An Interview with Jeff Greene from The Butterflies of Love

Jeff Greene of The Butterflies of Love recently gave an interview to Darryl Webber from the Essex Chronicle. We thought it was so good we decided to put it on the website so everyone could enjoy it.

It's Darryl here from the Essex Chronicle newspaper. Hope you're well. Jacki from Bitterscene has forwarded me your e-mail address to send you some interview questions - presumably you know about this and it's okay with you. Here they are...

hello darryl, jeff here, doing well, i'm excited to answer your questions on behalf of the band. thanks for asking.

Who's who in the band and who does what?

Dan Greene. sings, plays guitar, sometimes arrhythmic handclaps and tambourines. he is the leader of the band.

Pete Whitney. plays bass. has had quite an influence on the fashions here on the east coast, usa, with his unorthodox silk screening habits: nine months ago i saw him, he had silk-screened some sort of horse but maybe a coyote or a coyote's head or it could have even been roses in front of a horse shoe or a bow and arrows or something on his right leg about at the ankle. he had perhaps three to five other such silk-screens, definitely all horse related i think, strategically placed on his pants. anyway that was a while ago in philadelphia, and now in greenpoint in brooklyn, the kids are walking down the street dressed like pete whitney. just something i noticed. and then the influence of his moustache is certainly felt everywhere. written tablature of pete's bass lines are also in pretty high demand. he plays twelve string guitar as well.

Neil O'Brien. drummer. does a lot of other percussive things. looks very serious when playing sometimes. in general the friendliest and most popular member of the band. in the states, in the rare event that we perform, everything he does provokes an ovation.

Scott Amore. keyed instruments of all sorts, although never the accordion. usually a rhodes piano, an organ (farfisa, etc.) and a hammond organ. he's got lots of tape echoes and delays and machines that shake the stage violently, etc. he definitely looks serious when he plays except when he's really lost. (which, as he will probably read this, is almost never, really).

Jeff Greene. that's me, i play guitar and sing, and try to answer all the interview questions before anyone else in the band sees them.

How did the band come together and how long have you been going?

you asked for it:

dan and i had a band called "the bug" where we played acoustics really fast and violently, crazy songs etc. started that in maybe ninety three or four.

then a series of players came and went: drummers, stand up drummers, bass players, stand up bass players, theremin players, for a while we had an experimental jazz section in the band (for about a year, seriously) students of anthony braxton, and that was a pretty good line up. the jazz section was called the lettuce leaves, they had a cult called the children of the alter destiny which was operating in middletown, ct and wesleyan where braxton was. they set up on a different stage adjacent to us and it was sort of a concurrent competition which they recorded and released on cassette tape the next day. that was the height of the bug, and then we became the silver bug, more electricity, then the supersonic daredevils of show business and even more electricity, and then just as things were getting together and the band had remained pretty constant and we recorded "How to Know..." we released the single "rob a bank," under the name "the butterflies of love" sort of a sabotage with the name, we don't manage ourselves too well, thought we'd change the name again in a week, still haven't.

meanwhile, everything was completely changing and the band we are now got together, the first real solid touring unit (scott then pete then neil joined dan and i) and that was about four or five years ago and that's it. this is the height of the group. pete said his dad used to play in a group with dan in the seventies and that's how he got involved but that definitely does not seem possible.

Do you think being from Connecticut has influenced your sound at all?

maybe, hard to say. i grew up digging miracle legion, so there's that and then mark mulcahy is a butterfly emeritus. but connecticut's sort of a dead zone, there is very little to be influenced by which i guess is its own influence. i don't know what the other boys in the band think here. there was a brief moment of a fractured scene in new haven and yale when the bug and the silver bug were playing: jason morphew and holiday and mia doi todd and the reachers etc.. but probably no, its the alcohol.

Looking through the press clippings, you've got a lot of admirers in the UK - is it the same in the US?

no.

Is what the critics say important to you?

well, it helps with the folks. its fun to check out the life of the band as well, but we've got no control really of what we're up to, so nothing anyone says effects the band or our idea of the band or our music. so, not important, just interesting.

