‘Skill’ is Having Something to Say: Deerhoof at 31

Four musicians sit on a yellow couch with eclectic clothing.

Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts · Part of Genre Non Grata

Deerhoof, 31 Flavours Tour. Courtesy the artists.

‘Skill’ is Having Something to Say: Deerhoof at 31
by Trevor Shimizu

Formed in San Francisco in 1994, Deerhoof began as an improvised noise punk band before going on to create 20 self-produced albums that explore a wide range of musical possibilities.

To mark its 31st anniversary, Deerhoof musicians sat down with visual artist and frequent collaborator Trevor Shimizu to discuss being introverted, getting heckled by Nicolas Cage, and how there is no right way to be in a band.

Satomi Matsuzaki

Your kids both were in a good mood just now. Nighttime!

Trevor Shimizu

Yeah. Evil time is usually 4 pm.

Greg Saunier

That’s when it is for me, for sure.

Between four and six, it gets hectic.

Four to six is when Deerhoof has load-in and sound check. That’s evil time, when everybody’s at their absolute grumpiest. But enough with these softball questions!

All right. I wrote a bunch of questions for you. Do you like Primus?

John Dieterich

Whoa.

Why do you ask that? Because it’s some Bay Area–related thing? What are Walker Art Center people going to care if we like Primus?

How about Mr. Bungle?

Ed Rodriguez

I really liked Primus. I followed them on a Midwest tour for Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

Did you take your shirt off?

At that age, my quickness to take my shirt off in public was even lower than it is now. So no, I did not.

You and I were at the same shows on that tour.

What? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Trevor, this was a hardball question. I might be kicking out both of my guitar players.

I was an MTV kid so I didn’t have a lot of exposure to music. I still remember, like, watching Headbangers Ball. There was early Primus footage with a crazy circle pit, the whole crowd was going nuts, and I was like, What is this!? And then I read an interview with the guitar player, and he talked about symmetrical scales and whole-tone scales for soloing. And that was my first exposure to atonal soloing.

This interview is my first exposure to symmetrical scales. What are you talking about, symmetrical?

Do they still play, Primus?

Yeah, they’re still raging.

They just did an audition process for a new drummer. Their old drummer quit, or their original drummer quit. And it was like a shark tank, where online fans start swirling around with rumors about what his real reason was for quitting. Are the other two guys jerks behind the scenes, even though they’re nothing but laughs in their public persona? It’s not unlike Deerhoof, actually: friendly, squeaky-clean image, but behind the scenes, from four to six, it’s evil time every day.

Behind the scenes, we’re having drum tryouts that nobody knows about.

[Primus drummer] Tim Alexander’s band Laundry is pretty incredible if you haven’t heard it. They have a Chapman Stick player.

I don’t like the sound of tapping. When I see somebody’s right hand going up to the neck like that, I immediately know I’m not going to like it.

So John does the tapping.

If one of my parts calls for tapping, John will come over, and he’ll do the right hand.

It’s a really complicated writing process. I have to leave a lot of room in my parts so I can do Ed’s tapping.

The first record I received from my first San Francisco roommate was by Mr. Bungle, a seven-inch. He said I should keep it as it’s going to be expensive in the future. And so I kept it, and I still have it.

Yeah. And now that seven-inch has tripled in price since then!

So it’s six dollars? You guys don’t realize, Deerhoof’s very first show was for an audience of three people in San Francisco. Two of them had just quit the grunge band that [original Deerhoof member] Rob Fisk and I were in. Rob on bass and me on drums did free improv, and our emergency guitar player was Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle. He was in the band for one show; he was the original Deerhoof member. It’s not on Wikipedia. It’s not on Facebook. It’s only going to be available on the Walker website and in those program notes that are handed out at the show.

Yeah, Trey really helped a lot when I moved to San Francisco, because he was very good friends with the person I was staying with. Trey drove us to the Berkeley Amoeba record store. And, once, his girlfriend picked me up at the airport because I had to go to class in City College. Deerhoof had just played our first show in Seattle, and I had to fly back, while you and Rob drove back. But Trey’s girlfriend picked me up.

