Interview with Great Van Fleet's Guitarist in Guitarist Magazine

In this episode of the It's 1 Louder podcast, host PJ Pat dives into the polarizing world of Greta Van Fleet. PJ shares his initial disdain for the band due to their striking resemblance to Led Zeppelin and how their latest album 'Starcatcher' has changed his perspective. He reads from an article in Guitarist magazine, exploring the band's evolution, their garage rock roots, sibling dynamics, experimental guitar work, and their attempts to move beyond Led Zeppelin comparisons. Tune in to hear about the trials and triumphs of Greta Van Fleet, PJ Pat's personal stories, and a celebration of rock 'n' roll.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
00:19 Greta Van Fleet: A Polarizing Band
01:01 Evolution of Greta Van Fleet's Sound
01:43 Diving into the Article
01:57 Jake Kiska on Starcatcher and Band Dynamics
03:56 Memories and Influences
05:15 Experimentation and Gear
09:50 Guitar Legends and Personal Stories
11:48 Final Thoughts and Outro

Transcript

We're gonna get into Greta Van Fleet.

Welcome to the it's One Ladder podcast, everyone. My name is PJ Pat, and on this podcast I share my love and passion for rock and roll, mainly by reading and commenting on articles from Guitar magazine, rock magazines about all your guitar and rock heroes. And today's no different.

I know this is a very polarizing band, especially when they came out. I believe it was three albums ago. They were pretty much a Led Zeppelin ripoff. And so some people loved them, some people hated them. I was in a camp, quite truthfully, in, uh, those that hated them, I just thought they were just a Led Zeppelin ripoff.

And there were these young kids, very cute, but not really a big fan of just ripping someone off. Now, I know Led Zeppelin ripped off a lot of blue stuff, too. So I guess it's because the singer just sounds so much like Robert Plant. It's ridiculous.

the first time I heard him. I thought it was like, is this, like, an unreleased Led Zeppe song? What's going on? Here, I was a little confused

you can't really blame them when they came out with their first album. They're in their late teens, so I get it. But it's just really in this last album where I started jumping on the bandwagon.

they were nominated for this year's Grammy Awards for best Rock album and deservably so

Starcatcher. Really cool. If you haven't listened to it, really awesome stuff. The guitar player, everything is just know their sound. I love their sound now and what they're trying to do now. The singer even is trying to even step away from the Robert Plant comparison stuff like, he's doing a lot of falsetto, and there's a lot of stuff that he's doing that Robert Plant didn't do, which is great to see that evolution of music and of sound.

let's get into this article I'm reading from Guitarist magazine of their February issue.

All right, so the article is called Greta Van Fleet with Red Raw, third album, Starcatcher. Read it as the old soul Michigan rockers best

Jake Kiska reflects on banning stacks from the studio, shaking off those zeppelin comparisons and the warfare with his sibling bandmates back in the family garage.

Words, Henry Yates portrait photography. Paige Sarah.

Back in 2018, when Robert Plant was asked which of the modern rock's hot tips he rated, the former Led Zep frontman paid the ultimate backhanded compliment. There's a band in Detroit called Greta Van Fleet, beautiful little singer, and he borrowed it from someone I know very well. They are Led Zeppelin one.

It was a line the rock press would parrot at infinitum.

however reductive it seemed to one of the genre's best young exponents.

True when Michigan twins Josh on vocals and Jake Kiska on guitar, along with kid brother Sam on bass, found a Greta in their family garage. A half decade earlier, there was no denying the dna of classic rock's galadicos in their riff and shriek sound. But none of the siblings deny the influence, and the comparison certainly didn't hurt.

2000 and seventeen's from the Fire ZP won the Grammys for best rock album,

both 2000 and eighteen's anthem of the peaceful army and 2020 one's the battle at Gardens Gate were glorious interlopers amid M, the committee penned pop of the Billboard top ten.

And as Jick reminds us today with third album, Starcatcher, Greta has put distance between themselves and their 70s touch tones, with guitar work that roams beyond Page's shadow.

wanted a more garage sound for Starcatcher. What was the appeal? I think it had to do with spontaneity. In the past, we would usually go out somewhere remote, right in the middle of the woods or in the mountains, and we would typically overdo the demos. They started sounding like a record by the time we got out there, and sometimes it's impossible to replicate that.

