MANCHESTER, NH – Ever since they got their start back in the ‘90s in Sleepy Hollow, New York, The Slambovian Circus of Dreams have had a cult following due to their acclaimed live performances. Led by Joziah Longo on vocals, guitar and harmonica with lead guitarist and harmonica player Sharkey McEwen, multi-instrumentalists Tink Lloyd and RJ McCarty, bassist Bob Torsello and drummer Matthew Abourezk, the band has also been described as a hillbilly version of Pink Floyd due to their mix of psychedelic rock and Americana. Folks around Manchester will get the chance to kick-off the weekend when this unique act comes to the Queen City on May 30. That’s when they’ll be taking the stage at The Rex Theatre located at 23 Amherst Street. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and it promises to be a memorable time for all who attend.
I had a talk with both Longo and Lloyd about going to school before starting the band, their approach to both their live performances and their studio albums, and a new album that’s slowly but surely coming together.
Rob Duguay: Before the start of The Slambovian Circus of Dreams, the both of you went to Westchester Community College to study computer graphic design and video production. Both of those mediums have seen quite an evolution from the ‘90s to today, so how vital has that education been towards the marketing and promotion of the band over the years?
Joziah Longo: Infinitely so because when we jumped into school to do that, we had just left the industry in New York City. We were in a state of great opportunities, and we had been co-building a little community of people who had access to the best studios, meaning video and audio studios. Then the labels came around, they wanted to sign us, and we were not interested, which was to everybody’s chagrin. This amazing thing was happening, but we didn’t want to sign with a major when they were around, so we wound up jumping off of that whole situation we had in New York. At the time, if you didn’t have $20,000 cameras, you weren’t making videos.
It was that kind of thing, so we jumped off and there was the new promise of the digital age so we figured that we could be independent and we went to school. You only had 10 megabytes of memory on your computer back then and you couldn’t do anything, so when we went to school, we found the limitations of the medium at that time to be very interesting to us.
Tink Lloyd: Yeah, we kind of pioneered the DIY thing when it was a little bit insane, but we caught the wave before the wave started crashing. Frankly, we’ve been producing our own albums, doing our own album artwork and not as much video as we’d like, so instead we amped up the live show and we’ve been touring ever since. We met our drummer when he was our professor at the school, and the stuff we learned formed the foundation for all we knew to have a totally in-house production thing.
RD: This DIY approach that the band has, how has it evolved from the ‘90s to now? Has the internet made this easier, or has it made things more complicated?
JL: It’s been a good thing. When everyone was getting nervous, and they still are, about AI nuking artists and stuff, we’ve just been surfing the whole thing un-nervously. It’s a matter of things refining themselves, and I think with all of the new technology and the space that we have to move around in, there’s still a lot of chaos. We’re still in an early stage of recreating the world, but I think all that stuff will allow us to recreate everything. Recreate politics and recreate religion, it’s a time for us to step back and let everything become like a molecular dance a little bit. As long as we don’t hold on too much to the old, I think a new way will find itself, if that’s not too obtuse.
TL: That’s obtuse. (laughs)
JL: Is that so? You get what I’m saying though, right Rob?
RD: Yeah, I totally get what you’re saying, absolutely.
TL: With Joziah, the great thing about it for him as a songwriter is as things have evolved, it’s become easier and easier for someone with basic computer skills, a lot of talent and a willingness to work hard to do a lot for themselves without having to pull everybody in to do the long hours. We’re able to get things done that we couldn’t do before where you always had to have multiple people in a room, but on the other hand, that gives you too many options. As Eddie Kramer said, who is a producer we worked with back in the day, “What is a producer? A producer just makes decisions.”
JL: Then they execute them.
TL: That’s the hardest part for anybody who is making art these days, there are so many things you can do that are helpful, but you need to just decide what to do and make good choices. That’s the hardest thing artists have to face today, the decision-making.
JL: Very much so. Even back in those days, we talked about the big studios that we worked at in New York City, and we were around the greats. We were in situations where really great artists were in the same building that we were in. [David] Bowie created Tin Machine in a space that Tink and I ran and stuff like that back in the day, so giving that stuff up was difficult, but even then, what happened was there were these giant boards.
TL: They had faders and channels.
JL: Yeah, moving faders. There were these 120 channels with moving faders, so you thought that you had to fill them. It’s the same thing about too much equaling nothing, and it really comes down to the decisions. Bands in the ‘60s like The Beatles, they only had four tracks and eight tracks, and in a way, when you’re pushing up against something and you’re having a give and take with something, it creates a certain amount of friction and tension. You’re able to create and give birth to things a lot easier than if you got infinite things to dance with, so like Tink is saying, it’s just a matter of making decisions.
The cool thing about that is, I think it’s going to come down to people’s hearts. What is it that your heart wants to create, and how will it affect society? Forget about bigger society, how does it affect the relationships you have in your town? I think that’s the key point we’re coming to, we’ve created a big, crazy, complicated world that ain’t much to do about nothing, to paraphrase what [William] Shakespeare said. It’s really down to what you create and what you embrace instead of conflict, so it’s a really interesting and hopeful time, as crazy as things are and as ugly people are getting.
