Ain’t Life Grand

Four of the five members of Grand Fiasco crowd around a small table at McCoy’s in Westport, engrossed by a recently released Widespread Panic DVD. As the conversation floats from the 2002 show featured on the disc to Widespread’s just-announced two-night run at the Uptown in May, their faces light up in anticipation.

“I’ve been listening to those guys since I was fifteen,” percussionist Nathan Herrington says with a wide grin.

“But I think it’s only in just the last ten or fifteen years it’s been referred to as jam band,” guitarist Brian Brooks adds. “I don’t think when the Dead were around they were referred to as jam band, were they?”

Herrington considers this for a moment, then launches into a minitirade.

“The thing that irritates me about that with us is that when we rehearse, we have a purpose,” Herrington explains, defending his band against the perception of mindless, hours-on-end noodling. “We know exactly where we’re going. We’ll leave space in certain songs where we have a purpose of improvisation, but there’s always a resolving point. It’s not just ‘OK, let’s just go out here and see where it takes us.’ We may do that, but we always know where we’re coming back to.”

“We’ll just do what we call ‘the hairy eyebrow,'” Brooks says. “It’s where you just look at somebody and kind of say, ‘OK … here we go.'”

Although Grand Fiasco has been part of a healthy and steadily growing jam scene in the Kansas City area for the past two years, it only recently solidified its lineup. Brooks and bassist Brad McTighe serve as the group’s primary songwriters, newcomers Scott Middleton and Matt Gader flesh out the group on keys and drums, respectively, and Herrington claims the honor of longevity as the band’s only remaining original member. Yet even with the sense of stability found in its recent reincarnation and its notoriety as a solid local live act, Fiasco is far from running off to carve out a niche on the college-campus circuit that has spelled success for other jam acts.

“It’s not like we’re the only band doing this in the world; there’s probably just a million in Kansas,” Brooks says. “Over the past two years, so much has changed. We’re a little more grounded now. I don’t want to go to sleep on somebody’s apartment floor, curled up with a couch pillow. I’d rather be home. We used to have a thing about getting out and hitting the road for a while. There just hasn’t been any emphasis on that anymore, because we’d rather play and have fun. Plus a couple of us are getting married.”

“Which changes everything,” Herrington says with a wistful smile.

Other career-oriented considerations come into play. McTighe teaches ninth-grade English, Herrington is a part-owner of Danny’s Bar & Grill, Middleton is a sound engineer for UMKC and Brooks is a full-time guitar teacher.

“The thing is, we have people here in Kansas City that’ll support us,” McTighe says. “People are just rabid for music. They’re not just jam-band fans or improv rock fans or whatever. It’s every kind of thing. You’ve got people that are just so eager to lap up any kind of music they can get in this area. These people are so dedicated to it. For whatever reason, we’ve been lucky that way.”

There’s little doubt that Fiasco has worked its way into the hearts and minds of KC’s tightly knit community of jam fans by remaining dedicated to playing live locally. It’s a conscious decision that has worked in the band’s favor, bolstered by the fact that most of the national acts make regular stops in KC, Lawrence and Columbia.

“Living in the Midwest, you have people from all different places that have moved here, and there are so many different influences,” Middleton explains. “I think it’s more than if you live on one coast or the other or maybe even north or south of here. We get a lot of stuff coming through, too, so people get exposed to things they might not normally see.”

“Since people are into so many different types, it gives us a wider palette to choose from,” McTighe says. “When you have that kind of freedom, every show can be vastly different. It’s really about what you feel like doing and what kind of curveball you want to throw the fans, because you know they’ll appreciate it.”

According to Brooks, one should never underestimate the power of an obscure cover song as the sort of curveball audiences are looking for.

“One time, I was checking the Central Plains Jamband Society Web site to see who was going to be coming around for our next show,” Brooks recalls. “This one guy posted a bunch of cool stuff about the band — I later had a chance to talk to him and thank him — and he posted about the Jonathan Edwards tune ‘Shanty,’ asking if anyone else had heard a cover of this tune. So I went to Kazaa, downloaded the tune, and I was listening to it when I called over to Brad and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do a new song tonight.’ We learned it when doing the soundcheck, one of those out-of-the-blue things, because this guy showed great support of the band.”

Grand Fiasco plays enough covers to keep people moving and grooving at their shows, but the group also carries a respectable catalog of originals. However, don’t look for the band to try to document their work in the studio anytime soon. It’s not a symptom of laziness or lack of means. Instead, it’s just another aspect of a genre that exhibits markedly different values from the conventions of today’s pop/rock/Top 40/MTV meat grinder.

“It’s pretty well-documented that the people we play to, the people that come to our shows and we cater to, they’re all about the live experience — live and in the moment,” McTighe says. “There are people that would rather take their rig out and record a show and listen to it a hundred times any day of the week than listen to a studio project.”

“Plus it’s the same old thing that the Dead had and Phish have had in the past. It just doesn’t translate, man,” Middleton says. “But when we’re out there and playing live, it’s a whole different ball game. It can be stressful putting yourself out there, warts and all, for everyone to see. Sometimes it ain’t pretty. Sometimes there are a lot of warts.”

“I’d like the record to note that I don’t know anything about any warts,” counters McTighe with a chuckle that catches on with the rest of his bandmates.

In the end, Grand Fiasco is a bit of a puzzle. It’s not a touring act. It’s not gearing up to be the next big thing on the national jam scene. It’s not even very interested in spending time in the claustrophobic confines of a studio. So what do the band members look forward to?

“The next moment,” McTighe quickly responds. “The next time we do something right and have success. The next time we stumble and we all get to look at each other, laugh and say, ‘Oh, you really fucked that one up.’ The next jam that works. The next idea that hits rock bottom. The next verse we come up with. It’s very much moment to moment.”