of bio of me there. My partner's name is Shele Sondheim and we've been working for the last five years building it up. We're still doing that, but now I want to play music again. I only played in Los Angeles for some time, but then I told the guys 'I want to go out and play again'. We started last year and we went to Bulgaria and hopefully next year we'll do more travel.
© 2005 - Carsten Weide
This year I was supposed to go to Mexico to do a live CD with some other guys and then I'm going to Guatemala and Central America, and we're doing a Latin jazz concert there. So I'm starting to get around and playing again and it's a lot of fun and I want to do this more.
- Are you considering putting out a solo album?
Yeah. Actually I've been asked that for many years and I've never had the time to do it. I've written songs with a lot of guys, like David Garfield, David Goldblatt and a lot of different guys that I really like playing and writing with, so hopefully we'll have a record next year. We have the songs and the material and now it's just a question of getting the guys together. I already talked to Chad Wackerman and he's going to do a song or two with me, and Gregg Bissonette and a couple of different drummers that I like playing with and some new drummers also, like Oscar Seaton. It's going to be a very eclectic mix of music, so it'll be a lot of fun. But we'll see, hopefully it won't take another year.
- When did you start playing the bass?
Well, I started playing guitar between five and six years old. My father was a music teacher and a guitar player. He did it professionally but quit when he got married, but he kept teaching music so he taught me guitar. Then a couple of years later I picked up the bass because my father and my brothers played guitar. Too much guitar, so I started playing bass on the guitar, so someone said 'hey, let's get him a bass'. Actually I was playing in church, gospel music...
- In New York?
Actually that was in Puerto Rico. In New York I was playing guitar as a little kid. We moved from New York to Puerto Rico and then I picked up the bass. From there we moved to Florida and I wanted to continue to explore, and I was 17 or 18 years old when I moved to Florida. And then I got really nice jobs and everything, but I always looked at the credits on albums and every time I looked, I saw the same guys. Like Abraham Laboriel, Marcus Miller, Nathan East and all these guys and I thought 'I want to do that, I want to be on records, that's really cool'. So I think it was 1981 that I moved to Los Angeles.
I wanted to go back to New York, which is my hometown, but after being in Florida and Puerto Rico, I got used to the weather, I like the warm weather, you know. I thought I'd try California, it's supposed to be nice and warm and there's another music industry there, there's movies, there's commercials, there's a lot of things so I moved there.
Little by little I started working and then by the second or third year I got my first professional gig. I did an audition for Alex Acuña from Weather Report. I met him at a club with some friends. They took me there and asked me if I wanted to see Alex. You know, I grew up listening to Weather Report, and also Herbie Hancock, so these are guys that I love to hear. So I met him and we had a good time, and then he asked me if I wanted to audition for a gig. And I said 'Yeah, man!', and he asked me to meet him the next day. I thought there was going to be a band, but it was just me and him there. We started playing and had a good time, but then he said 'Stop, give me a second.. .', and then he went to the phone: 'Tania Maria, I got a bass player!' So that was my first real gig. I did two or three records with her and then we started travelling and from there it just kept going.
Then I met David and all these guys who were playing at the Baked Potato. From there I could start playing with Larry Carlton, Joe Sample, The Crusaders, Carlos Santana and then I did some pop stuff with Diana Ross. And then I started doing a lot of records. Alex Acuña and Jeff Porcaro were really instrumental in getting me into the studio scene. And because they enjoyed playing with me and I enjoyed playing with them, they really helped me; they took me under their wings. I started doing a lot of session work, which was really cool, so I started playing with all these guys that I looked up to and I just kept on going from there...
© 2005 - Carsten Weide
- Who influenced you as a bass player? Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke?
Yes, Jaco was a big influence and Stanley Clarke was another big influence, and Ron Carter, believe it or not. I haven't been playing the upright, which I like to play, but I didn't really take the time to do it. But I enjoy listening to Ron Carter and Eddie Gomez. I started listening to a lot of sax players and one of my favourite sax players is Michael Brecker, and then I finally got to record with Michael Brecker and that was really cool. And I like to listen to guitar players, piano players and sax players...
- We just talked to Chad Wackerman about his influences and how it comes across in his playing and his music. Chad thinks he's probably too close to it to really decide if that is the case. Do you think your influences come across in your playing?
The influences for me were like a starting point, to try to understand what they were doing and the sound and the emotion of playing. But then I brought my own interpretation because you develop your own vocabularies, sort of speak. For me it was a little difficult because I didn't like to stick with one kind of sound and one kind of music. In L.A. it was tough, because when I moved there I started playing salsa music, and then everybody said 'John Peña only plays salsa music', then I played R&B and people said 'he only plays R&B '. When I started playing rock, it was the same thing. They try to label you, but I really didn't want to be labelled. So I started playing jazz, and that opened the doors to the all the guys that I really liked to play with. I've been very blessed to play my with favourite drummers, like Vinnie, Gregg, Chad, John Robinson, all these wonderful drummers, so that opened the doors for me.
- You learned from other players yourself, do you do clinics?
I started doing clinics this year, because I wanted to start playing out again and then I get more requests to play clinics. Obviously you get more requests to do clinics when you're playing because people will actually see you. Now that I'm performing a little bit more live, I'm starting to do a little bit more clinics. I did some master clinics in L.A., and the more I get out, the more I start doing.
