Music fans in the southeast are well aware of Mother Vinegar and the big waves they've made in a short time since forming in August 2005, but the Midwest has yet to experience the unique blend of musicianship the band has unleashed upon their fans over the last year and a half. That all changes next week when Mother Vinegar performs three concerts, one in Illinois and two in Indiana, starting with a Friday night performance at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago on January 12.

To prepare for the tour, Mother Vinegar, who hasn't played a show since before Thanksgiving, is just hours away from a free concert (billed as a "live rehearsal") at the Guadalupe Cafe, just minutes from WesternCarolinaUniversity. I sat down at a local watering hole with the band's founder, drummer Kevin Cassels, to discuss the band's past, future, and the need to get famous as quickly as possible.

-So why aren't you eating or drinking? You have a long show coming up tonight.

KC: We get a free meal at the venue. And drinking & drumming doesn't work. I've tried it. I failed. Miserably. It's like eating Cheetos and doing sit-ups.

-You're music is a little complex to be able to pull off inebriated.

KC: Yeah it sounds fun at first. It wasn't a problem at age 21, but it's literally impossible at 31.

-Is everyone in the band around the same age?

KC: Everyone except our bass player, Jeff (Hinkle). I think he just turned 26. We kind of feel a serious need to become successful very soon. Who starts a rock band in their 30s? People are confused when they hear that we're a new band but we look like Three Dog Night. It takes a long time to become successful in the music business unless you're a really hot chick, like our guitar player.

-But you guys already have 60 original songs, is that correct?

KC: Yeah I guess the other side of that is when you are older, you kind of progress a little quicker. You're only as good as your frontman, and we're very lucky to have one that is constantly churning out new songs and always looking to change direction.

-Does Karl (Engelmanmn, guitarist/vocalist) write all of the songs and then just teach them to you?

KC: At first it was like that, because none of us can write songs. Not good songs anyway. We can, however, come up with riffs and instrumental sections. Around last summer, it started to become a collaborative effort. Karl would show up with an idea and we would just feed off of each other. We practice in a circle, facing each other. I think that's made a huge difference. Lots of chanting and pointing and "how about this" going back and forth. We noticed that our favorite songs are the ones written after we started doing it this way.

-So are you the leader of the band or is it Karl?

KC: I am definitely not the leader. I am the worst musician in the band. I'm more like the assistant manager. But a while back the other guys decided I would be the one to talk to the press and do interviews and stuff since I am totally and completely full of it. Until recently I've handled the business side of things but we now have a great manager and hopefully I can just concentrate on practicing, because I need it.

-I think you're being a little hard on yourself...you are one of my favorite drummers ever.

KC: That's because I am good at fooling the listener. But as long as I'm fooling you I won't divulge any of my shortcuts or secrets.

-Well it's fairly obvious that you and Tommy (Dennison, lead guitarist) come from a metal background. What about the other guys?

KC: Well Jeff is the most interesting case because he is the only musician I know who does not have a favorite band. I've asked him personally and he was asked in this podcast interview we did, and he literally has no answer. I think he said Led Zeppelin, which is of course the default choice for anyone under 40. But lately he's been obsessed with 24-7 Spyz, a black rock band from the Bronx that Tommy and I have been listening to for years. I can hear it in his playing too.

-Karl sounds like he's influenced by Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.

KC: Well he loves Tom Waits but he's not a fan of that comparison. Right now he is really into Bloc Party and especially Fishbone, but his true love is jazz. That's the first thing that connected the two of us. We're both absolute jazz freaks, but Karl is much more knowledgeable than me. He has stacks of old dusty jazz reference books from the 50s and 60s on his shelf. He's also very educated in reggae and dub music due to his tenure in the Natti Lovejoys. He actually played at the Dominican Jazz Festival in 2000 or so. He's taught us a lot about dub and reggae....when to drop out of the measure and who drops out next, etc.

-Tommy continues to grow and change. I saw him back with Olvier's Soup and he was amazing then, but he's grown quite a bit over the years.

KC: He's our secret weapon. There are some people that only stand in front of Tommy at our shows. They'll sit and watch him for three hours without even glancing at the rest of us. He's been listening to a lot of Dream Theater lately. He's borrowed my copy of Live at Budokan like five times already. So John Petrucci is a huge influence on Tommy right now. However, Petrucci has mellowed out over the last few years, so the techniques that Tommy has borrowed from Petrucci aren't necessarily shredding techniques, but more in the way of phrasing and unusual chord structures. Everyone knows Tommy can shred like a madman, but it's his taste and soul that get overlooked sometimes. That's why we don't do as many guitar solos anymore.

