It was a beautiful early spring evening when I ventured up to the Pearl Street nightclub in Northampton, Massachusetts to catch my first McLovins show. I was nursing a beer at the bar and waiting for the show to start when I turned to some kid next to me who was still many years away from legally having what I was having. He looked like a McLovin fan because he was wearing a tie-dyed trippy skull tee shirt. I asked him what his story was and he told me that his grandpa used to follow the Grateful Dead, his dad likes Phish but he’s into The McLovins. I didn’t really feel old until I realized I was the exact same age as the three guys in The McLovins combined.
So who are The McLovins? First of all let me say that they’re not twenty-five year old Hawaiian organ donors or Irish R&B singers. If you get these jokes then you also saw the movie “Super Bad” and you already know how and why they got their name. The McLovins are three Connecticut teenagers who are emerging stars on planet jamband. They are Jake Huffman on drums and lead vocals, Jason Ott on bass and back-up vocals, and Jeffrey Howard on lead guitar. In their short time together they have gone from playing small bars and school functions to touring the northeast and packing them in at venues like Infinity Hall in Norfolk and Black-Eyed Sally’s in Hartford. They have also played at several festivals including Snow.down, Strange Creek, Mountain Jam, and the inaugural Neteva Music Festival. At the time of this interview they had just played the Warner Theater in Torrington opening up for blues legend Buddy Guy. And now on Saturday July 23rd they will play the main stage at Seaside Park in Bridgeport at the awesome Gathering of the Vibes festival. They will share the bill that day with Deep Banana Blackout, moe., Elvis Costello, and Jane’s Addiction. Their popularity along with their musicianship has exploded over the past year. How cool is that?
How did this happen you ask? They posted a video on youtube that’s how. In December of 2008 these three kids recorded themselves playing the classic Phish instrumental “You Enjoy Myself,” or “YEM” as we Phish fans call it, and put it online for their friends to see. As of this writing there are now over 183,000 views of it. It’s not quite “Charlie bit my finger” but it’s not too shabby either. In the time since then they have recorded two studio records called “Conundrum” and “Good Catch,” one live record called “Jam around the Globe,” and an EP co-written for them by Anthony Krizan and Trey Anastasio’s songwriting partner Tom Marshall called “Cohesive.” But as great as Jake and Jason are at what they do, it’s their soon to be a junior in high school guitarist Jeff that will one day take his place along side Trey, Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks, and Chuck Garvey as one of the great guitar players the jamband world has to offer. He’s that good. On a personal note I want to say that it was a pleasure talking to these three exceptional young men and it’s not the least bit surprising to me when I see all the accolades that are being bestowed upon them. This interview took place at Jake Huffman’s home on Saturday May 28th.
How did it feel to open up for Buddy Guy?
Jeff – “Everything about it was an amazing experience. The Warner Theater, the spaciousness of it all, god I was so pumped and I think we reached a new level just by playing in there. Of course it’s a huge honor to open up for Buddy Guy!”
Jason – “Wow that was an experience I’ll tell you. We played probably our shortest set but in that hall you just got the sense that so many amazing musicians had been there before you. And we’re playing for Buddy Guy, a huge name and it was a perfect sounding hall and a great feeling because it really gave us a taste for how the professionals feel when they’re playing these big stages.”
How did his audience respond to you?
Jake – “I think they responded really well especially because we kind of like dropped a brand new sound on them that they never heard before and we got really big applauses at the end. And like Jeff said, the room was so big you could just close your eyes and feel the sound just fly up in this huge room and it really just made us play so much better and it just felt so real. And I think that really was portrayed well in the audience. I think they were really into what we were doing.”
Jason – “Also, to be honest, before we played I felt like these fans were there just to hear the blues and not a bunch of teens playing loud rowdy music but they really liked us. They were really supportive and cheering after we played. Some people were in the crowd because they wanted to hear Buddy Guy and not us, but they seemed to be accepting it and really catching on to the music. So it was a great surprise and we were very happy.”
OK so now how does it feel to know that you going to be playing the main stage at the Gathering of the Vibes Festival?
Jeff – “I still can’t even wrap my head around that, this huge stage and just the three of us there. But once again I’m hugely honored and I’m looking forward to it. I’m very optimistic and I think we’re going to get a good crowd there with a lot of energy and good vibes. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like.”
