Communication hoedown

Transcendental Hayride converses through its multi-genre jamming

By Mike Prevatt

Normally, when you're interviewing a musician on the phone, he's either on the tour bus, outside at a rest stop off a highway or just waking up at his place of residence. Then there's Transcendental Hayride singer/rhythm guitarist Dano Kildsig. When his interrogator rings him up, he's casually walking down the street enjoying the annual Haight Street Fair--just a couple of blocks from his band's home--and waiting for the next band to go on. He's also dodging wayward pedestrians. As he describes the scene, a man with a cane runs right into him and falls. He asks the guy if he's okay, sees him off and continues right where he left off in his answer.

That never-miss-a-beat skill was probably perfected in his band, Transcendental Hayride, which dates to the mid-'90s, after Kildsig and guitarist Kurt Moss had finished their L.A.-based hard rock act, New Improved God. After a brief breakup, the two musicians reunited in San Francisco and developed a psychedelic sound informed by punk, classic rock, Americana and electronic music. Like many jam-based rock bands, Hayride's musicians use their albums as mere blueprints for the live show, where songs are stretched, unfurled, tweaked and perverted at the quintet's whim--especially Kildsig's.

"Everyone else in the band is a better musician than me, but I'm the risk-taker," says Kildsig. "I'm the first guy who'll tweak something and try something new. I just have to realize I'm expecting the guys to follow me, and it doesn't always happen. Playing music together is like a conversation--it can lead anywhere."

The core of the band's show of late has been its fifth album, Things Are Just Going the Way They Should, released last year. It is markedly the work of a jam band, with its fluid grooves and jangly guitar melodies. It is also complemented by frequent use of organs, keyboards and other synthesizer/digital sound effects--among other guitar-bass-drum deviations the album boasts. The variety of instruments and styles suits the musicians just fine as long as they present a proper song, rather than mere improvisational exercises.

"Honestly, it's all the same thing to me," says Kildsig. "We have songs that start off with what people might call a metal riff, and goes into a long jam that ends up as something trancey or electronic. But what's different about us--and there's a lot of bands playing `live electronica' these days--[is] we're very song-oriented. Even though we go off on these dancey, trancey jams, it always snaps back into the song."

However, Kildsig downplays any ideas of complexity in the music. "There's nothing unique about it," he says. "For anyone who ever picks up an instrument, strums it or beats on it, comes up with some words, shows it to some friend--that's all we're doing. We're just playing together, and that's the whole thing. It's communicating."

In interviews, some jam artists are all too inclined to voice their frustration with modern pop music and how it's become so premeditated and slick, while others adopt a more humble attitude toward music--be it theirs or someone else's--and admit being influenced by an array of aesthetic approaches. The latter constituency is where Transcendental Hayride seems to reside. For Kildsig, music is still the ultimate inspiration, regardless of its origin.

"I think, as long I've been alive, people have been making great music and it's up to the individual to open his ears and listen to it," he says. "Any form of music is a valid expression and for myself personally, my songs, I'm trying to communicate, and I'm sure the guy on the corner singing atonally with two strings on his guitar is trying to do the same thing. Who's to say that wouldn't be me next week? I think there's a lot of great music. I relate to all of it."