Vince Gallo cooks up a new idea with RRIICCEE

by Len Righi

The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) (MCT)

11 December 2007

Actor-musician Vince Gallo and former Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson have known each other for more than 15 years. They even double-dated a couple of times in the middle `90s, when the women they were seeing also happened to be best friends.

“We were in the same social settings,” says Gallo, calling from just outside Dallas. “I saw his band several times in the early days. They were ... great. One night, I remember thinking that it would be interesting to be in a band with him.”

But the time was not right then. “Where he was at wasn’t where I was coming from,” says Gallo. “We were friends, but we were never really too friendly.”

In 2006, however, four years after the Courtney Love-led Hole disbanded, the time for a Gallo-Erlandson collaboration arrived, resulting in perhaps the most unusual groupings of this or any year, a band called RRIICCEE. The four-piece does not perform any pre-written music, does not recognize boundaries between musical genres, has recorded no music and apparently has no plans to do so.

RRIICCEE germinated about a year ago, when Gallo ran into Erlandson in a health food store in Los Angeles.

“We reintroduced ourselves, and at the end of conversation I asked him if he was doing music,” recalls Gallo, 46. “It was kind of a stupid question. But he told me he didn’t want to be part of the problem. I knew what exactly he meant. He did not want to be caught up in the cliche of the music business, the glorification of the ego. He showed me a different kind of heart and sensitivity. I heard that, and felt the same way. Then we found Rebecca and Nicky.”

That would be bassist Rebecca Casabian and drummer Nikolas (brother of Lucas) Haas.

RIICCEE performed at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan last June and in San Francisco earlier this year, but began its first official tour on Dec. 1 in Tucson and visited Austin on Dec. 3. “Both shows were pretty remarkable,” says Gallo. “The first night was more almost one long piece and the second night a group of shorter pieces.

“Most people go to a show because they have expectations and they become familiar with the material. It’s rare to fill a room with (people who have) no expectations. ... People come to hear what they have not been familiarized with. That’s what we’re hoping for. In exchange, people get an extremely focused, fragile experience that has so far been very enlightening for the four of us.”

So, having played together, albeit briefly, are band members learning to read each other’s tendencies?

“We’re not working in improv in that sense,” Gallow says. “If I was in a jazz quartet, I might be able to say something like that, but it’s not anywhere close to that. We don’t know what the hell is going on. We’re always on the cusp of other musical vocabularies, ones that don’t exist. When we get to that point (knowing what to expect from one another), it’s time to move on.”

Though Gallo is best known for acting in more than a dozen mostly independent films, including “Buffalo 66” and “The Brown Bunny,” which he wrote and directed as well, he played bass and sang in garage bands while growing up in Buffalo, N.Y.

“I took a lot of beatings because I was forbidden to go to concerts,” Gallo says. “When your father says, `You’re not going,’ and you say, “Please, please, please,’ and he says, “You go to that ... concert, I’ll break your ... face’ and you go anyway ... Well, I saw Bowie, Gentle Giant, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis and had to try to sneak in the house afterward.”

After relocating to New York City at 16, he formed the no-wave band Gray with the as-yet undiscovered visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Subsequently, he released two well-regarded solo albums, and has written the soundtracks to his films.

Asked if he had any misgivings about putting his filmmaking career on hold, Gallo replies, “I have a lot of energy and time. I’m choosing not to do those other things now.

“This is far from a side project,” he adds. “The decision (not to do films) would be harder if I was doing it for self-glorification. But the decision was not that hard.”

Asked about the future of a band whose intent is to spontaneously create new music live, Gallo says, “We’re like moons. At best, we’re a reflection of the way things change.

“So far, it’s been a really comfortable way of relating to one another. It’s not that unnatural or profound, but very obvious.”