Folky Okies

Green Corn Rebellion find a new spacious sound in the open country air

For our second installment of the Courtyard Concert Series, we invited Green Corn Rebellion to play a set in our office courtyard/turtle sanctuary. Here, the father and son at the heart of the band, frontman Christopher and drummer Nicholas Foster, discuss the history behind the band’s name, their upcoming album “POP,” and more.

TTV: First of all, the name. You’re named after the Green Corn Rebellion of 1917, why’d you choose that name?

Chris Foster: Yeah, August 2nd and 3rd, 1917. Well, it started with a story I was told about the book [The Green Corn Rebellion] by William Cunningham, and this was about five years ago. A friend of mine, Lee Roy [Chapman], you know Lee Roy, he was talking to Scott [Dingman], who owns Oak Tree Books, and he was like, “If you see this book out there, it’s really hard to find.” It was printed in the 30s. So that month Scott took a trip to New York, stopped somewhere on the east coast at a bookstore, and it was sitting there for five bucks. So he bought it, and then checked it out and it was worth 3500 bucks. So he sold it after a few months for about three Grand. I don’t know if you need to print all that, but it piqued my interest in the idea of it. And then someone—and it might’ve been Mark Brown—came up to me when I was forming another band and asked me if we had a name yet, and we didn’t have a name, we had like seven names, so he was like, “Green Corn Rebellion.” And it was a horn driven band, no lyrics, and I was like, “Well, it’s a cool name.” I started looking into it, the history of it and stuff, but it didn’t really fit with that particular project.

Then I came up with this new batch of songs; kinda Okie, kinda folky, and I was like, well Green Corn Rebellion sounds like it would kinda fit this, but I wanted to do a little more research on it. So I got a copy of the book and read a bit of that. There’s a basic history at the beginning of the Green Corn Rebellion by William Cunningham, and then it’s a fictional book after that, it’s pretty interesting. And then I looked at the Oklahoma Historical [Society] website. It was a grass roots effort against oppression by the landlords, the rent, all this stuff. The idea was they were going to march to Washington, and eat green corn on the way. I guess they picked it early, because it was before the harvest. Well these guys don’t know how far Washington is, and they never actually made it out of the state. It only lasted a couple of days and they got taken over and gave up.

You know, with all the funny stories, and the sort of sham it was in a way, and the debacle, I kind of related it to the source of the songs I was writing, the debacle, the sham I had gotten myself involved in on a personal level. And then the comedy of it, on the other hand, was that it also sort of related to the way I comically described my situation in song. And it’s a cool name and a nice little reference too, and the final thing was that it happened on [Nicholas’s] birthday, and he was the drummer. When I found out that it was on his birthday, I thought, “Ok, I’m gonna do it for sure.”

TTV: You have a great range of styles and genres that you pull from in your music, folk and jazz and rock are all in there, where did that sound come from?

CF: I think a lot of the songwriting inspiration comes from, aside from what I grew up listening to, which would be Neil Young, and The Beatles, and Tom Waits, and Charles Mingus and all that stuff, would be the people I’ve been playing in bands with. Wink Burcham, Chelsea Coleman, local guys. And of course J.J. Cale and Leon Russell are definitely influential too, but I think working with people who are making new songs. So I’m not listening to the same J.J. Cale record, or the same Led Zeppelin record, but I’m listening to Wink Burcham’s new song or Paul Benjaman will write a song, or Clay Welch and all those guys, everybody who’s been doing their thing out there. Mike Cameron; I’ve definitely gotten little bole weevils of melodies in my head from some solo he’ll do. I’m not necessarily trying to pull from anything, but I’m definitely getting a lot from all the musicians I’m going out and hearing and playing with. And the people in the band. I’d say one of my largest influences is [guitarist] Pete Tomshany, who didn’t join the band until September of last year. I’m constantly rewriting his songs, or he’s rewriting my songs.

TTV: How has the band grown to this big eight-piece ensemble it is now?

CF: It started with Jordan [Hehl, bassist]. I made this record, I thought, I’m gonna do a duet with Jordan playing bass. I’d been doing duets with Wink, playing bass to his songs, and I got together with Jordan and thought, oh that sounds kinda cute. And [Nicholas] got a call pretty quick after that.

Nicholas Foster: Yeah, there were just a whole bunch of songs, and there were also gigs. So that’s just a good combination. So you get a bunch of people you know together. And the band, a lot of the time, sounds nothing like the record.

CF: The first record, for sure. And the first record I got together just in my apartment. I borrowed an eight track reel to reel and I’d just lay down a banjo or a piano and then say, “Hey, Ryan Tedder, can you come over and blow horn on a couple tunes?” or to Nicholas, “Can you come play snare on a couple tunes?” Josh Massad, Jeff Porter, different folks and it kind of evolved like that. And then, you know, people who liked the music is who stuck. ‘Cause we had a lot of people who would just be in it for a rehearsal or a gig, but the people that identified with the direction of the songs, the arrangements, those are the people who are emphatic about it.

