HP- Your album seems to move from the complex to the simple. That's rather unusual for an album these days.

RHINO - Well, what finished off or maybe what capped the first album is what has given birth to the next one. It showed us a direction, back towards the grass roots of rock, which is the grass roots of the music of the world.

HP - Now would you define those roots?

RHINO - The black root is soul, the root of which is African music. Then there are the white roots, country music and the yellow root is oriental. Behind all these roots is one root: its communication. When music strays too far from those roots it stops communicating.

HP - I'd like to dwell on that for a moment because that seems to be what has happened to music recently. What I hear on a lot of albums right now is a collection of a lot of interesting noises that have no power to move me. Either I'm getting jaded or the music is getting sterile.

RHINO - We're trying to get back to a communication thing of human feelings. Human being to human being. Emotions. Rock and roll has been getting away from that, it was in outer space somewhere, someplace else. The sounds were nice but they didn't mean anything. The first music was communication, like signal drums and the other thing was chanting. It had to do with sadness, with rejoicing and with the religion of life. As we see it those are the main things in our music; the rhythmic aspect and the repetitious chant.

HP - Do you have any thoughts on the ceremonial aspect of music?

RHINO - People in music have always separated themselves from their audience. There was a circle of people who made the music, and the audience was the other half of the communication. They came to see each other and share.

HP - Yes, but I see a contradiction. Most rock bands play in casual clothes, its a very informal...

RHINO (Danny Weis) No! We're dressing up. People want to see something special. lts a drag when bands play in street clothes.
(Doug Hastings) Lets take this back to the religious aspect again, OK? All music goes back to a perfect structure. All things arise from a perfect structure. . .

HP - Are you talking about a cosmic order?

RHINO (Hastings) - Well, yes, sort of. We have a feeling and a desire for perfection, for perfect structure. I think we can go to any degree of intricacy as long as we start with a perfect structure and work it out from there.
(John Finley) Yes, what the music comes from is whatever bond there is between us and whoever we communicate with. We're into positive, precise structures which are somehow always right.

HP - It came to me recently that music has a negative side to it. I get a negative from a lot of groups lately and I really don't understand why.

RHINO - That's because it's not saying what it's saying. People take a piece of music, get up and play it and all the whole thing says is "I did it, look at me." It's ego. It really doesn't belong on a stage. You know, it sounds like they don't mean it or they're not there. It's not soulful. Really, where they're at is they're not trying to communicate, just show off. There's all kinds of music and all of it can communicate on some level. There's head music and body music -- we're into body music mostly.

HP - Can you make a concrete distinction?

RHINO - Sure, it's roots again. Yellow music is head music, black music is body music and white music is brain music. It's the spiritual, the physical and the intellectual. What's happening with all music is that people are taking basic structures and roots and going out in every direction. In jazz and classical as well as rock and roll.

HP - You seem to he more basic though, and if, you use. complexities you use them in simplest terms.

RHINO - Well, if you start off on your own, you've got something. If you start out on a way-out concept then you've got somebody else's beginnings. But if you make your own beginning, when you get out there you're really into something.
(John Finley) One of the people who evolved that way was John Coltrane. His work is so simple yet its far-out. He takes in that whole idea. All this atonal music is close, just a long tone. Notes are the separations. But man's brain is doing that the complicated way. The lines are the digressions of the curve.

HP - I don't get you at all.

RHINO - (Finley) Well, um, music is tones and rhythms. Structures are created by breaking these up and grouping them. That's the basic. You can go beyond it once you have that foundation.

HP - let's get to something more specific. I didn't get a chance to really listen to your lyrics but they seemed uncomplicated and expressive.

RHINO - Yes, we like the idea of plain talk lyrics. They're being alive, the important things to everyone, food, freedom, sex and problems.
When I (Alan Gerber) started to write I was really getting involved with poetic lyrics. But it takes time for people to get into it. A song is not like a poem that's written down on a piece of paper and can be studied. It's happening, it has to be taken in immediately. I wrote "Along Comes Tomorrow," which is on the album. That's a poetic lyric, but it's a simple idea and a simple cycle. At the same time it's all about life and all of life. life.

HP - Could you be a little more specific? I won't be able to bear it for a couple of weeks.

