By: Bill Bronson

If you listened to the radio in early 1992 you heard the song “Dizz Nee Land.” If you dug that tune you may have purchased a CD called Puzzle, dada’s critically acclaimed first disk. This great album ran deep with intense, well-written, guitar-heavy rock songs including “Dorina,” “Posters,” “Dim,” and one of my favorites, “Who You Are.”

Another feature of these great songs were the harmonies, Mike Gurley (lead), Joie Calio(bass) and Phil Leavitt (percussion), sang together as one. Their voices were perfectly matched to the deep, sometimes surreal lyrics, that really rocked your head if you took the time to dig into them.

Take their hit song “Dizz Nee Land.” This song somehow predicts the reality show mentality happening today. Some kid, by virtue of mayhem and bad behaviors including robbing a grocery store, gets his fifteen minutes of fame. Then he “hitched a ride on a monkey’s back and headed west into the black,” this being an all too familiar ending to this kind of story. Hey, what can I say, I was hooked.

This band’s first disk made it to the number 2 position on Billboard’s Heatseeker Chart. They then toured for sixteen months with some of Rocks biggest names of the day, including Sting in the USA and Crowded House in the UK. A great start to say the least.

The next three major label disks were filled with equally great, hook heavy rock songs: American Highway Flower, El Subliminoso and dada. During this time their two labels tanked, I.R.S. folded in 1996 so dada signed with MCA. Just when they were getting underway on a national tour in 1999 behind their fourth disk dada, MCA was sold and their tour was cancelled.

To say the least, this took a toll on the band and led to some critically acclaimed side projects for each of the band members. These include Mike and Phil’s Butterfly Jones Napalm Springs Joie’s solo The Complications of Glitter and X Levitation Cult. Not to mention the more recent incarnation of a fifties Lounge act Mike Gurley and The Nightcaps.

Thankfully for their faithful fans, the boys didn’t let dada fade to black. They found a way to keep the band rocking with a live CD in 2003, dada live: official bootleg (vol.1) and a fifth studio CD, How to be found in 2004, and the digital only EP A Friend of Pat Robertson.

In one way or another, dada has been making great music for twenty years, no small feat.

I’m talking to dada today before the second of two sold out shows at Schuba’s in Chicago, part of a small, three-city tour at the end of 2010.

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Bill Bronson: Welcome back to Chicago and thanks for spending some time with me. Sorry if some of the questions seem a bit cliché, but I’ve never seen them answered in print before, so here we go.

Joie Calio: Can we give the clichéd answers?

Bill: Absolutly! Let’s go back some twenty years and talk about the name of the band. Why did you decide to name the band after this non-movement art-movement?

Joie: It wasn’t really a non-movement, it was a part of a larger art movement. It was part of the German Expressionism period from about 1915 to 1920 or so. I was a member of the L.A. County museum once, so I was really kind of hip to it.

When Mike and I were starting this whole thing, I happened to go see the German Expressionism show there, and part of the movement was dada, it sort of stuck in my mind.

Then when we were sitting around tying to pick a name, things like “peanut butter on fire” or “my mother kills dogs.” It was like argh!

Then a few days or a week afterwards, Mike bought it up again and he asked “How about that name dada? It sounds great and would fit really well on a sticker.”

Bill: A very fitting name in the long run. Who were the influences that helped you create your very unique style?

Mike Gurley: Our records are very diverse. When we first met, we talked about the music that we liked and we were very much from the school of ‘60s rock. The Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix. Back when everything was expanding, growing. We like a lot of later music too, but that was the basis of our sound.

Phil: Not that we were trying to sound like them, but more like the way our music was approached, that there were unlimited possibilities.

Bill: The artwork on the disks seems to draw on some of the art movement’s ideas, with the rocking horse on fire (dada means “hobby horse” in French) and everyday objects thrown together in unusual ways.

Mike: That was on purpose. We had a lot of input on the artwork for all the records, Joie really did.

Bill: Your songwriting is very inspiring musically and lyrically, can you talk a bit about your songwriting process.

Mike: Every song is different. Sometimes one of us will come in with a whole song with lyrics, and then other times a song may start from a single riff. But we all have a say in the final song. Sometimes the style of the song will totally change as we’re working on it and you just have to let that flow.

