The Train is back at it over the holidays in Knoxville! Come out and check us at the Preservation Pub and Longbranch. Guaranteed great shows! Lots of friends to be there! I have even heard rumors of Dave and Scott's old band the Moonlight Cellar Band getting something together!
Friendship of Llama Train members forms the basis for musical exploration
By Steve Wildsmith stevew@thedailytimes.com
There’s a story to every first encounter, and the guys in Llama Train are no different in telling theirs — although given their mischievous sense of humor, it’s hard to tell what’s reality and what’s the product of active imagination.
. and I swooned Dave playing Spanish flamenco guitar in a corner of the basement,” Plumlee interjects. “I was trying to pull off the whole desperado thing.”
Fits of laughter erupt on the other end of the line, and as the interview progresses, the guys — all present except for Faw, who had to work late — finish one another’s sentences, pick up where the other trails off and riff on a number of music-related topics. It’s a bit disorienting at first, but by the end of the call, the distinctiveness of each man’s voice and personality becomes clear.
Such is the case with the music made by Llama Train as well — a heady mix of a number of rock ‘n’ roll styles that mistakenly gets labeled far too often as jam band music. While comparisons to Phish or Widespread Panic aren’t the worst things in the world, they’re not accurate when it comes to the Llama Train experience.
“I think people stupidly call anything longer than a four-minute song ‘jam band music,’” Honkonen said. “We’re probably anything but that. We love to play off of the audience, and if people are having a good time with a song that’s normally two minutes and they’re really loving it, it’ll become an eight-minute song. But that doesn’t necessarily make us a jam band.”
The genesis of Llama Train can be traced back to Epley and Faw, who grew up together and used to play acoustic bluegrass after high school. They started making forays into the local music scene, playing various open-mic nights, when they ran across Honkonen.
“When we met him, we thought he was a guitar player,” Epley said. “We started playing, just the three of us, and eventually Matt told us he was a drummer, so he transitioned over to drums. We had other bass players for a while before we met J.P., who can also play trumpet and keyboard. We all play guitar too, so we all just picked up on bass and made it happen. We never did get a full-time bass player, so we all just swap out, which is fun.”
Once the lineup solidified in 2004, the guys did whatever they could to get gigs around Knoxville. They established themselves playing four-hour shows at O’Charley’s on the Cumberland Avenue “Strip” for a while and eventually landed a gig at Preservation Pub on Market Square. A cozy venue with an intimate vibe, it was the perfect setting for Llama Train’s crazy jams and all-over-the-road sound, which ranges from pulling off an admirable Uncle Tupelo tribute on a song like “Future Age” to channeling a shiny, happy version of Interpol on a track like “Killer Robot Microphone.”
“We would play anywhere that would pay us to play,” Honkonen said. “We had no shame at all. We just wanted to play.”
In 2005, the guys went into the studio to record with local production wizard Don Coffey, a veteran of the power-pop band Superdrag. Although they’d grown quite a bit over the previous year and had learned a great deal from other local musicians like Tom Pryor, Brock Henderson and Jonathan Sexton, it was Coffey who pushed the guys to new levels of musical excellence.
“Don said it best — he said, ‘You have a great steak right now, but you need to cut 25 percent of the fat off of it,’” Honkonen said. “He pushed us in the direction of embracing more of an indie-rock vibe.”
“He just told us stuff that was so obvious — like how the bass drum and the bass guitar should connect,” Epley added. “Don was all about the pop song. He took our material and honed it down to three-minute radio singles.”
The end result is the EP “Siren Sounds,” a record that established Llama Train as one of the local scene’s in-demand bands as far as talent, experimentation and musical exploration go. It also helped the guys lock onto a unified direction that took their various influences and consolidated — but didn’t homogenize — them.
“We all brought our own unique flavor to the table — there’s just this crazy conglomeration of musical styles going all over the place, and we honed it down to an alt-country kind of sound mixed in with a prog-rock kind of sound mixed in with reggae,” Plumlee said. “At one point we had three distinct sets we would play to accommodate all three.”
Their friendship, Honkonen added, helps to maintain a balance of power in Llama Train that keeps any one influence — or individual — from taking over the direction of the band.
“Rather than force everything through a fine mesh screen, we just let everything breathe,” he said. “Working with Don was a big turning point that turned us into what we sound like today. We had to tighten up, he told us, so people could figure out who we are.”
As time went by, Llama Train fell by the wayside. Shortly after the release of the full-length album “Out of Season” in 2008, Epley moved to Pittsburgh and now lives in Washington, D.C.; Honkonen went on to play drums for Tenderhooks and now the Tim Lee 3; Faw plays with local band Grandpa’s Stash; and Plumlee is a member of the local outfit Intercontinental Beat Machine. But with the holidays here, Epley is back in town — and Llama Train is back on. And the beast that performs next week in Knoxville is a whole different animal than the one first birthed six years ago.
“It’s always been a really fun project, but it’s a very engaging experience now,” Epley said. “It’s hard to find the same quality of musicianship in the people you play with, but we all got really lucky because when we started, none of us were that great. But we definitely had the raw ability.
“We all share a love of music, and nobody is ever shut out. We’ve always written as a band, so as long as it’s a good riff somebody brings to the table, we’re willing to try it. Just last night, we practiced for the first time in a year and a half, and it was like we’d never really let up. For the most part, it’s just a really natural, easy thing.”
“Me and Scott (Faw), we met Matt (Honkonen) out in the courtyard after a gig, and he was playing guitar and trying to pick up chicks,” David Epley told The Daily Times this week. “We met J.P. (Jon Paul Plumlee) at this environmental non-profit thing .”
"In a past life, Knoxville's Llama Train might have been a jam band; they have the musical chops to play long-form improv without faltering or repeating themselves, and their repetoire includes Birkenstock-rock nuggets from the likes of Chris Robinson and the Grateful Dead. But somewhere in transit between that past life and this one, these fellows learned a lesson or two about songwriting and showmanship, things that too many patchouli rockers overlook in their droning quest for Jerry's muse. The result: the guys in Llama Train rock unapologetically, and they have fun doing it, trading off instruments as easily as most bands might pass around a bottle of cheap hooch."
- MG, Metro Pulse, November 2006
"These boys were raised on roots rock, Americana and the like. This band is as comfortable switching from their own material to classic covers as they are switching instruments. And expect plenty of both as they tour through straight ahead rock, danceable grooves and intimate acoustics. Before the night is over look for everyone to take a turn on guitar, vocal, drums, keys, harmonica and whatever else they can find. They play well and they play it all, but, despite their relative youth, are experienced enough to know when to jam and when to tighten up." - M. Trevor Higgins, ChattanoogaTimes Free Press
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