The nicest. I saw him last year. It had been decades, and I saw him last year at a concert here in Tucson. His piece was getting played by Kronos Quartet, and I was at the concert. I was so happy to see him. And we picked up the conversation like it had never left off. It was insane. He looked exactly the same.

How about Metallica?

This is what this interview is going to be? What? People in Minneapolis are not going to care.

I think they care. I have more questions, though.

Oh my God, these hardball questions! Metallica almost breaks up the band every time they come up, because Ed and Deron, who does our sound usually and will be doing our sound at the Walker show, both despise St. Anger, and it’s the only Metallica [album] I like. But I think the original metalhead in this band is Satomi. I know that Ed may have started with Headbangers Ball.

No, I’m the youngest in the band.

No, Ed and John are.

Satomi, me, John, Greg: that’s the order.

Oh, is that true? But are you all into the same metal bands? Did you like Metallica, Satomi?

Yeah, I went to see the And Justice for All tour, in Japan.

You saw them. Geez. So you got to find out what the bass parts actually are! Because isn’t it famous that Lars insisted that the bass be turned down to where you couldn’t hear it on the record?

But I think Ed looks like the other guy, no? What’s the other guy?

Kirk Hammet.

Didn’t anyone tell you that before? Like, with the long hair?

Actually, no. When I had really long hair, the only thing I would ever get is the lead singer from Slayer, Tom Araya.

From Chile, like me!

“Master of Puppets” was a great karaoke song. I think the last time I did karaoke was with Satomi.

We did “One” and “Master.”

The last karaoke song I did was around 2003. And I feel like most of us were there. I did “Electric Eye” by Judas Priest.

We sang it together!

There you go! There’s some strong metal influence in this band.

Do you know Blind Illusion? This is a great Metallica-and-Primus kind of hybrid.

That’s where this is all going?

It was Les Claypool, I think, when he was trying out for Metallica.

Do you have the Primus Wikipedia page open?

Yeah, we don’t need to go in this direction for your interview but, I guess, yeah, I was just . . .

You forgot to write questions, didn’t you?

Deerhoof. Photo: Asha Schechter. Courtesy of the artist.

I’m trying to go back and think about Deerhoof’s origins—like, when did everybody move to the Bay Area?

I was first. This is the way I chose the Bay Area: I had no interest in sports, but I was home from college for the summer. My brother was watching the World Series and shouted, “Greg, come here. You got to see this.” And I’m like, “I don’t really care about the World Series.” But the stadium was shaking. It was the Loma Prieta earthquake.

And Al Michaels, who was calling the game, was suddenly recast as the news expert because he’d previously lived in San Francisco. And they were just showing all these scenes because all this staff and equipment was there for the World Series. The helicopter cam flew over and was taking footage of the Bay Bridge falling over and the Marina District on fire. It was sunset, and it was so beautiful. I’m like, “That’s where I’m moving the day I graduate. That’s the place for me.”

I was at that World Series. I was under the scoreboard.

What? What?

Whoa.

And I thought people on the upper deck were just stomping, getting hyped up for the game.

Right.

And I looked out, and a lot of people had these Sony Watchmen, watching TV.

Watching TV, not a cell phone. Watching the game, watching Al Michaels. Exactly.

The TVs were flickering. I was like, “What’s happening?” Then they announced we might have to go onto the field, and everyone was like, “Yeah!” And it took six hours to get home. Anyway, there’s some great Bay Area history with music, I think. I can’t help but hear a new record and see your record and the kind of lineage of all these groups.

I don’t know if it’s a lineage. Rob and I, who were the ones who started the band, were pretty out of it. I don’t think at that time either of us even realized that Metallica was from San Francisco. I learned it after moving away.

Hmm.

You never heard a note of Primus in our house! We were really into the Melvins, who temporarily relocated from Washington state before they moved to LA. They were there for a brief moment when Joe Preston was in the band, and I went to see them every single time they played, which was often. Small clubs—I mean, it was terrifying, it was so loud. The two people who quit the grunge band I mentioned before were Dale Crover’s roommates. It’s one thing to see a drummer hit that hard up on a big stage, or in a video, but if you’re standing right there in front of him. Years later I started to like the neo-garage scene, you know: the Mummies and all this retro stuff. A lot of costume bands, a lot of joke bands.