Initially. Excitement with Starcatcher by design. We would go directly into the studio with basic concepts and just catch the songs as they would fall.

it was birthed by fire.

are your memories of coming up in a family garage with Josh and Sam? Warfare. He laughs it wasn't all quiet on the western front, I can tell you that. We got a lot of sparring out then. I can look more fondly upon it now. It's somewhat romantic.

remember being a kid playing my first guitar in that garage and dreaming about the bigger picture and what that might look like. I think that's what we wanted to do with this record, go back and capture that essence. It's a very live record for that reason. You know,

maybe some simplicity within the writing but in terms of playing guitar live, I think it takes more attitude to pull it off

m has the band success affected your relationship with your brothers. It's actually brought us closer. I suppose the definition of a brother changes when you leave home and all of a sudden you realize it's you and your brothers versus the world.

becomes a new relationship.

know there's the mythology of so many groups with siblings that have gone to shit.

can be quite a demanding chemistry.

Did you play tough gigs on your way up? I remember we'd play a lot of biker gigs in Michigan where we'd show up and they'd be running the show with a generator, firing guns off in the air, like a scene out of easy rider or something. We were all young and it was quite frightening,

they were the type of guys who would always have your back.

they'd say, if you ever have an issue, give us a call.

One time, a biker gang came to a show in Saginaw. Then a rival gang showed up, a fight broke out, and we just kept on playing.

experimenting a good way to stop your playing becoming derivative? I'm always searching to break up rhythm? Looking at different genres?

M truthfully, if I'm having an issue being stuck in territory that I've been in before, I might go to classical music.

Sarovsky's night on bald Mountain to get me out of sticky situations. Or chappe or Bach. A romantic way of looking at it is that it's kind of like sculpting. It's like. Situation where you're thinking, a ah riff has been played. There's tons of ways to shape it into something more interesting.

There's so many layers to a riff. If you play Seven Nation army, you're close. But it's not exactly like Jack White because there's nuance, there's attitude, there's soul, and then there's heart. The head and the strings. Everybody's going to do it differently. That's another fascinating thing. I love to watch people play my guitar pieces and see their interpretation of them.

were your core guitars on this album?

was pretty bare bones, but it was a lot. It was really eclectic. This friend of mine, the owner of Chicago Music Exchange,

told him I was doing a record and asked if he would send some guitars down.

he said, sure, I'll load a truck and send down about 20 extremely interesting vintage instruments.

we got to RCA Studio A, which is this giant studio in Nashville. Elvis and Sinatra records were done there. And I put all of these guitars cases on the ground, all strewn, um, up. I opened all of him, and then we go song by song.

was the best of the bunch?

He sent down the fourth 335 that was ever made. It actually destroyed every guitar that producer Dave Cobb had at the studio.

wanted to buy it. I wanted to buy it. And my friend was like, well, it's like a museum piece, so you can't.

were old tellies. I used a strat for some of these solos. I would just walk up, grab a different guitar, and it would be completely random, and I would just work on. It.

was part of my process on this record. I wasn't just using the beloved, if you will, my number one, the 61 les Paul. I was like, all right, I'm going to pick a fight with whatever I pick up, and I'll plug it into something, and if it sounds cool, then

dot, dot. On this record, it wasn't me forcing these tones or trying to curate what I could hear in my head. It was the other way around.

Oh, that's so cool. Because you normally hear the other way around where guitars have this sound in their head and they want to try to replicate that with the right guitar are the perfect amp. M if you ever saw, uh, say it out loud with the edge. Jimmy Page and Jack White, I clearly remember one scene where the edge, that's what he was doing.

He has all these effect pedals and uses a lot of effects. Because he was saying in the movie that

hears a sound in his head. And he's trying to replicate that exact sound using whatever effects possible. But looks like this dude did the opposite, which is kind of cool and refreshing.

about your amps and effects on Starcatcher?

did this on their last record, too, where I was kind of experimenting, playing guitar solo back and then playing with the pedal knobs while it's being recorded. So you get all the changing variables. It becomes like a human voice. You can kind of speak through it, and it becomes really psychedelic.

really cool. Too. I think they used to do a lot of that back in the day. I believe Jimi Hendrix did a lot of that. Where they used to tweak kind of the knobs as it was being recorded, or even after the recording process,

used a lot of the universal audio stuff. And we're having fun pushing preamps

the board itself. In terms of amps. There was a blonde fender basement and a Princeton silver face, both of them vintage, obviously

magnetone twilight. Or in a vox AC 30, which I typically have in a studio for most records. But this records was. Because I limited myself to only using combo amps.

Technically a Les Paul, but with the SG body styling. What drew you to that twin horn format? I remember watching Eric Clapton and cream when I was a kid.