- I remember that Will Lee said his first gig with Los Lobotomys was in L.A. - on a 5-string bass - and he'd never played a 5-string before. He actually thinks he sucked that evening and he was surprised when the guys asked him to play on the live CD.. Anyway, what makes a 5-string so different, and why are players moving towards 5-string basses?
Well, in the eighties they introduced the synth-bass and that had a lower register, where you can go deeper and lower. A lot of songs were being played on the MOOG bass because that was the real synth bass that everybody liked to play, and it's still the classic. The 5-string brought the depth and dynamically - if you do it right - it really feels good and that's why people are going 5-string. A lot of guys made the transition, but a lot of us liked to play Fender basses and that was a little hard, because they didn't make a bass that felt like the Fender 4-string. But now there are plenty of axes, basses that they make that have that same feel.
- Let's talk about Los Lobotomys. What do you think about the tour?
It's been a blast. Fun, but exhausting because we've been teaching everyday and playing every night, pretty much non-stop. When we flew in, we went straight to work, so we were still going through jet-lag and that was a little tough, but it was still fun. It's been a good tour and it's nice to bring back Los Lobotomys, the original Los Lobotomys, because when David started the band it was really as a community of musicians, it wasn't about any particular person. It was just about guys getting together while having fun and making music.
One of the things that I really loved about the original band is when I met Jeff Porcaro, and Jeff and I really had a special thing. I loved playing with Jeff and he took me under his wing, and we wanted to play together. Los Lobotomys went through a lot of transitions and in 1994, we made it a quartet because it made it a lot easier for travelling and stuff like that, and also for other reasons, it was the right thing to do. Steve Lukather had his own solo career and then he wanted to go out with a band. We had been playing already in Los Angeles with this band, so it made the transition a lot easier.
© 2005 - Carsten Weide
- The 1994 album was released in Europe as a Steve Lukather album, but also released in the U.S. as a Los Lobotomys album...
We really wanted to keep the Los Lobotomys attitude of the music. It's really everybody. Besides Lukather, David wrote stuff and there were different people, and now we want to get back to that same thing as a community, so hopefully next year you'll see - when we do the next Lobotomys record - it's not just me playing bass. Will Lee will probably play. We'll get different bass players, like Jimmy Johnson, and different drummers, like Vinnie, Gregg and Chad. And different guitar players too, like it used to be with the whole combination of cats. We're getting back to that feeling again, because it's really band-oriented, you know.
- It'll still be instrumental?
Well, it could be instrumental, but there might be some vocal stuff because we have guys that can sing. We might surprise Lenny, and Will is also a great singer. And we have great friends like Jason Scheff. We don't know yet, but it's going to be special.
- What's your take on the 'Official Bootleg' disagreement?
Well, my take on it is that it's our band, it's Los Lobotomys, and there was nothing wrong with the cd. There was a lot of people selling bootlegs, and we thought 'Why don't we make out own bootleg?'. I think that everybody was on board at one time and then later, some of the guys decided that they didn't want to do that. And then a lot of disagreements followed. But officially, or by the law or the way business is done right, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.
But everybody has their own opinion and it was too bad that some of the members decided to express their opinion on-line and let other people know how they felt about it. But those things happen, there's marriage and there's divorce. It's unfortunate but that sometimes happens too. But Los Lobotomys still lives and will always go on, so it doesn't matter who's in it and who's out of it, it's still a family of musicians that play together and it's still about the music. It's really not about any particular person. That's why I was so drawn to Los Lobotomys, because it was about the music and guys wanting to get together and have fun, enjoying playing together. So that's pretty much it...
- I always wished that Los Lobotomys would do more gigs, but I guess you always had some members involved with another great band, Toto, so I guess it was difficult to get the band together?
Yeah, that became a hindrance, because a lot of times they did want to book Los Lobotomys and we couldn't make it because some of the guys were out on tours and things like that. And even with this structure of Los Lobotomys, it's still difficult to get all the same guys. But it's depending on availability and that's the beauty of it. All the guys that are the community of Los Lobotomys are great players, so it doesn't matter. Whoever is playing, whether it's Will or Jimmy Johnson or Jimmy Haslip, they're all great players and we're all great friends. But if we can keep some of the same guys, it's fun too, because we don't like to rehearse either, you know. We like to just go and play.
- So it's a lot about the music and the community and friendships?
Exactly. That's the bottom line. It's about the music and the guys that like to play together.
- What is so special about the clubs the we hear about, The Baked Potato, La Vee Lee and Cafe Cordial, what is it about?
Well, I think it's about the freedom that they give you to play. But the Baked Potato has changed a lot and it's not like it used to be. It's kind of like taking a second seat. La Vee Lee was good at one point, but it's kind of fading. Cafe Cordial is still a nice place to go, but it's really more about the guys who like to play music and in the clubs that let you play the music that you like to play. They don't get in the way; they just let you do your thing. They don't tell you the music is too loud, and so on, they just let you do your thing...
- In those clubs, there are people from all over the world...
Yes, the other thing is that we need to go to clubs that allow us to play the music that people enjoy, versus playing in a controlled environment. Some clubs need to control that, and we can't do that... That's why it's fun to come to Europe too, because people already have an idea that these guys want to play, let's let them play. So there's a connection with the audience here...
Thanks to John Peña and Laurent Biéhly.
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