Because we have three musicians that respect each other, any one of our ideas could become the sound of the song. Many times songs come from jamming. “Fleecing of America,” which we’ll be playing tomorrow night was, one of those. It started with Phil’s driving drum beat and went from there.

Joie: We’re one of those bands that can go into a room and plug in and a song just happens. We just have a very electrical, organic connection that sparks without any discussion. We plug in and play and it’s good every time.

Mike: The very first time Joie and I jammed with Phil it turned into a fifteen minute jam session and it was good! I wish we had a tape of that session. There was an immediate chemistry, not just because of our influences, but also because we’re all at the same level as players.

I think there is some magic in a trio. Led Zeppelin and The Who were trios with a lead singer. The Police, Cream as well. There’s a groove in a trio where you can really hear the drummer. You can really hear the individual personalities of the players.

Bill: Some of your songs seem to be written about real life experiences. “Posters,” “Trip With My Dad,” “Bob The Drummer” and “Sick in Santorini” to name a few. I love the imagery in these lyrics. It almost feels like the listener is there with you. Are any of these drawn from life?

Mike: All four of those are, license has been taken of course , quite a bit.

Phil: Truth is stranger than fiction.

Mike: The closest to the actual story is “Trip With My Dad,” which is Phil and his dad.

Joie: What about “Bob The Drummer?”

Mike: It’s real. We just weren’t sixteen years old. It was me and Lance, and we…

Joie: I’ll never be able to listen to that song again.

Bill: Speaking of “Posters” did you ever cover any Zombies?

Joie: No, do like the Zombies though. [Starts singing “Time of the Season”]

Mike: That’s right. We could do a whole medley of Sinatra, The Doors and Zombies and have it come in right in the middle of “Posters” that’d be great. You’ve inspired us Bill.

Phil: Yeah we really ought to do that.

Bill: Thanks. Another theme that seems to run through your music is time’s fleeting nature. “Time is your Friend,” “Beautiful Turn Back Time Machine,” “You Won’t Know Me” and “Here Today Gone Tomorrow” to name a few. Not sure if this is really a question, any comments?

Joie: I think there’s an appreciation among all the members of the band of that “slice of life” type writing in any type of art. In books, films, paintings or songs, we appreciate that.

Phil: I’ll tell you what, like most people, the older you get the more acutely aware you become of the passage of time and how finite life is. Those songs were written over a long period of time, and as I look back on them I see that whichever one of us wrote the lyrics, we were connecting with one of life’s big dilemmas.

Mike: Since you mention that Bill, we have a new song called “Moment in The Sun” that would fall into that category as well. It might be on our next record. Check out the lyrics on that one, it kind of falls into that theme.

Bill: “The Spirit of 2009” is almost like an Orwell inspired sci-fi mini rock opera. You really packed a lot of imagery into that tune.

Mike: Can I write that down? We were just talking about that song the other day Bill and how we went about recording it. The first version sounded like a rock song recorded in 1994.

Joie: Like a pop song, and we thought “this ain’t right.”

Mike: It didn’t match the lyrics. We all decided it has to be weird. So we tried to guess what music would sound like in 2009, which you can’t predict in 1994.

Phil: Like most Sci-Fi inspired music it’s kind of kitschy and the lyric has a tongue-in-cheek kitschiness, but it’s a serious topic put into a carnival inspired sound. How prescient was that song with all of the political division and battles still going on today between the right and left in this country?

Bill: In “Agents Got No Secret” you penned that “Chicago Winds don’t know how to give in,” but of course this sounds like “Chcagoans don’t know how to give in.” What’s the deal with that?

[All Laughing]

Phil: Was there a subliminal shout-out to our Chicago fans there?

Joie: That song was actually written about the head of I.R.S. records, Miles Copeland, a good friend of ours. At the time I.R.S. records had gone out of business and we were faced with a dilemma. What do we do? We ended up getting an offer from a different record company. Then Miles gave us a “Rock-Star” offer. We turned it down and he didn’t take that too kindly at the time.