That felt like an intervention. It was seminal for me. Definitely Pete Townsend.

had an old cassette of, uh, the who's live at leads. The first real guitar I owned was an SG standard with P. That's what Townsend was using at that concert. I remember as a kid, just picking up the SG and liking the weight and tactile qualities. I liked it because it was chunky.

dad would take me to. And I remember being at a guitar center in Saginaw, Michigan. I was playing sunshine of your love on an SG, and some older guy came around the corner and said, damn, that was pretty good. I thought you'd be some older guy like me

you're like 14.

you say the SG has shaken off its image as a heavy metal guitar man? The lineage of the SG is all over the place. It's kind of popped up in irregular places. I guess with some guitars, they start becoming synonymous with specific genres.

a Jackson or a dean is going to be on a metal thrash side. But the SG is one of those instruments that is crafted like the Les Paul strat or the telecaster at the golden age of guitar. And because the SG has been around for so long, it's kind of ended up everywhere.

definitely true.

said you studied Jimmy Page's playing to, uh. Decree. There's been a handful of guitar players I've done that with. Clapton was one Hendrix from the american side.

it gets into philosophy at some point.

was like living and breathing. A type of guitar player at any given time. Paige was one of those guys where if I was playing a Zeppelin track, I would walk through exactly what his thought process was when he was putting that song together. I could think exactly like him or Hendrix or whoever.

Because if you spend enough time with that stuff, it's like a psychological character study, if you will.

you ever met Paige? I haven't.

been in close proximity. We were staying in the same hotel in LA and missed each other in the lobby by a couple of minutes. Our manager was like, you know who just walked through here? Jimmy Page. So close, but not quite.

Oh, man, that must be such a life goal for this guy to meet Paige. I mean, obviously he plays like him. Um, his band plays like Led Zep, so it must be a true dream, uh, for him to meet page. And I'm sure it's going to happen one day.

That's very similar to a personal story I had. My best band in the world is Pearl Jam, and I love that band from the get go, soon as I heard alive, fell in love with them, and I've been following and been a huge fan since. I'm actually part of the ten club, their fan club, that they have from the get go.

So, needless to say, mike McCready, one of their guitar players, a huge, huge influence on my playing.

Long story short, last October, I actually met him. I met him, and I'm 48 years old, and I felt like a little kid meeting the guy. I was genuinely happy.

meeting your idol, right? You're very, very nervous and you don't know. He could treat you like a complete asshole. But he didn't. He was so nice.

I got to see him rock out 3ft in front of me. He gave me some pics. It was such a beautiful night and really a highlight of my life. So I can only imagine this guy meeting Paige at some point and feeling that same thing, if not more.

Okay, last question.

you feel like you've distanced yourself from the Zeppelin comparisons with this latest album? I think if you take a common denominator control group and you ask them, what is rock and roll to you, then Zeppelin and those groups that laid the foundation or the baseline. So our early approach was,

playing rock and roll music. It's what we grew up with. It's what we. Listen to is driven deeply in our dna. And initially, yeah, the reaction was like, this sounds a bit like Led Zeppelin. A bit. It sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin, especially with the singer.

get that reference a lot, they say. I'm sure every rock and roll band gets that reference a lot. Not really, man. You know what I mean? You get it the most, I can tell you. Greta Van Fleet. You get it the most, especially with that damn singer of yours.

with time goes on, you get a bit older, there's an evolution in what you're doing. And with Starcatcher, it definitely sounds like Greta Van Fleet. No doubt about that. Yeah, I'll give him that. But again, that dude's voice, it's inescape. Capable, how he sounds like Robert Plant. So I don't know if they can ever get away from that comparison.

It's not like they're playing industrial or electronic music and the guy's singing like plant, you know what I mean? That'll be something else. But to play in a rock band, to have a singer like that,

inescapable. Greta Van Fleet I think that's just something you're going to have to accept and live with it and embrace it and just move forward with your own sound, your own rock and songs, and that'll be that. And whoever wants to follow you and jump on a bag wagon will.

And those don't. You know what? Fuck them.

Thank you, Greta Van Fleet, for showing the younger generation how to rock out, even if you kind of sound like Led Zeppelin,

Thank you so much. For listening. Smash that like button and subscribe if I brought you value to this. Looking forward to bringing you some more articles and commenting on it. Looking forward to seeing your comments. Let me know. What do you think? Do you like this band? Do you hate this band?

They're still, I think, in my opinion, very polarizing. Let me know your thoughts and I'll see you in the next one.