Sacvibe caught up with the front man for The Mutaytor, Buck yesterday. They definitely aren’t mainstream, so for those of you who may not have heard of The Mutaytor, a little background:

In 2006, my ‘burner friends’ returned from Black Rock Desert, ground zero for Burning Man, and spread the word about a band called The Mutaytor, so last July when Wanderlust Festival (Squaw Valley) listed them on their 3 day lineup, I checked them out and popped my proverbial cherry. Now you can pop yours.

Well, tonight, if you are of a curious nature, and I know you are or you wouldn’t be on Sacvibe.com, you won’t have to travel far at all as Sacramento’s favorite live music night club hosts a night of amazing music and vibes. And for those of you headed to North Lake Tahoe, The Mutaytor performs at The Crystal Bay Casino on January 29 with another Sacvibe favorite. BLVD doing the after party. Now on with the show.

Sacvibe: You go by Buck?

Buck: Yeah.

Sacvibe: And what do you do with The Mutaytor?

Buck: Frontman, lead singer, guitar and ringmaster of Raconteurs.

Sacvibe: You mention Jack White’s band (The White Stripes), the Raconteurs. What do you think of them?

Buck: I haven’t had time to check them out. It’s hard to keep up with music because it’s happening constantly. Even more so now. It’s great, and not so great. Thank god the music industry died in the traditional sense of the word. Used to be seven guys ran everything. They decided what was gonnna be on MTV and radio and that was that. Meanwhile, there’s great music not getting out. Most bands, they don’t know how to market themselves and kiss ass at cocktail parties.

Now, with pirated software and a youtube channel, everybody is making music. There’s so much going on, I can barely keep pace with it. I still find myself hugging my record collection.

There’s the thing, and I think this is the disconnect. Anybody who is gonna download a CD, here’s the deal, home stereos used to have cassette decks and we’d record the good stuff on radio stations. Now things are up on [bit] torrents. If you’re music is good, and people are downloading your music, these are the people who are gonna come to your shows and buy shirts and stuff. That’s where you make your money anyways. The labels used to print whatever they needed to give away as they saw fit, and the bands had to pay for that and not until they did, would they see dime.

I see our stuff on torrents all the time. Do i wish i got paid? Fuck yeah? But those kids are gonna download it, listen to it and get our music out to places where our music can’t be. If you’re gonna be an early adapter, that kid flaunting his mixed tapes for his girlfriend or that girl he’s trying to nail, the bottom line is that that is now what radio used to be, the difference is that I’m not getting soaked. I don’t have a douchebag to deal with. I make my music reasonably available. You can buy it on our site. MTV doesn’t play music anymore. Kids are doing the work now. The work is not being done by professionals anymore. It’s kids. Discovering music is way cooler than having it jammed down your throat. I remember thinking it was really cool that we were famous enough to warrant being on a torrent site.

Sacvibe: Where are you from, the band?

Buck: The band is a product of burning man. We basically came from that culture. Everything we do eminates from that. It’s a pain in the ass to be a rock band in the desert. Everybody, it was djs. There were very few bands. We rather than doing that, hauled an entire stadium, powered it, built it, played it. That’s where we’re from. We became the biggest band at Burning Man. It’s awesome to be identified like that. From 2000 to now, we’ve become that part of culture. Kinda like the Grateful Dead at Haight Asbury. It’s like being associated with a movement that’ gonna be bigger than you. We personally all met there. A lot of us worked there. To be identified with that culture is great. The Burning man culture, especially how it relates to art, it’s much more hands on, participatory, much better than how the music industry works where you had some random gatekeepers decide what gets played.

People went home and kept up with the artists, giving folks incentive to piss away money and do stuff for free. The fact that burners patronize these artists in what we call the default world, kinda like the burning man Kool Aide drinkers refer to the other 51 weeks of their lives, we have to spend 51 weeks making a living. That one week week is a lot of people’s best part of the year.

Sacvibe: Ever played Sacramento?
Buck: No, first show in sac. We go to the Bay Area a lot.

Sacvibe: How did you end up playing Wanderlust?

