The Rebel Set is a local band that features driving drums, chunky guitar and the unmistakable sound of the farfisa organ.
Joe Zimmerman, songwriter and lead vocalist for The Rebel Set, spoke about how he defines the band's sound, which falls somewhere between two classic genres.
The band will be playing Monday, Nov. 23, at Valley Bar in Phoenix.
Full conversation
JOE ZIMMERMAN: Garage rock or something. We used to be a little more surfy, but we've kind of evolved a little more.
MARK BRODIE: How are garage and surf different?
ZIMMERMAN: Well, surf is traditionally instrumental and very like clean with a lot of reverb and stuff, and then garage is a little more rough and noisy, and I guess we, we're somewhere in between this.
BRODIE: So is there something appealing to you about the time period in which those forms of music originally became popular?
ZIMMERMAN: I think just how primitive it is, it was done quickly and, you know, by modern standards, the recording techniques were pretty primitive.
BRODIE: Like how so?
ZIMMERMAN: Just the, you know, there wasn't like 24 tracks of drums, or, you know, it was like two tracks for the whole band for the whole recording. I don't know, just the way that that sounds when you do things that way, and let things like instruments bleed onto each other's tracks and stuff rather than everything nice and clean.
BRODIE: Is there more room for like happy accidents when you do it that way?
ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, on the last recordings we did, which haven't been released yet, there's a point where there is no organ part, but that microphone picking up everything else made some interesting sounds that we turned up for that part that that are just weird, you know, ambient room sounds that never would have happened if it, it, you know, literally was accidental.
BRODIE: So you get some surprises when you listen back to what you've recorded.
ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
BRODIE: How do you explain a band that plays surf music in the middle of the desert?
ZIMMERMAN: Well, there's been actually a lot of surf going back to the ‘50s, it's not surf, but Duane Eddy, sort of a forerunner of surf and twanginess and then Al Casey, who played with Duane Eddy, who went on to play with the Beach Boys and became a studio musician playing on a lot of surf recordings, made his own surf and hootenanny album. I don't know why it's in the desert, but there seems to have always been a fair amount.
BRODIE: So your music is, as we've talked about, evocative of past eras, and I'm curious how you sort of balance keeping a fidelity to what has been, but also putting your stamp on it in 2015.
ZIMMERMAN: It may sound oxymoronic or something, but we never wanted to be like retro, we just wanted to play those styles but play them now and not limit ourselves in terms of they didn't do it that way, so we can't do it that way.
BRODIE: How do you decide, sort of how much to take from the past and then implement it into what you're doing now?
ZIMMERMAN: There's not really any, a lot of thought that goes into that. We just sort of when you play using equipment that's like 50 years old, it just kind of sounds that way.
BRODIE: But that's a conscious decision, right, to play on older instruments.
ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, I mean, there's certain things that you can't, like the farfisa that Katie uses, yeah, it has a very distinct sound that is hard to replicate, so if you want that sound, that's the only way to go.
If you’re in a band or know of one you’d like to hear on air, send us a note at [email protected].