There was some garage band we really liked and went to see several times, but I can’t remember the name.

I think Russell Quan was the drummer? San Francisco wasn’t that big, so a lot of people were playing in each other’s bands, and that was always fun. But Deerhoof were like hermits, you know? Really shy. And it was only the pure luck and graciousness of other bands, who decided they liked our band and would come to our shows and invite us to play on theirs, that allowed us to be part of the community. We were living in a cave or something, making our own strange music, practicing in our kitchen. Trevor, you and Chris Cohen were two of our earliest admirers.

It was a really cool time.

So many musicians moved away as it got too expensive. Now [San Francisco is] massively overrun by Big Tech. All the things that made it cool made the yuppies want to come. They moved in and many of the things that made it cool got pushed out.

Not long after I joined, our practice space got bought by tech people; they kicked everyone out. Then it was empty for, like, five years.

I remember early Deerhoof was having a hard time getting shows. So Rob and you thought, we really should get some shows. I said, “Okay, I can try to write to Ramona at the Bottom of the Hill if we can play.” I wrote and I had no email back from Ramona.

Haha, I don’t remember that at all.

Yeah, Rob was like, “Let’s go see this show so we can ask the band if we can open for them.” Henry’s Dress was the name of the band. They were really popular back then.

Yeah, Matt Hartman, who lives in Albuquerque now.

Did he play with Cat Power?

Yes, he was in the backing band for a while.

Rob and you and I went there after practice, and we were not on the guest list like we thought. We couldn’t even get in! And we were waiting for Matt to come out of the venue so we could make friends, but then neither of you asked him if we could open for them.

We all chickened out.

I thought: This band is so shy, I don’t know if this band would ever make it.

When I joined, Matt was one of those people who was at every single show we played. Always so friendly. Years later we played together in Albuquerque.

I played in a band with him too, called The How. It was a Who tribute band. I was Keith Moon. It was just us two.

It’s funny because, Satomi and Greg, you were the shy ones. When Chris Cohen and I saw you play in San Jose, after the show, I bought Holdypaws from Rob and Kelly. I said, “I’m about to move to San Francisco.” And they said, “You should come over and have wine.” That was my introduction to your group. I don’t think we met.

That’s incredible. A bit embarrassing.

In that period, there was a good sense of community.

The Bay Area music scene in the ’90s was high enthusiasm, high camaraderie, high silliness, no shame. Everybody just going nuts.

I remember seeing you listed as opening for Sonic Youth.

At the Fillmore! You know who showed up in the audience? Nicolas Cage. We heard this heckler from the back, making fun of Satomi and screaming in the gaps. Later, somebody was like, “Was that bothering you? Nicolas Cage was heckling you.” I was going to confront him, but he’d already taken the bus back home.

This is funny. We know why he took the bus. Because my roommate at the time, Lori, came to the show, and she took the bus home. Nicolas Cage came in, and he was putting his hands in his pockets, and he’s like, “Oh, shit, I don’t have any cash!” And then he was screaming in the bus, like, “Can I have some money for a ticket?” So Lori gave him the money to ride the bus, the 38 Geary.

What was that one review? “You sound like a garbage trunk being driven off a cliff.”

You did a lot of deep research for this. Was this a recent review?

Maybe after your first record. I thought that was funny. Good review.

Yeah, in other words, it’s a garbage truck, but getting quieter and quieter? Or, if you’re at the bottom of the cliff, then it’s getting louder and louder? Or you’re in the garbage truck, and the fact that it went over a cliff is not having any effect on the sound?

Great point.

Like, taking flight, maybe. Maybe they were comparing us to a majestic eagle soaring through the air. That’s probably what they meant.

Or, it’s collecting garbage.

I’m very clean.

Enough of these softballs. What’s next, Trevor?