Buck: Our booking agent scored it and we went and played it. We’ve done a lot of festivals. We’re a good outdoor band given that we work with fire and stuff like that. We’re kinda of a festival band. We excel in that environment. Wanderlust is by far the coolest. It was a really… [T]he vibe there was great, it’s not the usual 20 year old kids binge drinking. It was yoga in the morning, seeing great bands at night. I liked how it was booked. They didn’t got for big names, they went for those really really good at what they did. I didn’t see a single thing that wasn’t good and it was presented well. They made it so you could see all the music. There were staggered acts so you didn’t have to miss a band over another. Here people came and sat there and had an hour to check out a band they never heard before. It attracted a really kind a of cool person which was a really cool thing about Wanderlust.

Sacvibe: Out of year, how much touring do you do?

Buck: Not as much as we’d like to, not as much this year. The economy obviously, disposable income is down. Clubs weren’t making much money. There were places we played before and could barely afford to pay half of what we were paid the year before. We have a lot of people in the band. We have 3 to 4 times as many as the average band. As a result, all those people have to eat, have hotel rooms, drink and it multiplies exponentially. If we were a four piece band, we’d be living well. If we’re gonna drag people out of town, we have to pay a competitive wage. We started travelling with a 20 - 28 persson show, and since then, we had to scale it back to a 16 person show just to make the numbers work.

Sacvibe: When you scaled back, that must have been difficult to decide who gets cut and who stays?

Buck: Yes, it is. some of the decisions kinda make themselves. We have a lot of guys and girls who do aerial acts. Smaller places can’t accommodate that. Then we have a huge fire component or a smaller theatrical fire, and then sometimes the regulations for city or state prohibit that from happening in doors. We have a kinda glow stick version of those acts. Then there’s the size of the stage. The band, the musical component is the same. We build off that. We have several drummers.

Sacvibe: What was the furthest or most fun show?

Buck: Burning Man, was fantastic. Standing back and seeing it from a consumer level, seeing Mutaytor at Burning Man at say opposed to a small club is communion vs. Last Super.

Sacvibe: You must be Catholic?

Buck: No, but it’s a great analogy. It holds because it, you have an act, you have an act that is repeated because it’s an act. At Burning Man everything is on the table. Big, stupid frankly dangerous… we work hard on the desert.

Sacvibe: Favorite new find for 2009, musically?

Buck: Close call - the thing that is turning me on is the Polyphonics Spree and OK Go in general. There’s a way in which they present the music. One of my favorite quotes is from Brian Wilson (Beach Boys), “The rules should be that you should be making music that makes the listener feel love. ”

A lot of music subjects the listener. This is how I SEE THE WORLD. It’s really didactic. That’s the way, and one of the ways ,you looked at it. Lyrics, what we’re turned on by, if you’re hearing the word “we”, more frequently than “I”, then your off to a good start. Band like the Polyphinics Spree and OK Go, or Flaming Lips, these bands, again, it’s more the focus is about the listener and artists are on the same team; particularly in the live show. The process of experiencing music should be uniform. There’s this wonderful point where people in the room listening in the room are just as important as the band itself playing.

Bands play in padded rooms all the time, and that’s fun, but it’s not special as being out there with the people. When everybody is in the room and the music is frenetic, and the combined emotion of everybody is consumed by the music doing whatever, there, music is a collective experience and that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. I think that’s a reflection that we’re a big band. Nobody is a star. We all ge tour moments. There isn’t a personality that our band is built by.

Sacvibe: Any last words?

Buck: If you read… I guess to the people of earth? If we can do this, you can do this. We have gone surprisingly far, on kinda an unworkable idea. There’s nothing to stop anybody from a dedicated core of friends who have a pretty shared goal, there is nothing to stop anybody from doing it. Whatever ridiculous thing you do, making food, art, writing, whatever, there is nothing stopping anybody anymore. We don’t have to wait for record deal, publishing deal… make your own music, write your own book. There’s somebody that wants to hear you, ready you. Don’t wait for anyboydy to tell you to do it. That mystical unicorn is not gonna fly down from the rainbow and you catch it and ride it into the sunset.