Chattanooga Times Free Press music reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Andy Bean, lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist with the New York-based modern hot jazz duo The Two Man Gentlemen Band, about the dangers of free kazoos, the joy of fancy beer and pool parties.
CP: Before we get too far into this, I tried to get to your Web site while preparing for this interview, and did you realize that www.twomangentlemanband.com is a Japanese-language site? Have you seen that?
AB: Yeah. You know what happened? I think it’s a registered business. Somebody bought up some misspellings of our name. I knew someone had parked it there because we tried to get the misspellings like TwoManGentleManBand instead of GentleMenBand, just to be safe, and somebody wanted to charge us like $500 for it. (Laughs.) I haven’t seen it recently, so I look forward to checking it out.
CP: How and when did you and Fuller form the band? Are you both from New York?
AB: We both went to college here in New York and for a few years after that. We’d known each other for awhile from playing in some dreadful college rock bands. We were always into hot jazz and old-time country music, and we went out to Central Park one day playing some tunes we knew and some we wrote, and we just caught the bug from people throwing money at us. For about two years, we street performed pretty regularly. It was our full time job during the summers. At some point, we got tired of the rain and getting up early to get a good spot since it’s pretty competitive, so we took it on the road.
CP: Were you surprised at the time to find another musician into playing hot jazz?
AB: You know, that’s the good thing about New York, whatever you’re into, there’s somebody else here that’s into it. There might just be one other guy that’s into it, but if you like something, you can find like-minded people. We were friends before we started a band and moved from there. That seems to work better.
CP: What about the audiences? Did it surprise you that other people reacted well to it, that it wasn’t as niche as might be supposed?
AB: I think that, for us, since we’re doing entirely original songs in an old-time style, the fact that it’s new stuff that sounds old makes it easier for people to wrap their heads around. I don’t think we would be able to do what we’re doing if we were doing just tin pan alley covers. There’s a scene for that and people like that music, but what’s gotten us what little following we’ve got is our lyrics and that they’re written in modern times.
CP: You went to school in New York, but where are you from?
AB: I’m from New Hampshire and Fuller is from South Florida, which as he describes is that there were 10 teenagers in his town and the rest were retirees and other old people.
CP: Maybe that has something to do with how he became involved in such a vintage musical style.
AB: (Laughs.) You know, I’d never thought about that. When we were street performing, I used to fly down there and do these really ill-advised Spring Break busquing tours on the streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale. We’d even go to retirement communities sometimes, and those people ate it up.
CP: Your songs tend to be so witty and humorous. Are they as much fun to write as they end up sounding when you play them?
AB: Yeah, definitely. The songs that we still like that we wrote were the ones that really cracked us up when we were writing. The ones we like the best are the ones we didn’t even think about being funny, we just spit them out and got a kick out of them. There are a couple we don’t play anymore off the records that we wrote maybe to be funny and they just didn’t stand the test of time. We just spit out whatever comes naturally to us. Whenever we do anything otherwise, it’s not our best work.
CP: Which begs the natural follow up of which songs are your favorites.
AB: Definitely something like a “Fancy Beer” we really enjoy, and “William Howard Taft” we’ve played at practically every show for the last few years. The timeless themes: fat guys and beer. Some of the double entendre stuff comes and goes, depending on the audience. (Laughs.)
We have a new record coming out in fall, and we just had a live album that came out in January. We’re moving in more of a swinging direction like bands from the ’30s. We’re finding that there’s a tradition of writing songs about inane topics. Flim and Flam have a great song about potato chips, which is no deeper than it sounds. We embrace that tradition.
CP: Speaking of which, you guys have turned out three albums in the last three years. What motivates you to record on that accelerated a schedule?
AB: The good thing is that we tour like crazy, so we’re going to hit most towns two or three times a year. We always like to have something new for all the devoted folks who come out all the time. The other side is that, for a two-man band, it’s really easy to make a record. We walk in, press record and we leave with a record. Larger bands, especially those with more complicated instrumentation, aren’t so lucky. (Laughs.)
In the beginning, we only had 30 people coming to shows in the first year or two, so when we came back to towns, we needed something to have something sell them. Otherwise, we wouldn’t make enough money to live. We were really milking our fan base.
CP: Has your audience responded well to that approach?
AB: Yeah. There are some people out there who own all the records, and God bless ’em.
CP: What prompted you to produce a live album after five years together? Has that been on your to-do list for a while?
AB: We did that right after we had been in England for a month and played something like 35 shows in 30 days. We just liked how we were sounding, and we knew we were going to change our sound a little bit to being less banjo and kazoo heavy in the coming year. We wanted to capture what we had going on. It turned out nicely, mostly because when we did it, this venue owner in West Virginia gave us a huge jar of moonshine that we distributed, for free, to our live record audience. It really helped them get into it.
CP: Do you still give out kazoos at your shows?
AB: You know, the short answer is no, except sometimes at the end. There was a tipping point when we went from playing for 30-50 people to playing for 50-100 people. It was no longer possible to control an audience with free kazoos at that point. When it was a small, orderly audience, you could give them direction, like “Kazoo here, but don’t kazoo here.” When it gets bigger, there’s always going to be one guy who kazoos the entire show, so we had to put the kibosh on it.