I was wondering if, during this time period—opening for Sonic Youth, then All Tomorrow’s Parties—it seemed like there were all these groups playing shows together and everyone knew each other. Do you feel like you’ve seen anything like that in the last few years? Or how are things different?

Yeah, sometimes you’d see the same bands again. Shellac would play. Sonic Youth. It helped bring us out of our shell. I treasure those memories, and we would be nowhere without the generosity of spirit of all the musicians that we just happened to be around all those years. But I also feel like we’re not a reliable source to answer your question. Because, after that period, people are still friendly to us! People still reach out to us in a way that feels like a miracle to me. It’s staggering that there are still people who resonate with our music. I feel like I’m living a charmed life. I mean, it has its difficulties. You don’t make a lot of money. But I feel like I found the holy grail of the way to have human interaction and friendships.

I was wondering if you’ve come across other young groups, people around the age you were when Deerhoof started, creating a scene like that?

Definitely. I moved to the Bay Area for 12 years, and then lived in New Mexico for 12 years, and moved back to Minnesota. It’s a crazy, amazing scene here, and it’s neat to see how it’s similar to scenes that we experienced—but also different. The music as always is growing, and it’s so cool to see young people pulling from all these really different things and having no fear about it. And also being in a community of supportive people. For me, it’s super inspiring to interact with those folks.

I want to add a nuance that I wonder if you think is true. San Francisco had this reputation as a haven if you were a freak, or wanted to be allowed to do something original, or just try and be yourself. But once Deerhoof started to tour, like our first forays into the Deep South, I realized that the environment there was the exact opposite. It wasn’t that there were no freaks; it was that their scene was so derided and oppressed by the conservative and unsupportive culture they lived in, they had to go that much harder and band together out of necessity. Their weirdness felt much more serious than the San Francisco version, where everybody could be goofy and the stakes were low. In places like Chattanooga or Winston-Salem, they were fighting for their identity.

And what has changed in the decades since is that politics and media and tech have all moved to the right. I’m getting the sense that, even in places where you used to be able to do your thing, now if you are trying to be a musician at all, you’re basically a member of a semi-oppressed group. People are having to stick up for themselves. You’re particularly targeted if you’re gay or trans or non-white, which was always such a big part of almost any good music scene. So it has a slightly different flavor than the one Deerhoof grew up in.

Would you give some advice to groups touring for the first time?

What is different right now from when we were coming up is that so many people put their opinions and advice online.

Half of them are written by bots.

Yeah, it’s sponsored material for some—like, “Febreze is what I use while I’m on tour.” But when we were coming up, we all did it the same way. Everybody in our scene grabbed our stuff, threw it in a car and a van, went and slept on people’s floors. We did not expect to be paid. I’m not saying any of those things were good things. But when John and I first started playing music together, we were booking tours by calling on the phone, asking other bands for advice. I don’t feel like I knew anybody that was doing well. The very idea that it could be sustainable was just unfathomable.

We did a lot of stuff because nobody told us we couldn’t, or that there was another way. And now you look online, and there’s people telling you, “This is how stuff needs to be done, and this is the best way to do it.” But I feel like that narrative is falling apart. The reaction lately is a lot more like, “Fuck that. We don’t need to buy what you say we need to buy.”

Yep. You wrote such a good article about it.

It was in response to this New York Times article about bands complaining how difficult it was to get signed. Like, going to play SXSW, and all the money they spent to be in front of record execs.

Around the same time, the main guy from Pomplamoose, who is also the president of Patreon right now, wrote about how they lost money on tour. And then you read it and they had multiple vehicles, they brought a lighting rig, they were paying session musicians. They claimed they were not staying in nice hotels, but the prices they were quoting were not Motel 6 prices. So I wrote that article in response to these voices painting it like there was a right way to do things, and you needed all these resources and funds.

It’s so discouraging.

Can you imagine if that energy had swept through any of the scenes we were involved in? We would have been destroyed. If I ever hear an older musician talk about how the scene isn’t as good as it was when they were younger, how kids aren’t as real or they’re spoiled, I immediately think, “You could not be more out of touch. House shows are still happening, but you’re not invited to them. That stuff never stopped. It’s just you stopped going.”

