the hum / By Bob Doran

Entranced

Wooden Shjips’ neo-psyche, plus Zony Mash, Hope Sandoval and dancing for peace

(Sept. 24, 2009)  When your band is from San Francisco and you describe your music as psychedelic rock, comparisons to the psychedelic ’60s are perhaps inevitable. Such is the case with Wooden Shjips.

“We think of ourselves more as a rock ’n’ roll band, but we get tagged with psychedelic,” said Wooden Shjips “ringmaster” Ripley Johnson in a call from his Frisco home. “We grew up listening to a lot of ’60s music and classic rock. I relied on my dad’s record collection for the most part — he had maybe 1,000 records, and maybe 20 were any good — but I listened to those 20 over and over.”

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Based on the Shjips’ sound, I’d guess there were Doors records among them, some blues, Cream, maybe Blue Cheer and/or Vanilla Fudge, definitely Neil Young.

Said Ripley, “If someone made a record today like Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere with its extended jams, I think it would be called psychedelic rock, whereas back then it was just called rock ’n’ roll.”

Ripley, who plays lead guitar, put the band together three years ago. “The first iteration of the group was all non-musicians, people who had never been in a band before and didn’t know how to play their instruments. It was sort of this experiment in primitivism. I didn’t expect it to last very long.”

And it didn’t. When take-one of Shjips broke up after making a few recording, Ripley reconfigured and reconvened. “I didn’t want to stop playing,” he said. “Nash [Whalen], our keyboard player, was on guitar then; I asked him to switch to keyboard. Dusty [Jermier] and Omar [Ahsanuddin] were friends of ours looking for something to do. It ended up being really fulfilling for me, to be able to hone in on the musical elements that mean something, to focus on primitive rock and repetitive rhythms, basically long drawn-out rhythmically-based jams.”

Yes, they jam, but Shjips is definitely not a jamband. “It’s funny, a lot of the so-called jambands don’t seem be very jammy, and a lot of the so-called psychedelic bands are not that psychedelic,” said Ripley. So, don’t come to the Wooden Shjips show at the Alibi this Thursday expecting jamband psychedelia. The songs tend toward stretched out improvisations on the raw side. “Trance” and “garage” follow psychedelic on their MySpace — and both apply, but at the heart, as Ripley insists, this is rock ’n’ roll. The local psyche-trance-garage band Nipplepotamus opens.

Fans of keyboard player Wayne Horvitz will recall that his groove jazz quartet, Zony Mash, was superceded a few years ago by an acoustic combo he calls Sweeter Than the Day. “Zony Mash didn’t break up; we ceased to exist,” said Horvitz calling from an airport on his way back to his Seattle home. “It wasn’t like the breakup of the Beatles where they didn’t want to talk to each other any more. Sweeter Than the Day was essentially the same band,” which is to say Horvitz on keys and Tim Young on guitar with a rhythm section.

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