-So how and why did you decide to form Mother Vinegar?

KC: Around 1998 I was in a band just to be in a band. I really disliked it, but it was a gig and it was fun. We put out an EP and my friends were like, "This is mediocre, why are you in this band?," etc. I started asking myself that question. Plus I had a full time job and was also starting to write a book, which took up a good two years of my life. I decided right then that I would only be in a band if it was extremely satisfying musically, and if everyone else in the band was better than me. So I went about six years without playing drums.

-At all?

KC: I didn't own a drum set. Tommy and I did a one-off show at this club in Atlanta in 2001, and the year before that I was in the house band with some guys from the Disco Biscuits and SpyWagon at this party in Brooklyn. But other than those two gigs, I did not play the drums at all from 1999-2004.

-So how did you convince a seasoned musician like Karl to start a band?

KC: Jake Cinninger (Umphrey's McGee guitarist) told Karl about this record store I used to own in Asheville and he gave Karl my number to see if I would sell his CDs in my store. I had sent in an audition tape and resume when Umphrey's McGee switched drummers back in 2002, so Jake knew that I played drums, plus he had heard some of my other bands and stuff. He mentioned that Karl was basically making these recordings alone, and that maybe the two of us should jam together or something. So Karl sent me these homemade albums under the name "Mother Vinegar."

-So Mother Vinegar was originally a solo act?

KC:I guess so...sort of like Trent Reznor with Nine Inch Nails, but Karl didn't have a band or anything. But he had a few albums, "A Star is Born" and "Corporate Scum" and maybe one other, distributed through this record company out of England. I listened to them and thought they were stunning. He played all the instruments and used a bunch of effects. Basically he had a makeshift studio in his house where he did all of this stuff alone. So we had a long phone conversation and I asked him if he might be interested in jamming. You have to remember that I was already a fan of his through his old band Ali Baba's Tahini and the songs he wrote for Umphrey's, so I already knew I wanted to be in a band with him. I told him I had this great guitar player I could bring down. Of course, Tommy was still in another band so now I had to convince him to come do this project. Luckily his band was starting to break up at the time. So we drove down there with the intent to play as a trio with Karl on bass.

-When was this?

KC:Summer of 2004, about a year before we officially became a band. I was just terrible. Tempo issues all over the place. Karl liked my ideas though and I think that's why he stuck with me. The first jam session was interesting. Tommy and I were used to rehearsing and practicing, and then recording something. Karl just hit the record button immediately, and it was pretty uncomfortable for me.

-Do those recordings still exist?

KC:Yeah I have them on my computer. We did two songs, "FerrisWheeledCity," which is a song about Chicago, and "Hippie Jam Band Vamp," which is an instrumental spoof on jam band noodling. The recordings are very, uh, let's say "different" than our current sound. "Hippie Jam Band Vamp" is now a progressive metal song so people have asked me why it has that name, but if you imagine the riff without distorted guitars and throw in a simple Widespread drum beat, like the original, it makes perfect sense. At the time Karl lived two hours away, so we only had a few sessions in 2004. He moved closer to us in 2005 and he decided he wanted to switch to guitar since he was writing all of the material on a guitar. I was all for it because I've seen him rip solos before plus he is the total opposite of Tommy as far as technique goes so I knew they would be a good match.

-So Jeff came on board soon thereafter?

KC:Actually, no. We tried a few players, one of which was this 18 year old that Karl wanted to kind of take on as his apprentice. Karl called me one night and talked about moving back because he was frustrated that we still didn't have a band, yet we had songs and recording time booked in a studio already. He was prepared to do guitar and bass but obviously we wanted an official bassist so we could finally play live.

-But Jeff appears on the album, correct?

KC:Yeah we slid into home plate at the last minute and hired Jeff. I knew Jeff already. I had seen his band open up for Hellborg/Sipe/Hansen and we had actually seen an Umphrey's show together in Athens. He was also in an acoustic project with my cousin. It was at my cousin's party that we first played together. We did a sloppy version of "Love is a Battlefield" and then proceeded to get smashed and talk about music. For some reason it never clicked in my head that he was exactly what we were looking for. The light bulb in my somewhat blurry head finally went off after an hour or so. We had him down the next week and we knew within minutes he was the one.

-So tonight you return to the site of your very first concert. I haven't seen a lot of promotion around, but even your first show was packed to the rim with people.

KC:Well college isn't back yet, plus this show is very informal so I don't suppose many people even know about it. We're just going to throw down a list of all the songs we plan on playing in theMidwest and just read off that list until we're done. We have two new songs that will make their debut tonight.