When I used to waitress and get paid under the table—am I not supposed to say that for the Walker?—I got paid, like, four dollars per hour. The other waitress on my shift was stealing my tips. But now I don’t know how people play in bands and do another job and then do social media. It’s so much work.

And the free papers are gone. Venues closed down. The few that there are, are mostly owned by Live Nation/Ticketmaster. We were so lucky! The one thing about that New York Times article that probably is true is that it is hard to get signed now. I just drove my friend to Seattle, and we stopped in Olympia for French fries. I found the theater where Deerhoof played our first out-of-town show! Satomi wasn’t even in the band yet. It was me and Rob.

Yo-yo Festival.

The Yo-Yo-a-Go-Go Festival. And the guy who ran the label Kill Rock Stars, Slim Moon, saw us and signed us instantly. One show. Can you imagine that happening nowadays? Now you gotta tour for years and be selling so much merch that it’s an absolute no-brainer a label would want to pick you up. Because labels are also in financial dire straits.

I agree with you, Ed. Anybody who complains that the young people have it easy is lying to themselves. I also feel lucky that we’re still going and we get to meet the younger bands. That’s where the revolutionary energy comes from that has any hope of saving this collapsing society.

Is there a quality that you would look for in a new band, if you were a record exec? How important is skill in music?

We don’t have a record label, but the closest thing we have is choosing our opening bands. That’s always super fun. We often pick local bands in whatever city we play.

I just look for honesty and a real connection. As far as skill goes, I think we’ve all seen a band where somebody doesn’t even know how to tune their guitar, but the show destroys you because they are feeling it. The genre doesn’t matter. If the energy is right, it feels legit.

It’s hard to be legit right now. There’s every pressure not to be yourself, to put on airs, to craft your online image. Studies have shown that the ability to, for instance, resist Nazism under the Third Reich was not based on skill or money. It wasn’t how smart someone was, or whether they were in academia, or how they voted. The biggest determining factor was how true they were to themselves. It’s not just an X-factor to make a lot of money on my imaginary record label. It’s literally that our survival as a species depends on people being true to themselves.

For so many of the bands we play with, the “skill” is that they have something to say and figured out some way of saying it.

This dynamic plays out in a funny way, even inside our band. Each of us is differently trained as musicians. The amount of formal training has had no bearing on whether any of us could duplicate what each other is doing. Actually, we all can. We’re completely interchangeable.

Was there a moment when you were trying to emulate the sound from another artist? Or a moment when you decided to abandon that and find your own sound?

It’s the same as visual art. When I moved to New York and would see a lot of art, at first I said, “I like this, I don’t like that.” But the more I see it, there is no reason to not like this. I might not connect to it today, but maybe I will in a week or a year. It’s not relevant to you in this moment, but a year from now it’s exactly what you need.

You’ve lived long enough to see your tastes change. The things you thought were bad turn out to be your favorite.

That was actually one of my questions. Are there musicians you were embarrassed to admit to liking, but now you realize you truly love?

Well, that’s a different question. The only thing that’s allowed me to retain what marbles I have—when I see how many people describe Deerhoof as a dump truck going over a cliff—was to tell myself that this person is really just a future lover of Deerhoof. Then my sanity would return. But you’re asking if there was something that embarrassed us in the early days that now we have no shame?

I’m obviously not embarrassed about anything because we started off with me talking about Primus.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I was friends with hardcore noise people who didn’t allow me to like any uncool bands. I saw them recently after not seeing them in a really long time, and the first thing they said was, “I read your interview and you said you listen to Metallica. That’s not cool.”

Bringing shame on our family.

There’s also stuff that I love that I would never want to make anything close to it. There’s also this personal journey of trying to figure out not just what I like, but what are the things that only I have, regardless of what I like or hate.

I don’t hear a lot from John that you hate something.

