Avi Vinocur
San Francisco’s Avi Vinocur is a prolific multi-instrumentalist who records with both his band Goodnight Texas, and under his own name and has played with everyone from Phil Lesh to Metallica. We caught up with him to learn a bit more about his process, Goodnight Texas’s whole shtick, and stories from the bay.
MM: When and where did you start making music?
AV: Well, I played piano as a small kid. I found making up songs on it pretty interesting, as opposed to learning it properly. I actually found some cassette tapes of me writing songs on piano that I don’t really remember, I got into it kind of abruptly when I was six or seven. I got a guitar in elementary school and was kind of into it, but high school is when I really got obsessed with it and got into electric blues and played a lot of Jimi Hendrix stuff.
MM: Did you have a moment when you were like, “okay, I want to do this?”
AV: Yeah, when I was younger and I first heard Green Day, I was like, “I feel like I can do this. This makes sense, it can be simple and awesome. But when I got older I got really into the 60s stuff, you know, Hendrix, and the Beatles, and Dylan, and all that. That’s when it got really interesting. Hendrix made guitar interesting and the Beatles and Bob Dylan made songwriting interesting. Hendrix’s songs are incredible too, they’re very colorful. That’s kind of the part of playing music that really clicked with me.
MM: How did you pick up mandolin?
AV: I found one at a guitar trade show. There were two mandolins sitting there, one was cracked and one was normal. I think they might have screwed up and sold me the good one for the price of the cracked one, they mixed up their tags or something, so I got this 90-something-year old mandolin and got really into it. I had one when I lived in LA, just out of high school, but I didn’t really know how to do it, I just made up a few songs with it. But when I got this one, there was something very old-timey about how it sounded and immediately a bunch of songs just came out, it just clicked. Something about the sound felt very at-home to me. I later found out my great-great-grandmother played mandolin. I didn’t know this till way later. She lived near like a railroad yard in Frederick, Maryland.
MM: How do you feel like you really made your way into the “Americana” folksy kind of set?
AV: It wasn’t totally intentional. There was just something right about making music that sounded the way it did – something a little darker and heavier but very simple kind of stuff. I always loved very traditional-sounding vocal stuff, Irish singing, one-instrument instrumentals on a nylon-string banjo, or a mandolin piece, or a simple vocal, and I was like, I want to try to make songs that feel like they’re traditional songs but are set up a bit more with a pop structure, where there’s a little ambiguity around whether it’s a new or old song- that was my objective. It’s evolved from there, but I wanted to see if I could do an impression of old school music through my own stuff. Getting a mandolin definitely helped make that possible. We started with nothing but a mandolin, a banjo, and an acoustic guitar. We never knew anyone who played fiddle, but I sort of liked more plucky instruments, it felt heavier to me. There’s a very traditional South Carolina chain-gang song called “Rosie,” I think it was recorded at a prison, but it’s just this gorgeous very spiritual-sounding song that had a big impact on me on how powerful just human voices can be without instruments behind them. I love silence and space in music and having very quiet and then very loud moments. It all sort of made sense in that genre than anything, we didn’t think it out, it just sort of fit.
MM: How’d you meet your band?
AV: I met Patrick randomly at a cafe, I was performing and he had just moved to San Francisco, he was there having tea with his girlfriend at the time. He came up to me after I performed and said “we should play a show together, I just moved here,” and I invited him to my open mic at the Brainwash Cafe. He came and the first song he played was an original called “Wavy Bones,” and I was like, I cannot believe you wrote this song. It just sounded like a classic song that I hadn’t heard and I was like, “oh my god I have to play music with you.” We tried to figure out how to play guitar and sing together and at first we couldn’t really lock in, but then we just started playing electric guitar on each other’s songs and singing together, and then I swear to god, in just one day it clicked. We were playing a show in Berkley and I just sort of chimed in on one of his songs and for some reason, it has never been hard since.
The cafe is called the Bazaar Cafe in the Richmond district of San Francisco. It’s a cafe I’d played at for years, and it was run by this older guy named Les who was always there. Actually, when Patrick and I met, my mom was in town visiting. I’d played there for five years and I knew this old guy, Les, pretty well. Then one day my mom called me and told me that in 1964 my cousin, Lester, moved to California, and we never heard from him again, and we thought that Les might be that guy. I brought a picture of my great-grandmother, who was his aunt, to the cafe, and he’s like, “That’s my aunt! Where’d you get this picture?” and I said, “That’s my great-grandmother! We’re cousins.” He was like, “Are you kidding me?” Because we had known each other for five years, and we just didn’t realize it. My mom had been at the cafe and they both didn’t realize they had grown up together. He was older but there are pictures of them as kids playing together. My mom ended up getting married at the cafe and Les officiated the wedding and he’s just part of our family now. Everything happened at this cafe. It’s called Bazaar Cafe but it’s definitely the “Bizarre Cafe.” Les retired but it still exists as a music place. So I met Patrick there, found my cousin there, my mom got married, the whole thing.
MM: How is the writing process different solo vs. with your band? Which do you prefer?
