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Deerhoof is indie's Rosetta Stone.
For the past 20 years, the San Francisco band has been pulling at all the semantic threads of rock music, diagramming a language unmistakably its own from the grammar of garage, surf, pop, avant-garde and punk. Deerhoof is beloved by weirdos and technical wizards alike, self-producing its albums while seemingly never compromising the prerogative to conduct all business on its own terms. The band has been regarded as peers by every manner of icon, from Yoko Ono to Radiohead, from Sonic Youth to David Bowie to David Byrne, proving over the course of 14 albums and countless ancillary projects that it's capable of bewitching anyone.
And, as with every record to come before, on latest album The Magic, the group drills ever inward toward an essential Deerhoof sound—whatever that means.
"The trick is, if you've made 15 records—or whatever, I have no idea how many—what is there still to say?" says guitarist John Dieterich."What are you going to do next?"
Dieterich, singer-bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, guitarist Ed Rodriguez and drummer Greg Saunier approached The Magic as they have pretty much everything else: ready to define themselves by seeing how many expectations they could undo. Or, as Dietrich puts it, "taking advantage of happy accidents—or even unhappy accidents."
"We received an email on a Friday saying that a TV show, which turned out to be Vinyl, was looking for music," he says. The show needed music by Monday. "None of us had any idea if anyone else was working on it, so I wrote something, Greg wrote something, and Ed wrote something. None of it got used, so we ended up with songs that were attempting to approximate something from that era, Stooges-y, inspired by David Bowie."
"We recorded [2014's] La Isla Bonita in Ed's basement in Portland while we all stayed at his house," Saunier says, attempting to find some through line to Deerhoof's process. "Ed had double duty—making smoothies and accounting for everyone's coffee-versus-tea preferences—and also get us set up to record. "On The Magic, it was John who had to do all that. He set up recording equipment in a rented office space in Albuquerque and made breakfast and played guitar."
Rarely has a band so egalitarian managed to survive for so long, especially with members scattered across the country. Dieterich and Saunier acknowledge that this is how it has to be. "We have four songwriters in the band, so there's no pattern to it," Saunier says. "The only way we know if [a song is] right is if all four of us says it's right, which almost never happens, because we have totally different taste."
There's no secret to being Deerhoof, then?
"When I first joined the band in '99," Dieterich says, "there was this feeling in popular culture that there's a short shelf life for when [a band] is perceived as being in their creative prime. We didn't believe that. We have to keep writing, we have to keep getting better at our craft, we have to get smarter and stay curious."
For musicians who quit their day jobs together in 2003 to focus on touring, it's taken over a decade to confirm that such intimacy is what keeps them vital. "The more we tour—you really get this sense that a close connection [with fans] can only happen between people in a room together," Dieterich says. "More and more, you sense the importance of that." He stops, quickly asking, "Is our show all-ages? We try to play all-ages whenever we can."
It is. "Yes!" Dieterich exclaims, finally providing some clarity to his band. "We're the good guys!"
SEE IT: Deerhoof plays Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St., No. 110, with Skating Polly and Savila, on Thursday, July 7. 9 pm. $13. All ages.
Willamette Week