I feel that, too. It dawns on you that you’re not going to be able to do everything. Your time is limited on this earth. For example, I realize I’m never going to be as good at drums as X, Y, and Z. I might not even be as good a drummer as I was before. Maybe I’ve already peaked, and maybe that’s OK. I remember a series of works you did, Trevor, in which you pretended to be a different painter, doing his late works. You remember this?

Mm-hmm.

There were all the art-world clichés. You were bedridden, and you fall in love with your younger nurse. The brushwork is incredibly spare and has this spiritual quality, of being sort of half in the grave. There’s something to be said for “late work,” where you aren’t as loud or as fast as you were in your youth, but you’re still finding yourself.

I saw Matthew Shipp perform recently, also Andrew Cyrille: musicians and poets who’ve been doing their thing for so long. I’ve never seen anything like this Matthew Shipp performance in my life. The funny thing is I kind of hated it. But he was just devoid of any amount of giving a fuck. He had the attitude of: I am simply sitting here and doing this thing, and I’m going deep into something right now. It was like a bolt, so brutal and intense. Everyone had really strong opinions about it afterwards. I woke up the next day and thought about it all day. That’s what you’re looking for: asking a question so intensely that it produces more questions.

Huge. Free jazz players were already starting off in a revolutionary style, but then sticking to it is like seeing a seed you planted grow into a tree. An elder statesman is almost shaman-like in terms of archetype.

That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t even about taste. It was an incredibly developed . . .

. . . way of being in the world. A shaman is not a capitalist, but a healer. Maybe a confusing hermit, but one who can blow your mind and change your life. That’s what you want to shoot for—not a Chick-fil-A commercial or a cross-promotional thing with Febreze.

A shaman is a singer. So that’s me in the band!

We’re setting a pretty high bar for this Walker show. You realize this is all getting handed out in the program notes. People are going to have pretty insane expectations. Then we just go up there and play our rock songs.

That’s a question I was going to ask, about standout shows in your life. You’ve seen so many.

The very first All Tomorrow’s Parties festival we ever played was in LA. We arrived the night before we played and went to the concert hall.

Cecil Taylor.

He was an old man by this point. John and I knew people at school who had played in Taylor’s group. But it’s one thing to describe or analyze how he does his notation. Then you see the show—and, no, this is not a person checking off boxes, or taking a route through a grid, trying to get a good review on Pitchfork. This was a human being that made you wonder how somebody could ever become such a human being. He was so himself. You had no idea what he was going to do next. It was his entire body playing the piano, his facial expressions. He’d start reciting poetry. He’d taught himself how to exist on this earth. You don’t forget something like that.

Merzbow. Before I was ever in Deerhoof, I lived in Tokyo. I was maybe 19. I’d never heard anything that loud. It was almost like a spiritual experience. I went there by myself. There are maybe five people in the audience. It’s a small Tokyo venue but the PA system is huge and super maxed out. When I came out of the club I’m like, “I can’t hear.”

Growing up, I saw Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time [band] twice. If I would’ve gotten stuck in a time loop and that would have been the rest of my life, I would be completely blissed out. The first time was in Minneapolis, I can’t remember where.

It was at Northrop Auditorium. I was there, too.

You didn’t even know each other!

Denardo [Coleman] was on the electronic kit. There was a tabla player, two guitars, two bass players. It was just so many threads happening simultaneously. They played for about an hour and a half, and Ornette didn’t say a single word. The place was packed. There were obviously a bunch of season-ticket holders because within moments of Ornette starting, he just cleared the place.

Do you ever come through Minneapolis, Trevor?

I’ve never been, but I’ve always been curious about the Walker. The great Dan Graham piece in the garden. Maybe I should go see you guys play.

You can get the hard copy of the program notes. Ed, you used to work there, right?

I was a guard for a year and a half.

Trevor, you should definitely do something there.

I don’t think I could just ask them.

If the guards are still like me when I was there, you could probably just walk in and hang stuff if you want.▪︎

Four performers stand facing the camera in pink light. — Deerhoof, *31 Flavours Tour*. Courtesy the artists.

Experience Deerhoof @ 31 at the Walker on May 1, 2025. Learn more and get tickets here.