Jason – “That’s really an amazing feat for us. To think that two summers ago we were playing the little green tent Vibes. We got a great turnout there and just after two years we’re already playing the main stage. Like Jeff said it’s a huge honor no matter what time slot we have. We hope we get a good turnout and I think we will. It’s going to be the biggest stage we’ve ever played on and there’s quite a lot of pressure actually but I think we’ll pull through.”
How did it happen?
Jake – “Well last year we got around three thousand people to the side stage and that was the most they ever had at the side stage. They came up to us afterwards and were like ‘wow great job, next year lets try to get you on the main stage.’ It was really cool hearing them say that. I think it was the next couple of days on the Gathering of the Vibes facebook page they posted a status that read something like Mclovins on main stage with a question mark with a thousand likes to get us on it. After that I got emails from a guy named Jason who runs the page and he said ‘yo Jake check out the status I just put.’ I looked on it and after four hours it had fifteen hundred likes. I sent an email back to Jason saying ‘we did it man!’ It was incredible to have that internet fan base. People actually wanted us to be on the main stage. It wasn’t like we worked our way in, people wanted it. So it’s really cool to be liked and wanted. Playing on the main stage is going to be so unreal. I can’t even fathom it.”
I know you’ve been asked this before but tell me how the three of you came together?
Jake – “I met Jeffrey at Paul Howard’s rock camp. It was at a church in Avon and I played with Jeffrey for a week. We all played at the camp and then we put on a show at the end. There were about five of us there so it was a really small kind of thing. We played Allman Brothers and stuff like that. From the first note that Jeffrey played it was like ‘holy crap!’ I really wanted to play with this kid. A week later I met Jason at a jazz camp that I was doing and again it was like ‘oh wow, this bass player and I play really well together.’ The next week I remember thinking about the two of them and how I really wanted to jam with them again, it was so much fun. I called them and told them that I have a basement with a drum set in it and if you want to bring over your amps and guitars we can jam. We started playing together and we clicked right away. You just feel it when you play with someone and it just clicks. It feels great. I think it was a week later that we sat in at a bar in Collinsville and played three songs and people really liked it so we decided to keep it going and see where it goes.”
Jason – “Like Jake said we met at a jazz camp within a week of him having met Jeff. I was playing upright bass there and Jake was in the drums and we started to click a bit when we were playing and in our free time we would eat together, chat and whatnot. We became friends and he invited me over to his basement along with this great guitarist he told me he just met just to jam and hang out. And that turned into practices and here we are now.”
Jeff you must have been getting offers before Jake and Jason came along right?
Jeff – “Before the McLovins I definitely played with other musicians, it wasn’t the kind of thing where I was just sitting in my room alone. I played with more adult musicians which was good because I got the experience of playing with others which is a whole skill in and of it’s self. So that was good but I think playing with the McLovins was a new thing. It was kids my age so it had this sort of fresh quality to it. Also people got into it a little bit more. They got a little more fascinated with it like ‘wow look at these kids. They sound just like adults.’ So there was something new about it yet it wasn’t a totally new experience from going to playing alone in a room to playing out at a bar for the first time which I think is a good thing.”
What is the timeline from when you got together to when you posted the youtube video of the three of you playing the Phish tune “You Enjoy Myself?”
Jeff – “The youtube video was in December of 2008 and our first practice was in August of 2008.”
When were you aware that it went viral?
Jake – “The same night we posted it I woke up the next morning with like five hundred emails and ten thousand views on the video. I had so many emails the whole next day I could barely turn on my phone because it kept vibrating and buzzing with the emails. I called Jeff and Jason saying ‘oh my god look at all the views.’”
Jason – “It was amazing. I had just come home from a Monday at school and I was minding my own business and doing my usual thing and then Jake calls me up and he’s all hysterical and he says ‘oh my god we have ten thousand views already on YEM!’ And I didn’t believe him at first. I thought ‘ten thousand really?’ So I went on and checked and oh man I was on top of the world there. To think that we had put it up for a few friends to watch and it went from twenty views to ten thousand literally overnight. It was an unbelievable feeling. And I think that’s the point where I sort of felt like there was a change in the way I went about my everyday life because I went from feeling like nobody knows who I am to ‘wow, ten thousand people have seen this video already.’ So it was quite a dramatic shift.”
What about you Jeff. What kind of feedback we’re you getting?