You get compared to early REM, Galaxie 500 and The Go-Betweens alot. Do you mind those comparisons?

no, we don't mind. but we don't agree most of the time, its not what we had in mind (we probably had nothing in mind, except maybe the snare sound from a specific bowie or neil young song) anyway. we would like to be compared to the chemistry experiment (favorably or i guess unfavorably, either way, just so long as we're compared to them).

How has the band's sound developed from when you started to new album The New Patient?

dan and i can play our instruments better, although not faster, we listen to old tapes and we're playing really fast, it seemed almost not possible, and then all of the sudden we started playing really slow a few years later, and who knows how that happened, and then on to now, when the rhythm section is just completely unstoppable, which counters dan's and my tendency to be arrhythmic and/or atonal. that there is a pretty big development. as far as recording, i think we used to be more interested in documenting what we were up to rather than in making crazy recordings. so that's something too.

also with members of the band moonlighting in t rex and tom petty cover bands (all true) has had its effect.

Lyrically, what are the main themes on the album?

drinking and love. also, of course, drinking and terrorism and love and terrorism. then hospitals and then complicated and wondrous girls and then regrets and hopes. pretty much a constant, all of them.

How do you and Daniel go about writing the songs? Is it collaborative from the start or do you present complete songs to each other?

when we lived in the factory and before i think we had more of a direct influence on each others songs, now dan is in new haven, i'm in brooklyn, sowe bring pretty complete songs to each other and then to the band. then theband as a whole wrangles out the final songs.

When you come over to the UK to play live, will you mostly be playing material from the new album or will you mix old and new?

this past easter we toured most of the new album and all the hits of old in the UK, so this time we will do the same, only with even greater expertise ihope, maybe new and unrecorded songs, maybe pete will just freak out for awhile with scott, lots of drum solos too. maybe dan will take the stage solo with his dream machine (just makes ocean sounds). we have ideas of becoming more cover oriented, so that could happen. most likely though, i'll just talk a lot.

Have you any particular ambitions for the band?

to be as big as cee bee beaumont. to stay in hotels or motels once in a while when we tour. see pete whitney in bass player magazine. perform at the olympics. write and record more records and that kind of stuff. oh and have a string of smash hits.

Do you all still have 'day jobs'? And if so, what are they?

OK, here goes.

dan performs weddings and such for about fifty bucks a pop, but his license expired in 2001, so that is definitely suspect but he does it, he also teaches young children math, geography and other such subjects which we are all surprised he knows anything about. now, he has finished two books he's been working on for about ten years, so that could be something as well.

scott records and produces every band in new haven in his studio with joey maddalenna (the leader of new haven's greatest band, the risley dales), and has become the guy to turn to on the east coast if you're in need of some completely crack pot but melodious melody line. i've been hearing him on every record lately. he also videotapes all the public meetings for the town of wallingford, ct.

neil lives in asbury park, new jersey where no one would dare charge him for anything, so he has it pretty good, and he makes strange paintings and illustrates brochures concerning health issues which is a good job. he goes to the beach a lot.

pete, as i mentioned earlier, makes experimental clothing. also he's a trained mathematician but he rarely practices. he resides in philadelphia and he's involved in many community projects and musical endeavors. his band 'the anonymous fury" has started to take shape. he still does a brisk mail order for "positive negative men" t shirts, his old band with scott and joey, as well as for some of his coyote themed western wear.

i've been organizing art projects in prisons for quite a while, but i've just recently retired, and am trying to figure out what to do. i am open to suggestion.

The press over here has made a lot of the fact that you're all over 6ft. Is tallness a requisite for being in the band?

yes. musically, we all have little in common with shorter people.

Thanks in advance for your answers - hope you didn't mind the frivolous ones at the end! All the best,

Darryl Webber
Feature Writer
Essex Chronicle

thanks and all the best to you. hope i didn't ramble to much.
jeff.