NF: As much has the lineup changes, I would just say it grows with people who really like it. And we don’t run out of parts for them to play. We haven’t yet.

CF: There’s plenty to do.

TTV: When you wrote this music, did you have in mind a particular instrumentation?

CF: Well, the first record, no. It was just stuff I was trying to get down. I wrote everything before we did any gigs at all. But as I’ve been playing with the band, I’m inspired by, for instance [saxophonist Zach] Elkins joined the band at the beginning and when I started writing for the new record, then I would imagine a horn section, which he can take care of in a multi-tracking session. It’s hard to say. I would say, not in general, but as I’m writing...I don’t know.

TTV: As the band is growing, is that changing the way you’re writing the music? Are you writing more for a bigger band now?

CF: I guess I’d say I don’t know.

NF: I would say no. Cause we still get banjo/vocal demos or guitar vocal demos. And there might be an extra part that he’s thinking of or there might be a melody here, but the way that we’re learning the songs hasn’t changed. A little bit maybe.

CF:  I think the instrumentation process is separate. But when you get a few women who can really belt shit out, you can always find a place for them to make us sound better.

TTV: What can you tell us about the new album?

NF: It’s not Bluegrass.

CF: It’s not Bluegrass.

NF: That’s a really common misconception

CF: “We thought you were a bluegrass hillbilly band.”

NF: Which is weird to keep hearing.

TTV: Do you think they might have you confused with Green Corn Revival?

NF: Yes. I’ve had a lot of people get the two of us confused.

CF: I heard we played at Cain’s a couple times.

NF: I heard we played some music festivals.

CF: It’s really strange. I had the band named and we had done a gig or two before I’d heard of them. I just don’t get on the Internet enough. I wouldn’t do it any different though. It’s just a different name and it means something different too. We’re not a revival. We do revive ourselves every morning with coffee though.

The new record is a big full orchestration. It’s bigger than the band sounds live in a lot of ways.

NF: Which is different than the first record, which was smaller than the band sounds live.

CF: Yeah, the first record was simple. I had an eight track reel to reel. That’s what I did the first record on. This one, we have forty tracks on some. Pete Tomshany will lay down six guitar tracks, we’ll get four saxophones, or as many as we want. And the songs are a little more ethereal, so they lend themselves to orchestration. I’d moved out to the country and I started hearing the country sounds, and so everything opened up in a way for me. For the most part it’s a slower-paced record. Oh no it’s not, is it?

NF: It depends on what you mean, I guess.

CF: It’s not a slower-paced record.

Saxophonist Zach Elkins: It’s more deliberate.

NF: It is definitely more deliberate. You’ll get your “ZE: in the newspaper now.

CF: I don’t know how to compare it to the first one. It’s easier to compare to the live band. But yeah, it’s definitely more deliberate.

NF: All the songs were rehearsed before they were recorded, instead of the other way around.

CF: So things were fixed.

TTV: That gives you the chance to let everything settle in and people to find their parts?

NF: To develop.

CF: Absolutely. And then on top of that, Costa [Stasinopoulos] is mixing it. It makes all the difference in the world, sonically. This is a guy that really knows what the hell he’s doing. It’s the real deal now. It sounds like a record. This isn’t one of the first three Ween records, which is how the first one might sound.

And I was in a different place when I wrote the songs. The first one, I was, print it or not, waking up with bad dreams and drinking whiskey and writing songs. I was living alone in a tiny garage apartment just trying to make sense of my life, and this one was more like, well, waking up in the country before all the kids got up, and going out and listening to the birds, and going, “How can I express this joy and these feelings now?” It’s definitely got some uplifting qualities. As musicians, I think we all like to think we’re not only serving our own interests, but we’re giving something to people. And I think the band has stuck with it because they feel like what they’re doing, and what we’re all doing is offering joy to people at our shows.

TTV: When is the album coming out?

CF: Well, I’m going down to Blackwatch Studios this weekend to finish it up. Costa’s been working on it, and we’ll spend a few days, late nights, early mornings and then should have the mixes done. Then we’ll probably sit on it for a few weeks, make some little adjustments, then send it to mastering.

NF: We’re shooting for the 97th anniversary of the Green Corn Rebellion.

CF: I’m actually really looking forward to the 100th, when we’ll release our fifth and final record. All good bands have five good records.

I’m really excited to get the mixing and mastering done, so I can start working on our next record, which I want to do in a room with the band all together. Between Pete and I we’ve probably got two new records of music to pick from. Got a lot of Country. And we do have some hillbilly music.