We better find the good in each other and build something, and I think anyone who gets caught in the ugliness is going to get turned into a pillar of salt and get left behind. We got to float in the middle of things and feel where the new direction is because I think the universe is trying to recreate itself and there’s something more free and more powerful.
RD: I totally get where you’re coming from with saying that. The Slambovian Circus of Dreams has been heralded for their live concerts, and a lot of bands always try to find that balance between their studio recordings and their live performances while aiming to meld the two. When it comes to this for the band with the albums and what you do on stage, do you keep it parallel where you have different focuses in each setting, or is it the opposite where you try to replicate a live performance into a recording and vice versa?
JL: With the albums, we always try to make sure that heart and content is dominating the form. We don’t want to polish things up too much and we don’t want to take the energy out of what we’ve done, we want to make sure we get the juice down before we do the polishing. If you get the electricity down, no matter how much polishing you do, the electricity and the force will shine through. It’s always about finding a balance between the body and the spirit of something. For live performances, if we’re not intimidated by the environment and if we can find a center there, then we can channel that energy.
Also in real time, it’s important to feel the aspirations of the audience, where they want to go and go with that flow. It’s really a dance with who came to the show and the expectations they had, especially in these times. People need a break from the yabba dabba nonsense with all these kinds of emotions that are attached, so it’s about what people come to find and how you’re able to serve that with what you have. For us, the live performance is processing data in real time, and I mean that in an emotional way. I think that’s what keeps it living and powerful.
We get rave reviews for our live performances, but the audience is performing half of it and it’s just us staying in tune with each other and not being didactic about stuff.
TL: Yeah, it’s interesting. Our live performances and our albums aren’t very different, because when we do albums, the core of each song is Joziah being the voice and the guitar. We don’t really use a lot of samples, it’s all real instruments. We’re not just on the fly trying to make something work, it’s usually well-rehearsed because we do perform a lot. Like Josiah said, there’s a simple thing in all of us that goes back to the cavemen.
Back in the day of the caves, people would light a fire and people would come sit around it. They would do it not just to keep warm, but to tune into each other and get power from each other while sharing stories. We feel like what we do and what other artists do, the importance of song is that we come together as a community to do cultural things. It’s really become kind of this ceremony for humanity with the advent of rock & roll or whatever you want to call it, that’s why people went to go find culture in churches. Then music became more of a central gathering place, but for us, when people come to a show, we’re really thinking it’s a very special event, and each one is very unique.
Each audience brings a certain mastermind with what’s happening in their community and what’s happening in their lives. Then you say things and do stuff you wouldn’t do at other shows based on the audience, so we have a basic setlist, but we’ll adjust it even in the middle of the show if something speaks to us differently.
RD: That’s a cool view on the dynamic between yourselves and the audience, and I also totally get the community aspect of it. Nothing brings people together like music and I think you both can agree with that.
TL: Yes, absolutely.
RD: Being from New York, what are your thoughts on coming up to perform at The Rex?
JL: We’re so excited to come to New Hampshire, it’s been a while. We’ve all gravitated to different geographic locations, so there are different flavors that we’ve gravitated towards and created once we got there while finding our tribe. It’s a very unique area for us and we’ve had very special experiences when we’ve come there, and we’ve missed it so we look forward to it again. The Rex Theatre is a new venue for us, so it’s a different kind of gathering place, but we’ve had such wonderful experiences in New Hampshire.
TL: New Hampshire, Connecticut and Vermont, even though we’re a little removed, we’ve done most of our shows in the Northeast.
JL: Yeah, we were so embraced by people in your neck of the woods from the very beginning where we were trying to suss out what we were. For us to come to a show in New Hampshire, we know we’ll walk away with just as much as when we were playing in New York.
RD: It’s been a few years since The Slambovian Circus of Dreams put out a new studio album, so are there any plans for a new release sometime soon?
JL: What’s happened for us is since Tink and I have continued to pursue this day job for the past 30 years of being in the band, it’s very hard for us to keep up with ourselves. I would say that I have a good five albums that are finished in my mind, and when they’re done in my mind, they’re put on paper and they exist completely. I’m also writing musicals right now, which was baffling me for a while, but there’s about five musicals on the docket. The stuff is there, but the means to do it kind of vanished from us for a bit. The simple answer to what you’re asking is there is an album that’s in progress and it’s moving slightly slower than we’d wish, but what is also happening is one of my nephews, who is a real studio freak.
TL: He actually helped produce our last album.
JL: Yeah, and he’s the young son of this guy who I’m really good friends with, and he offered to help with the instrumentation for this album that’s in progress because not only does he have technical prowess, but he plays every instrument with great nuance, including drums. He’s such a freak that he’s got the exact same kit that Ringo Starr had in Abbey Road Studios along with the mics that were used there, so on every level he’s a very spherical guy. In two days, he recorded a song with me.
TL: We think we just found our George Martin. We’ve done some shows in Canada with him and now he’s this monster producer, player and technician, so we’ve finally found the person to finally help us get this work done.