Jeff – “There was no shortage of interesting feedback. I know that the day after the video made its premier I was sick. I got to stay home and read all the comments so that’s what I did all day. But all of the interesting comments and feedback came from a website called Phantasy Tour which you may have heard of. It’s very notorious for having noxious and snarky, interesting characters in there. We had some honest and sincere supporters of it but there were others who said ‘oh they suck!’”
Tell me the story about how you got your name although I guess it’s obvious to anyone who saw the movie “Super Bad.”
Jeff – “The story behind the name is that we were nameless and it wasn’t like people said I hereby call you The McLovins. It just sort of happened because we like to say that all three of us look like McLovin, but really I’m McLovin! I’ve outgrown that a little but I think it still exists a tiny bit. So they started calling us The McLovins and then I saw the movie after. I hadn’t seen the movie actually before that. I said to the guys ‘how do you like The McLovins?’ I think Jake was into it and we were a little skeptical, kind of on the fence about it. Now looking back it’s a memorable name. It sticks to you. It’s goofy but I guess it’s what we’re about. We’re goofy kids having fun.”
OK let’s talk about your records. Tell me about the “Conundrum” disc and its relationship to Norton Juster’s book “The Phantom Tollbooth.”
Jake – “We were actually eating dinner after a practice, all of us and our families went out, and Jeff, Jason, and I started talking about our favorite things like our favorite television shows and things like that. We have a lot of things in common when it comes to our likes and dislikes. I asked Jason what his favorite book is and he said that he really liked ‘The Phantom Tollbooth.’ I said ‘that’s my favorite book!’ And then Jeff said that it’s his favorite book too. So we started talking about all our favorite parts in it and this whole adventure that the boy had and how we all really related to it. So we thought ‘let’s write some songs inspired by it.’ We were a lot younger and we’re thinking ‘why not?’ We can do whatever we want. It’s our band and our music and maybe it would be cool to write something about something else that had touched us and helped us out through our lives. So we kind of did it like that. ‘Conundrum’ is inspired by ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ but not like verbatim. We were inspired by the sounds that we felt and the music we heard in our heads when we read it. We tried to do it that way. I tried to make the lyrics growing up type stuff with metaphors kind of relating to the book and kind of not. It wasn’t just like ‘it’s the book!’ It’s our album and the ideas and the songs in there and the sounds are inspired because of how we felt about the book.”
From “Conundrum” to your next album “Good Catch” could you feel yourselves growing as a band?
Jeff – “Definitely, going from ‘Conundrum’ to ‘Good Catch’ I think the tunes had more of a song structure and were a little more interesting but at the same time they were better vehicles for doing extended jams and going at it in different directions. Which is cool, we had more structure yet we also could go on different tangents. So I think that made ‘Good Catch’ overall a better quality record although I do love ‘Conundrum.’”
Jake – “Also with ‘Good Catch’ we had already been playing all the songs on the album for a full year. The songs on ‘Good Catch’ were how we played them live. We didn’t really change much about that. We did do more overtakes and overdubs and things like that but it was primarily like if you go to a show and listen to ‘Tokyo Tea’ and then listen to ‘Tokyo Tea’ on ‘Good Catch,’ they’re pretty similar. And now with our next album we did it a bit different. There will be songs on there that people have never heard. They’re more structured and we won’t play them exactly like the album. We’ll play them different live. So we’ve taken large steps from ‘Conundrum’ to ‘Good Catch’ and even bigger steps from ‘Good Catch’ to the mysterious new album.”
Jason – “I think when we finished the ‘Good Catch’ album we listened to it back and went and listened to ‘Conundrum’ over, just seeing how far we got. It’s kind of like when you look back at your grade school art portfolio and you think ‘I thought that was the most amazing thing at the time but now I see all these things wrong with it or I see how much better I am now.’ Not that it was bad, it’s just I really could see a change in all of our playing for the better. We’re so much tighter. We had such a better sound. We knew more about where we wanted to go with each song. And the biggest change I would say is in the way we produced them and the way we wrote out the songs. For ‘Conundrum’ we just played it a few times together live in the studio and went back to fixed a few things individually. For the most part we did absolutely no touch-ups except for the sound guy fixing the sound and whatnot. But then ‘Good Catch’ came along and we had more fun adding new layers and adding entire different drum tracks. Like in ‘3:47’ we added thirteen other drum tracks, something ridiculous like that with djembes and congas. It was a dramatic shift but for the better and I think we definitely developed a lot.”