-Do you plan on using prepared setlists in the Midwest? What can people expect?

KC:The setlists are already written actually. I write all of the setlists, and I spent about two hours with paper strewn all over the desk, marking things out and rearranging sequences and stuff like that. It's a very meticulous process, and I've been called insane by more than one person for the attention I put into it. There are so many factors you have to consider. The flow is extremely important. In a song you have dynamics.....slow parts, build ups, heavy sections. What makes it work is the order in which these sections appear. I try to treat a setlist as a song, with the different dynamics arranged in a certain order to make it as effective as possible. But then I look out into the audience and they could probably not care less, but it's important to us.

-Will all 60 songs make an appearance over the three night Midwest tour?

KC:No, because a chunk of those songs only appear at our acoustic concerts. We have a completely different show when we play acoustic...it's usually very mellow. Some of those songs have graduated to the electric show, like "Well Missed" and a couple others. There are certain songs that are going to be played every night, like the new stuff. Some will make only one appearance throughout the run and some will make two. There is talk of people going all three nights so we want to mix it up as much as we can.

-In your interview with Hostage Radio you mentioned that most of your CD sales went to the Midwest. Why do you think that is, and will you be relying on material from the album since people out there are familiar with it?

KC:Well the main reason is because of Karl's relationship with Umphrey's, and also the underground attention that Ali Baba's Tahini has received since Umphrey's has become popular. Karl is a figure in their world and his songs are familiar to their fans. I was also very active with their online community for about three years and those people are just fantastic, so a lot of people coming are friends I met through the community. As far as the album goes, there are certain songs that are retired forever or at least unless something drastic happens, like "Family Reunion" and "Boom Boom." Anything else we might play from the album has been completely rearranged from its original format so they feel like new songs.

-Like "Have a Sitar"

KC:Absolutely. That is the perfect example. On the album, it's me on drums, Jeff on an acoustic stand-up bass, and Karl on sitar, which he played while sitting cross-legged on a pillow. Karl went back and added percussion, melodica, and organ. The entire piece was done acoustic. But now, it's one of the most progressive songs we have, and it's very metal at times. The main riff is one of the heaviest things we do live.

-When you headlined the Orange Peel last summer I didn't recognize it until the middle section.

KC:There were never any intentions to ever play that song live. We didn't play it until one year after we recorded it for the album. I remember looking forward to getting the roadies and equipment necessary to actually be able to take the sitar on the road. Then I started thinking that we could just turn it into a progressive metal song and still keep the same sections. I thought that middle section could easily be translated into a twin-lead guitar section. I remember telling Karl that we should do it and that I had all these ideas for it and he literally just laughed at me. It was put off for a while but once we actually started on it, we fell in love with it. It's become the highlight of the shows for me personally.

-Are there plans for a second album?

KC:No, but I'm sure by the summer we'll be making plans. We pretty much did everything wrong the first time, and that was mostly my fault because I organized the whole deal. We felt like we needed an album to get gigs, but we made the album before we ever played a show, so we weren't even a band yet. By the time we started playing gigs and developing our sound, we didn't even soundlike we do on the album, and we started to disown it really. Tommy had some personal things going on and doesn't even appear on three of the tracks. For instance, the last song on the album, "Zach," is just myself and Karl. We had no band, no plans, and no shows...just an idea. It's still a good album I guess, but we can do so much better. I think resurrecting some of those tunes with new arrangements and injecting new life into them has made us feel a little better about it. But if I had to do it over again, I'd have us do an EP or a mini-album and wait a couple years to do an official release.

-Are you happy musically and personally with the band? Is Mother Vinegar in this for the long haul?

KC: Yes, very much so. I've never been this musically satisfied. Bill Kreutzmann said in the Grateful Dead Movie that the goal in drumming is to get to the point where you feel like you're dancing. Where all four limbs are just kind of moving on their own. It's to the point where I'm not constantly worried about this section or that part or if we're going to lock up or whatever. I have my eyes closed most of the show now and, after years of feeling that way while being part of the audience, it feels great to have the same feeling onstage. The four of us love each other and love what we do, and we don't expect everyone else to like it. Many people don't...we had some bad reviews and some great reviews. But we would much rather play for ourselves and keep ourselves satisfied and happy than try to cater to other people. Even if one band member left, we'd have to break up or start a new project with a different name or something. It would be in bad taste to just throw some random guy up there. It just wouldn't be Mother Vinegar.

Mother Vinegar performs Friday, January 12, at the Kinetic Playground

By Lionel Gibson