Gastr Del Sol Quotes

The first groups that I loved were Kiss, the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. But who wants to live in the past? I started reading Rolling Stone and picking up local fanzines at record stores when I was twelve or so. Rolling Stone -- actually Tom Carson and Greil Marcus, the ones I could sort-of trust -- were then trumpeting the Clash as the embodiment of rock and roll spirit and Public Image and the Gang of Four as dangerous dismantlers of the rock tradition. Who would want to dismantle rock music? Rock music as the enemy? That nearly untenable ambivalence -- wanting to find the contemporary spirit of rock music, the real stuff in the here-and-now, but also wanting to give up on it out of sheer disappointment a la John Lydon -- spun me around, obsessed me, made me start a band. Then I discovered what had been happening in Louisville for the past several years -- the Endtables, the Babylon Dance Band, Malignant Growth -- and that became the primary context, real peers to be had, much more so than anything you might read about in Rolling Stone. 
David Grubbs

Gastr del Sol came directly out of the band Bastro. In its final incarnation, Bastro consisted of John McEntire, Bundy Brown, and myself. In its first incarnation, Gastr del Sol consisted of John McEntire, Bundy Brown, and myself. Somehow, across the space between these two groups, there emerged the sense that the latter was only provisionally a band. No promises were made! Bastro's last tour saw us as individuals feeling like prisoners to the power-trio format. Could we as a group respond to different venues, different performance contexts, even to different sound systems? Not particularly.
David Grubbs