Like all jam bands I’m sure the songs continue to evolve even after they are recorded on to a CD.
Jake – “That’s definitely true and also because from a lyrics perspective my voice sounds a lot different than it did a couple of years ago when we recorded the different albums. So it’s weird for me to listen to ‘Conundrum’ because my voice doesn’t really sound like that anymore. Pretty much all of the shows that we’ve played are recorded in our archives. So it’s weird for me to listen to sequentially each show and how my voice changes a little bit. I was trying to find a good sound for my voice when it hadn’t fully developed. I’m eighteen now and I think it’s done. I’m pretty sure my voice is done.”
Jason mentioned Tom Marshall and Anthony Krizan. Jake why don’t you talk about that EP and your relationship with Tom?
Jake – “I’ve been in contact with Tom since we posted the ‘YEM’ video. And for a while we’ve been talking about when would be the right time to write a song with him. We decided last year we’d write ‘Cohesive.’ When we wrote ‘Cohesive’ that was just a whole new world, a different process. We’ve never really done it with lyrics first and working with Tom and Anthony opened up a whole new world of how to structure songs and a different way of writing songs. And that has definitely influence us with our songwriting. It’s really incredible being able to work with greats like that and they’re really supportive guys. We’re recording our next album at Anthony’s studio because we love how ‘Cohesive’ came out and how it’s produced and what a great environment it is down there and how supportive those guys are when they’re with us.”
Tell me about your live disc called “Jam around the Globe.”
Jeff – “’Jam around the Globe’ is one live show at New Vision Studios where the first two albums were recorded. It’s called ‘Jam around the Globe’ because it was streamed on Ustream so anyone around the globe could see it. So I’m sure there were people from China and all over the world tuning in! That was a really fun time because we got to hear the sound quality of that ‘Good Catch/Conundrum’ thing but you also had that live feel as opposed to that shortened studio feel. So we sort of unleashed ourselves a little bit in there and it was great.”
Jeff who is your favorite guitar player?
Jeff – “For me one of my favorites is John McLaughlin. He’s played with Mahavishnu Orchestra and he’s incredible. He’s like a rock jazzy guitar player. For anyone who hasn’t heard of him you should listen to him because with his technical ability and emotion he’s just got it all.”
Jake who is your favorite drummer?
Jake – For the style of music that I play and who I look to for inspiration and different ideas Stuart Copeland is my favorite drummer who I’ve never met or never had a lesson with. I just love everything he does. I think the way he drums is incredible. But my favorite drummer is Jim Oblon and he is Paul Simon’s touring drummer. He’s my mentor. He’s my friend and I think he’s the greatest drummer.”
Jason who is your favorite bass player?
Jason – “Oh man the two that come to mind are Jaco Pastorius or John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. They are definitely the most influential to me.”
Finally what can that huge crowd at the Gathering of the Vibes Festival expect to see and hear when The McLovins take the stage?
Jason – “I think for the most part, not to sound cocky, but they will be very surprised and sometimes shocked especially watching Jeffrey who is still so young playing guitar the way he does. I think people can look forward to coming out to a show with great music and I think what makes us even more special is actually being out in the crowd and getting to see the whole family we’ve created with all of our fans. I mean our families are standing right out there chatting people up. So I think they won’t only get an awesome blast of music to start their Saturday but they will also really have a great time meeting new fans and people who come out to see us.”
Jeff – “We’re all about the energy and our shows are very sincere and we put all our happiness into the show. I think people should expect a show where they can just have fun. It’s a very positive experience.”
Jake – “All of you can expect a surprise because when you go to see The McLovins people think ‘oh yeah The McLovins, those kids really jam. Those kids are really cool.’ But I think they’re going to be really surprised when they see us and how professional it actually is. How we’re three years developed into our own kind of sound. I think people will be surprised that we’re a real band.”
For more information about The McLovins you can check out their website at www.themclovins.com. And while you’re on the internet go to youtube and watch their now classic “YEM” video. Let’s see if we can push it over 200,000 views. After that, if you haven’t seen the “Super Bad” movie, stay on youtube and check out the “fake I.D.” scene and get in on the joke with the rest of us. Or better yet show up at the Gathering of the Vibes on July 23rd and climb about the McLovins bandwagon. If you’re not into tie-dye I understand trippy skull tee-shirts are also available in urban grey, pink, black, and day glow green.