RHINO (Gerber) - OK. The song is about somebody getting up and looking forward to the day. You know, your head is in a really good place and you know the answers and the day is just fine. Then all of a sudden tomorrow, something comes along and turns everything upside down, and you don't know anymore, its horrible. That happens to all of us. (laughter) But then comes tomorrow, my old friend tomorrow, to get me out of that mess. It never stays the same. But do you see? It's a cycle.
(Finley) - Yeah, it's like our gigs (laughter) We've done gigs that were tremendous and all we could do was say "Wow!" But then we do another and it's a BUMMER. (more laughter) There's no knowing how it's going to be.
(Gerber) - But that's the idea. The simple pattern taken far enough then brought back to the beginning. It gets complex then completes it. self simply. That's important. In the first few months that we were together we were complicated. We were all assembled as a super group and we were showing off our chops, putting down as much fancy stuff as we could. Then we decided it was all too complicated, much of it was unnecesary. Musicians could relate to what we were doing, but a lot of people might not understand. The whole scene was getting that way and we decided we weren't going to start out where everyone else left off, we were going back to the beginning. The first album, the one coming out now, is what we were those first six months. We didn't really know each other as people or musicians. We went back and started from the beginning again. That's what we mean when we say the first album showed us a direction. "Serenade" (the last cut on the album) is us at just that point, where we came to a simpler thing. That's the basic. We were put together to work together, and only after that did we get to know one another and find an identity as a group. One identity. See, most cats that have played together for six months knew each other for a long time before that. We were new to each other from the start. We've been listening to groups who are good musicians, really good musicians, but it's like they're constantly trying to prove something to each other. Everybody is running off incredible licks. but it comes off as total chaos. It's a bunch of insecure people and a lot of ego. We're trying to make one sound, a collective ego. Yes, like spokes of a wheel.

HP - What does that mean in practical terms. Break it down .. how does it work from man to man?

RHINO - Well, the spokes go to and from the hub of the wheel in every direction. We jam. It's feel, not think. You listen and learn where to play your thing where it's not going to hurt his thing. If seven guys are playing and one drops out, the other six just fall in and fill up the hole. That's what integrated music is.

HP - Do you relate what you're doing to anything else that's happening? The first two things that come to my mind are The Band and Blood, Sweat & Tears.

RHINO - A little closer to The Band, I'd say. But we dig BS&T. We were talking about it the other day... for all intents and purposes we're a 17 piece band. The guitars can play horns. We have a horn sound without horns. On the album, on "When You Say You're Sorry" it sounds like something like the Don Ellis horn sound. You know, a sheet of sound "shhh --- splash!" It all has to do with balance and voicing. "I Need love" is a little Richard tune and it sounds like there's a horn section on it. The Band is a basic, root-centered sound and BS&T is a city version of the same thing, more orchestrated.

HP - (to John Finley) You use a lot of black intonation in your vocals. What do you have to say to the argument that white vocalists and musicians shouldn't try to sound black. It's not my opinion but it's a healthy controversy in critical circles.

RHINO (Finley) (bristling) When I try to sound black, I stink! I'm not trying to sound black, I sing what I feel. When I feel what I'm singing I know I'm communicating. We're all capable of feeling the same things -- we all come from the same place. It all started with the Garden of Eden and the first man. I am that man. I'm physically and culturally white, but I'm the same as anyone else. I can experience as much pain and suffering and as much jubilee as any other human being. Dig it, there are black people in symphony because they feel the white man's classical music. There are white people in oriental music. On one of the Ravi Shankar albums I have there's a part where it sounds like Sam and Dave's "Hold On I'm Coming." In another place on the same album its even raunchier, like Muddy Waters almost. If you can feel a thing you can play it. The black man can sing funk because he feels it. But I've beard black cats who couldn't play or sing funk because they didn't feel it. There are white people who can't feel classical. Our music is black in parts because it's body music, because it draws from black music. We communicate to the animal in man, that's where man is at. It's physical music. Jazz is more intellectual and again, Indian music, spiritual. You combine the elements you feel and it's where you're at when you're playing.

HP - One More Question. We talked briefly about classical music a little while back, but didn't get into jazz, which, while a little closer to home is harder for me to relate to than rock. Do you think jazz and rock have anything in common at this point. Are they moving toward or away from each other?

RHINO - Well, Rock is now where jazz started out. Jazz bands played tunes at the beginning, just like rock. In order to keep it interesting it got further and further out. But it got too strung out because the average cat, uh, sorry, chick, can't relate to it. As far as rock and jazz coming together, some rock people are playing a lot of jazz riffs and and a barrage of notes played at amazing rhythms, but they're not doing it right because they didn't start from where jazz started from, they're just taking licks. It doesn't sound right. There was a similar structural beginning for jazz, but jazz is older so it's more developed. You can't relate to where it's at, and neither can we, really. I mean we can listen and say 'Wow, listen to what's going on.' You know, admire it, but we don't feel it like we feel our music. Michael Fonfara - There are some groups like the one Larry Coryell is in where there's a rock drummer and bass player, a jazz guitar and a sax man, but there's a basic lack of communication between the musicians because they're on different levels. The jazz guys are getting it on, doing their thing, the rock cats are doing their thing, but they're doing different things. What's happening is people are relating to it on a temporal basis, trying to dig where it's at without knowing where it came from. You can relate to Dixieland, right? Well, rock now is where jazz was in the Dixieland days.

HP - Are the structural bases of jazz and rock basically different?

RHINO - The structural basis of EVERYTHING is the SAME. That's a philosophical truth. And a musical truth.

by Ellen Sander (databirds@aol.com) - for Hit Parader Magazine, March 1969.