CP: With all the touring you do, do you write a lot of material on the road?
AB: We usually do our writing in the breaks we have. We think up a lot of the ideas and things when we’re on the road. When you’re a musician doing what we do, we spend two hours a night playing music and five hours in the car. It’s almost like we’re professional drivers, so we have a lot of time to spend brainstorming in the mini van. We do a lot of thinking then and write them up when we get home.
CP: So “Into My Minivan” is based on real-life experience?
AB: Yes it is. (Laughs.) I believe we’ve sat next to each other in a minivan for something like 140,000 miles.
CP: Have you thought about switching to a pick up truck for variety’s sake?
AB: (Laughs.) Let me tell you, it’s a low-budget operation here, so as long as it keeps working, we’ll stick with it.
CP: Have you guys ever considered adding a third player to the Two Man Gentlemen Band? Admittedly, you would have to redo all your marketing efforts, but …
AB: You know, we do for select gigs and tours. We did a handful of shows with the Bob Dylan tour last summer, which was a bizarre thing. We had a quartet then for the stadiums. We solved the issue of the name. We’re still The Two Man Gentlemen Band, we just put “Trio” or “Quartet” at the end of the name. The Two Man Gentlemen Band is the corporate name, and whatever follows is the descriptor. (Laughs.)
CP: What kinds of things inspire your songs? I have this image in my head of you two hanging out watching Charlie Chaplin films and looking at woodprint advertisements for snake oil and cane revivals.
AB: (Laughs.) You know, that’s actually close. A lot of the musical ideas come from we – and I especially – liking things from the ’20s and ’30s – hot jazz and things like that – so when we sit down to write stuff, that’s what’s in our head. We definitely keep an eye on that stuff. Lyrically, it’s just waiting for an idea to come and seeing if we can put that idea to music. We’ve had a lot of good ideas, and I can’t quite remember which ones we couldn’t set to music, but usually, we can figure it out. We just wrote a song called “Pool Party” because somebody mentioned a pool party to us.
CP: When you get an idea like that, does it tend to come out pretty quickly, or do you have to wrestle them into shape?
AB: It’s about 50/50. Some of them pop out in one sitting and others bounce around in your head for months. I always find it kind of embarrassing to admit that this two minute 20 second, simple song about fancy beer took three months of thinking to do, but that’s the truth. (Laughs.)
CP: Well, it seems like when a song takes up so little time, every second is becomes even more important.
AB: I think so. It’s kind of like a haiku.
CP: Which, ironically, is something your fans seem to be good at. You’ve posted on many fan-written haikus about the band to your Facebook profile.
AB: Yeah, we’ve gotten 30 something, some of which have been pretty amusing. (Laughs.) The most recent one was about somebody who got laid because of our songs, so they turned it into a haiku.
CP: That’s got to make you feel good.
AB: That’s the highest kind of praise a band like us can receive. We were flattered.
CP: I have to ask, since it’s one of your fan favorites, what was the inspiration for “William Howard Taft”?
AB: Early on, we leaned towards writing songs about historical things because it happened to be what we were into at the time. It was almost criminal that William Howard Taft, being our largest president, didn’t have any songs about him. We couldn’t find any out there, so we decided to write one. That one was pretty easy because “Taft” rhymes with “fat” and “bath.” It pretty much wrote itself.
CP: Any chance we can expect a “Grover Cleveland” or a “William McKinley” as a future follow up?
AB: I’ll tell you something even better. On this next record, we have a song about our drunkest president and arguably one of our least well-known, Franklin Pierce. We have a ballad about Franklin Pierce. I think it’s pretty solid, and it’s also near and dear to my heart since I’m from New Hampshire and so is he.
CP: Are you both history buffs? Why the fascination with historical figures?
AB: It’s a diminishing appeal, as far as songwriting goes, as we move on. Our history songs just show a very cursory knowledge of whatever event we’re writing about. That sometimes elicits complaints from history buffs out there that, “There was more to Taft than just his fatness.” It’s like, “Well, that’s great, but that other stuff wouldn’t make a very good song.” (Laughs.)
CP: You said you’re shifting your sound on the next record to being more swing-heavy. What prompted that?
AB: It’s kind of what we were always in to, but I just don’t know that we were ever quite good enough to pull it off. We’ve finally started sounding like we always wanted to sound like. It just took a couple of years playing pretty much nonstop. It’s not that we didn’t like how we sounded before, but it’s just always been a goal.
As far as the songs go, I think it’s a better balance than any record we’ve had yet. They’re a historical number and some straight-up songs about inane topics like chocolate milk and things like that. There are also some more, we like to think crafted, even heart-felt songs, about the tribulations of being guys on the road most of the year away from their lady friends. There’re also a lot more bass solos, which is going to take us straight to the top.
CP: That must have made Fuller happy.
AB: (Laughs.) Yeah. If we ever have contracts with each other, I feel like there’s going to be some sort of demand for a minimum amount of bass solos.
CP: Have you decided on a name yet?
AB: We have not, but I’m campaigning for “A Pool Party with the Two Man Gentlemen Band.” I don’t know if that’s going to make muster.
CP: Well, it gets my vote.
AB: That could be the deciding vote, then. We have a lot of tie votes in a two man band. (Laughs.)