AV: I tend to cherry-pick songs that fit the aesthetic of the band, or make songs I think are missing from the band’s catalog. It’s a little more deliberate with the band, the stuff I write for my solo work is stuff I make up that doesn’t fit or work for the band, I have a bigger palette with my solo stuff to get weird or make different kinds of sounds. I wanted my last record, No Cause for Alarm, to sound like really lo-fi sounding cassette demos, electric guitar, recorded in a bedroom, angry about the elections, and that’s what it was. I did it very very quickly, like, I’m gonna do a song every day, write it and record it, every single day, try to complete everything in one day. Then I had a few other songs I’d written previously, and that was that. Came in a matter of weeks, I barely even mixed it, I just had someone master it and put it out. It sounds pretty good, it’s very lo-fi, actually there’s some people I show it to and they’re like, “this record sounds terrible.” I’m like, that’s kind of the point, that’s what my energy was at the time. If you don’t like that, my first one is better. It’s kind of scraps of stuff that didn’t work anywhere that seem to end up on my solo records. I’m more open-minded that way. For the band, I try to keep it more focused, on what I feel like fits this “American highway historical story” concept. We’re branching out a bit now, we have a fifth guy who’s going to be joining who’s like a very talented multi-instrumentalist who will do more electric guitar, fiddle, just to fill out a bit more space. As far as song-writing goes, with the band it’s more deliberate, like “I think we need a song that’s more brooding and dark and kind of like a war-drum,” so we write that. We have a new song on our record called “Barstow”, I wanted there to be like a cross between an Aaron Copeland piece with the Who. Kind of a Wild West version of a 1970s rock song. What would that be like? Our records with the band tend to take place in a region and a period. Like the most recent record is early 1900s in the Southwest of America. But it’s always vignettes and stories. If it doesn’t fit into that, or feels more modern, it usually ends up on my solo records.
MM: You played with Metallica but one wouldn’t draw many parallels without knowing that. How has working with them influenced your sound?
AV: Watching them do their thing, the way they write songs, they build them like building blocks. Parts on top of parts and they just keep constructing around it. There’s not an overall order to it, there are sections that get pieced together and become the choruses, pre-choruses, bridges, the way they do that is very interesting and I think we used that. On that Barstow song I mentioned, there are lots of different riffs after riffs that kind of go one after another, that may have been influenced by them. It’s fascinating to watch them work and do their thing. To be one of the biggest bands in the world and at the top of their game, but it’s still very much like being in any band. You still have rehearsals, someone’s on their phone and you’re like, get off your phone. People disagree on certain things and have to find a middle ground or whatever, it’s very fascinating.
Playing with them was insane, I still kind of can’t believe that happened. It’s been surreal to see it come out on vinyl, that show we did. I guess it was their first acoustic record. The show went really well, it’s pretty crazy that I’ve done that. And seeing how the energy felt on stage, just acoustic, I can’t even fathom how it would feel playing with them electric on stage. The energy level with everyone just sitting on stools was through-the-roof insane. Just really high energy, so learning to bring some of that around the space has been fun to conceptualize and figure out how we can bring more energy to what we do as a band.
MM: How would you describe the San Francisco scene now vs. 7-8 years ago, how has it evolved? Is it in danger?
AV: I think it’s doing better now. There’s a very close-knit group of local bands we’re lucky to be a part of, of just friends. We hang out all the time and everyone is really talented, great singers, song-writers, it’s not getting a ton of national recognition but it’s really good and really diverse. There’s a lot of bands incorporating back-up singers and choreography and challenging each other to one-up their shows, and everyone’s shows are so good right now. I kind of wish more people could see it. But it’s been really great, there have been a lot of times where I’ve thought “I want to move to Nashville or Austin or New York, and get in more with some kind of a tight-knit music scene,” but it’s kind of evolved here and become this tight-knit thing that’s evolved and developed. It’s a music scene but also just a bunch of really good friends. There are also a lot of people I don’t know in the scene doing incredible things, but the scene I’m in now I really love. There’s a lot of stuff going on in Oakland too, a lot of bands of different genres. I don’t think there’s a specific direction in SF, a lot of people come and go pretty quickly here so Oakland is a bit more stable, maybe. But it’s not like, a specific genre that’s taking it over like Seattle in the 90s. It’s sort of a lot of different genres and sounds, there’s definitely a good Americana scene, a lot of bands, songwriters, and hard-working people.
I sort of wish that these billion-dollar tech companies that are here would agree to maybe try to reinvest some of their income into local artists and musicians. Like at their headquarters, maybe hire a local artist to do murals, or perform on Fridays. Some companies have done this and don’t even want to pay you, although some do, but they have the budget to do it and they could help artists and musicians compete with their employees who are coming here and raising the real estate prices. If they just re-invested a little in local arts, it would make them look really good. I’ve been brainstorming how to pitch that. How do we get San Francisco tech companies to pledge like, one million or two million dollars a year to local arts, even if just at their local headquarters or throwing an event? Or it could even be as simple as, you’re a Bay Area company, feature San Francisco musicians and artists when possible. You don’t even have to use a local song for a national Superbowl commercial, but for a simple ad on your home page you could use a local band’s song and pay them $1000 to do it, to help them afford to stay here. People have to come and go so quickly. It would give artists a lot of incentive to move to San Francisco and come in here and really make this city what it always has been and what it always has been trying to be. Give artists a little bit of a chance, a little bit of a leg up, and these companies can afford it. It could be really positive.
Listen to “Tennessee” and pre-order “The Senseless Age” on Bandcamp
