Think Matt Taylor, Not Ringo Starr
By Aidan Doherty
Editor-in-Chief

AD: So what's up?

DF: Well, we're playing a show at the Roxy on Saturday, which is sort of an industry showcase to try to get some record-label folks to actually see us play in LA. We've had some great exposure and breaks, but we feel like we haven't gotten a good venue chance in this town for awhile. And so we're trying to get that show to be a big night for us.

AD: When did you guys start out actually?

DF: The genesis of the band was back in the spring of '98 when Libby and Jason were freshmen and they lived in the same sponsor group, lived across the hall form each other. They each knew the other was a musician and started doing something musically together. And Ijust started playing with Jason in a garage-band that became the [Dusty Baker] Cock Explosion, and he asked for me to come play with him and Libby, and I thought what the heck, and the first time I heard her voice I knew she was the real deal. The three of us have been at it ever since. The band in its present form kind of took shape in the latter part of 2000, so their senior year, when we added Nick on bass and he made a difference in the band's approach and its songwriting, because he was a real kind of punk-pop kind of guy and a really good songwriter and a great musician.

AD: When you started out did you have any idea that you'd get this far?

DF: No, no. I mean when we started out it was just fun, and I'd just started playing drums again for the first time in 11 years or 12 years, so for me it was just kind of a nice distraction. And you know they were good musicians and Jason and I really, musically were kind of very much in sync, so it was a lot of fun. So their freshman, sophomore and junior year we just kind of played at it and played occasionally. We definitely were kind of a unit, and we were trying to do stuff together but Libby was abroad her whole junior year, and we didn't know what would happen. I always believed Libby could be a pop star if she wanted to be. The question was did she want to be. And I think her year abroad, when she came back, we kind of made a plan and a commitment for their senior year to try to give it a go. And that's when we got serious about it, and we were lucky enough that our plan kind of fell into place. All the goals we set that year we met and then when we won the Pantene Pro-Voice concert in the summer of 2001 things just kind of took over.

AD: It's a big leap in the dark though.

DF: Huge, huge. Well, yeah, the contest, Jason just saw an ad for it in Rolling Stone, and the reason it kind of struck home was you know it was for female singer/songwriters, female-headed bands, aged like 16-24 which we were, but then kind of the subheading "supporting what women have to say," and Libby had just written this song, "Blood Red Moon Song," which is about a pregnancy scare.

AD: Now I'm not trying to be impertinent, but 16-24, now….how did you sneak through there?

DF: Oh, well it's about the female singer/songwriter, it was definitely about… that contest was about the women, in a sense Libby was the winner, and the band was her backing.

AD: You are, you know, a very youthful and hip-looking guy though…

DF: Yeah, all my band mates are what, 22, 23? I mean, I think Jason and I got over relating as adults rather than as a dean and a student. We got over that pretty quickly. It took Libby awhile, it took Nick awhile, I mean I just haven't known Nick that long, but you know after spending five weeks on the road together and all the stuff we've gone through, that obstacle's pretty much gone.

AD: So now, this show you're doing in the Roxy, and then this show you're doing in San Francisco, is this part of a tour, or just kind of two little things?

DF: No, the Roxy, they've invited us to play a few times; their booker saw us play there with Poe and they really like us, but playing the Roxy is kind of a big deal in LA, because high visibility clubs in LA like the Roxy, the Troubadour, I don't know, Spaceland, to play those places you need to draw a crowd. If you don't draw a crowd they won't ask you back. So we've kind of waited for the right time, when we didn't have a lot of other shows to wear out our audience, and when we felt like we were ready to do it. So that's not part of the tour. The opening for Rusted Root is part of their tour. Originally we had turned 'em down, 'cause they wanted us to do an East Coast show and pay our way, and we'd just gotten the Jewel tour and we were, maybe, a little too full of ourselves, but we couldn't afford it, and so we turned 'em down. We said we'd be happy to play a West Coast show, and it turns out a month or so later they said come play a West Coast show.

AD: Sometimes it's kind of sexy when you turn them down.

DF: And yeah, we felt that a little bit because at that point we'd opened for three platinum-selling artists, we'd toured nationally with Poe, we'd opened for Jewel, we'd opened for Indie RE. Rusted Root, they're a medium sized act; they have a big following and they've had a platinum album, but they didn't kind of sync as much with our audience as those others did. But we're excited. It's a chance for us to test a new audience, and one of the things we love about playing shows like this, one of the challenges of playing the Jewel, and especially the Poe and Indie-RE's is that you don't know if the audience is going to accept you, so we go out there playing to an audience of people that has never heard of us, and you know we want to win 'em over.

AD: Did you ever get people chanting for the headlining band to come on stage?

DF: Never, we've never…I don't think we've ever had an audience that was disappointed, I think when big-name act audiences see us, we always win 'em over, because we have real songs, and we have a great singer.

AD: So what's going to happen to Pomona when the Dean of Funk has to leave to cut a record?

DF: Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I'm not giving up my day job. As much as I believe in the band, I'm not going to do that. I've got too much of a career invested. If some record company wants to makes us rich and sign us to a multi-record deal we'll see, but I'm pretty committed to what I do here.

AD: Any scandalous tour stories?

DF: I think people see us and they don't see us as a very fun or typical band because we're not raucous onstage, we don't have kind of a wild front person, but the tour is… I'm trying to think….

AD: Do you remember any of it first of all?

DF: I do remember. We practiced some moderation, not always. The challenge was having to be up and on the road every day at nine or ten in the morning. You can sleep but you still had to get yourself out of bed. My favorite Jewel tour-story was after we had done our Texas dates with her, and we had a real tough travel hitch going from Dallas to Phoenix, and we had to get up really early in the morning to catch a plane, fly to Los Angeles, change, and get to Phoenix. And Jason, his guitar, his key guitar got lost somewhere on the way and he was just distraught. The airline claimed that they would find it and get it to the concert hall, and they got it here about an hour before we were supposed to go on. We were just kind of coming into the dressing room area, and there was this delivery person there with the guitar and Jason just threw his hands up and fell prostrate on the carpet and was just screaming in happiness, and that very moment Jewel had come out of her dressing room which was next to ours, in horror, she didn't know what was going on, and she just like scurried back into her dressing room. I'm trying to think if we have any wild stories. Probably the wildest after party was actually in LA after the Poe tour 'cause we brought a bunch of folks back to our hotel which is the Roosevelt, which is kind of a famous LA hotel; it's where they shot most of the scenes for Almost Famous and it's got that LA vibe about it. We had a bunch of folks come back including, most notoriously, our lawyer at the time, who was older than me.