Chattanooga Times Free Press music reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Josh Clark, lead guitarist and vocalist for San Francisco-based jam band Tea Leaf Green, about how to capture the improvisational elements of jam music on stage and in the studio and who he considers the “first” jam bands.

CP: When you’re in the studio, what is the band’s approach to arranging music since so much of what you do is reliant on the volatility of the moment?

JC: We play together live, and you obviously do the vocals later. The bulk is created live, and we do several takes until you get something that has the emotion and passion behind it that you’re happy with. On the album, we’re coming out with, you’re not going to find a song that’s longer than five minutes. We try to trim the fat and get down to the song, just the song.

We’ve tried it every way. We’ve tried to make the jam album and all that, but at this point in the studio, you want to present each song in the tightest way you possibly can. It makes for a better album and better listening experience for that 15 minutes or whatever you listen to to be like one piece. When you’re playing live, the song is one long piece, but with an album, it’s a stream-of-consciousness deal. We try to keep it as direct as possible.

CP: So the studio is a chance to boil each song down to its most basic elements?

JC: Yeah, and there’s a lot of powerful in that when you get down to that core. If it’s delivered right, some of the best songs in the world, some of people’s favorite songs, are three-minute songs.

CP: Are jam bands sort of a combination of the best of both worlds with jazz improvisation and rock’s lyrical and melodic focus?

JC: It’s the freedom of it. The audiences are really what is allowing it. They are allowing us to have a career and encouraging us to be as free with the music and change it as much as we want.

In a lot of ways, it’s a very open-minded scene, but also a close-minded scene in some ways. Just like any other scene, there are people who are like, “Well, I’m a jam band, and that’s it — nothing else is going to do it for me.” I’m not like that, I like everything if it’s good. At festivals, people want you to experiment, and it’s OK to fail or trainwreck because it’s all about getting to a place you’ve never been to before.

CP: How do you keep things together on stage and stop each other from going on a wild tangent that ends, like you said, in a trainwreck?

JC: Duct tape and spit (laughs). We have areas, you know, the songs are set up so you have a structure that’s the same every time, and you want to play that the best every time, but here’s this wide-open area. We’ve been doing it long enough that we can sense when it’s going sour and know when it’s time to bail. We also know where Point A ended and the time when Point B picks up.

There are times when we’re feeling really frisky and we’ll try and go into other songs or do unexpected things without planning it, but we try to avoid that. We have certain safety nets, though, because the worst-case scenario is to stop. I don’t know that we’ve ever done that, but it can get weird. That’s the risk you run.

CP: That to me, is almost a romantic aspect of jam bands because it seems like you put your neck on the chopping block every time you get on stage.

JC: You do. There are sections where if you’re not feeling inspired and the band isn’t feeling inspired, it becomes useless, and that’s a big part of the song. You have to create every night as opposed to a band that has a set they do every night the same way trying to nail it as perfect as possible. You can just fall asleep at the wheel doing that, you can phone it in, but in a band like this, you have to muster it from somewhere, even if you’re not feeling it.

CP: Who was the first jam band, in your opinion? Was it the Grateful Dead?

JC: Grateful Dead weren’t the first, maybe the first, most-famous ones. I consider the cavemen the first jam band or anybody who’s gotten on a porch, (talked) and drank whiskey and played their instruments all night long. It’s an American tradition that goes deeper than any other. It’s really a world-wide tradition. It’s music and people communicating through it in the most-primal way.

CP: Sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought.

JC: I like talking about it. I think about it a lot. It’s endlessly fascinating because it’s become such a powerful word, and it means so many things to so many people. Some people want to vomit at the mere sight of a jam band, and for others, it’s the Holy Grail. It makes people feel, one way or the other. There’s very little indifference with it.