Now, I’d party with the guy at the drop of a hat. But he’s the Chicago Wind that does not know how to give in.

Bill: Interesting insight into that song, thanks. You re-released four of your disks with additional material, were the sales strong enough to consider some kind of a multi-disk anthology with previously unreleased material?

Mike: We’ve put out most of what we have, there might be one or two more gems.

Phil: There might be a few left out there.

Joie: Greatest Hits might be the way to go.

Phil: How about a “fan picks” best of? There’s an issue of getting the masters as they’re owned by various entities. I thought it would be cool to do a “live in the studio” disk of the songs as they’ve evolved over the years and are played live today.

Joie: I think it should be a double record, a double fold out vinyl record. The first record is the fans picks and the second record is our picks. Record live in the studio with guests.

Bill: For those of us that own all of your music this would be a great feast of new dada material.

Phil: We have to put out the new record first.

Bill: Do you have a name for the new disk yet?

Joie: No, we’re the worst at naming albums. We wait until the eleventh hour then panic.

Bill: How did your legendary three hour sets evolve?

Joie: A really bad sense of timing.

Phil: No really, the fans just kept pushing us and you’d feed off their energy and you wanted to keep playing. It got out of hand quite a few times getting into the Grateful Dead time frames. Past the point of no return.

Mike : I’m not going to say it’ll never happen again, but the regularity of three hour plus shows is over.

Mike: We played two hours and fifteen minutes last night and that’s a good set.

Bill: Agreed, your fans really look forward to the songs you decide to cover. How do you come up with these picks?

Mike: It happens organically, maybe a jam or something. Seriously, this time Joie was playing on the Nashville open E-sharp tuning, and I started singing “ I Wanna’ Be Your Man,” Phil had this groovy beat and we started up with some harmonies, and there it was.

Phil: We cover the Beatles a lot, we really like to jam on them a lot. It’s a go to for us.

Joie: I’m still trying to get into them. I think you guys will eventually get me into them.

Bill: How will you be promoting the new disk?

Phil: I feel we’ll make it available digitally to those fans that follow us closely, then pitch it to a few independent labels. Right now we’re trying to complete the album and make it available.

Joie: It kind of depends on what’s going on that month in the music industry. It may come out as Ring Tones only or by that time it may be toothbrushes only. Who knows what will be happening in the music industry by then.

Bill: It seems as if artists today have to do more of the grunt work to make their music heard. How do you keep the creativity at such a high level while taking on so many additional tasks?

Phil: The business side of things sucks. It’s a huge chore that was much better handled by record company staffers, professional travel agents and managers. Except none of those people could be fully trusted, and they’re never as interested in you as you are in the first place. It doesn’t help with the music side of things at all.

Joie: There are certain people in this world that are branded at a very early age with this thing, a love of music. It’s full-blown fuckin’ hit you with a hot poker. It doesn’t wash off. It never changes. You’re fucked and that’s how we are. We are all in, all the time. It never goes away.

That’s how we all are. You gotta’ have that in you. If you don’t have that in you, you’re gonna’ get killed. The love of music runs deep. It’s always there.

Bill: I think the song writing has been strong throughout you career. I love “Four” [dada]. In many ways it’s as fresh as the first disk. though you’re not playing it as much.

Mike: We like all the records. But that one, well we did a lot of those songs live for a long time so we’ve gotten away from those. But next year we may be playing six of them in our live shows. It runs in cycles.

Joie: That’s how all of our songs are. Many of the songs we played the crap out of in the nineties and we said we’re done. Some never go away though like “Ask the Dust.”

Mike: There are songs we just love to play. I can’t imagine a set without playing “Dorina.”

Bill: Joie, you’ve recently done an acoustic version of “Fire Burns,” that you are selling on itunes with all proceeds going to Acoustic for Autism. Have you been touched by this issue in some personal way?

Joie: The guy in charge of that, Louis, contacted me and I couldn’t say no. And yes, I’ve seen first-hand the tragedy of Autism. It was a no-brainer. This song is on my new solo record. But this is a deal where you give them the master. So I re-recorded the tune in my home studio and donated it to the cause.

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Dada Live in Chicago Bonus Gallery