Andy and I never had a good communication. There’s been enough said about all that stuff, but there was a particular communication breakdown on this night. Oddly enough [The Three O’clock drummer] Danny went into management, and had just asked if I wanted him to be my manager. He was managing this guy who hadn’t yet put out a record, but it was just about to come out. It was Lenny Kravitz. I had just heard a little bit about this guy and his record – that it was a really rad kind of 60’s rock, and very authentic sounding.

Danny didn’t know anything about the band that I was in, making a record with. He had sent me some of the Lenny stuff, and I really liked it. There was just something really tough about that sound, and I think I found out later it was a 2 inch [tape], 16-track record or something. It’s very badass how they recorded it. I just really liked that, and it was rawer than what we were doing in Jellyfish. Basically, Andy and I were just not getting along, and I was literally at my wits end with him [on that solo], ready to just throw my guitar at the drum kit and leave, and never come back. And I was maybe going to go do this thing with this guy Lenny Kravitz.

I’m glad I didn’t do that. I have nothing against Lenny, but I wouldn’t have been happy in that situation. At least in Jellyfish I was an equal third, even though they tried hard to downplay that. With Lenny, I would have been an actor in his play. But that solo is just rage [laughs]. It’s full-blown anger, and I love how sloppy it is. It’s definitely not labored over, because if it were, it would be a lot cleaner. That little tiny shredding thing I did is sloppier than the sloppiest British invasion guitar player [laughs]. It cracks me up – I just hear a very young me when I listen to that. I’m pretty sure after that take I did put my guitar down and start walking out, and I remember Roger followed me, almost pushing me through the door, because he was so emotional. He said, “Please – I want you to leave the band. Only because I’m so sorry for how he’s acting. I can’t justify anything that he’s doing to you – the way he’s vibing you and chopping you down, and stuff like that." I actually did audition for the Lenny thing, and I basically got it, but he wasn’t at the audition. I was told, “We’re going to have Lenny come and meet you, because we know he’ll like you,” but I got too sentimental about the record we were making [with Jellyfish] because I was such a fan of the songs that we had written. Mainly those guys had written the songs, but I helped write and certainly helped arrange, so that’s why I stuck with my original band.

The other thing on that album I think was a fun surprise for everybody was my bass playing, because I knew that I felt that instrument, but I never had a bass. On my demos or home recordings prior to making that record with Jellyfish, I would just tune a guitar way down. That’s where I developed my palm-muting thing, which is basically my bass-playing sound, especially on a slower song where the bass doesn’t ring out all the way because I’m palm-muting in a very specific place. We tried to find a bass player and couldn’t, and then the producer Albhy [Galuten] and Jack [Joseph Puig] the engineer said, “Well, isn’t that Jason on the demos? Just have him play the bass”. I was happy to play bass.

BW: So that’s you playing bass on like “Calling Sarah”?

JF: Yes, and it’s Steve McDonald on “Now She Knows She’s Wrong” and “All I Want is Everything”, and then we had the awesome jazz dude John Patitucci play upright on “The Man I Used to Be”, “Bedspring Kiss”, and “I Wanna Stay Home”.

BW: You have the distinction of appearing on Beavis and Butthead when the two characters watched the video for “These are the Very Best Years”. Recently, I was talking with R. Stevie Moore and another friend about how funny that is of course, but more importantly about how great that song and band really are. Listening back, it seems like people may have slept on the album Ro Sham Bo back then, but now you listen to it, and can really appreciate it. You can hear where you, Jon Brion, and the others would be heading musically in the future. It was like this incubator that absolutely worked on its own level, but also showed where things were headed. It’s an amazing album.

JF: Thanks man – yeah. Very few people talk about that record, so it’s nice to talk about. That was a challenging, super exciting time. I had left Jellyfish, and was gung-ho to not be in another band. I met Jon shortly before leaving Jellyfish. A girlfriend of mine worked in a coffee house here in L.A., and I made her cassettes to play at work. One of those cassettes was [the Zombies’] Odyssey and Oracle, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society record, and some other stuff that people weren’t playing in public. According to my girlfriend, some “weird guy would come in every day,” and one day when she was playing one of my cassettes, he ran up to her and asked who made it. She said, “My boyfriend did”. He asked who her boyfriend was, and she said “Jason Falkner.” The next day, he came back and gave her a cassette that had some of his songs on it, some Brian Wilson demos, and Ray Davies demos. It was cool. I came home from tour, and I started listening to [the cassette tape] and I liked a lot of his own stuff. It didn’t have the thing pulling at the pop thing that I feel like I have to have. I have to have something in there that’s fighting for it to be interesting to me. It didn’t have that – it was more just like pure pop, but I liked it.

When we first met, we went out drinking and had a blast, and I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be in a band with this guy. But it’s nice to know that he’s there.” It was a comfort that there was somebody else who was really into this stuff, and even knew about it, because at that point, there just weren’t a lot of people talking about Odyssey and Oracle. It hadn’t really been discovered by the intelligentsia.

So a few months later, he called me up and said, “Hey, it’s probably been a few months since you’ve been in a room playing with people,” because he knew that I was just holed up in my girlfriend’s Hollywood apartment. I had a toy drum set from Toys R Us, and was tracking on that because I couldn’t have a real drum set there. I had my one electric guitar that I would tune down for tracking bass, and an acoustic guitar. Jon told me, “I have some friends here from Boston. Why don’t you come down and we’ll just jam? We’ll play some Kinks songs and just screw around.” So I went down there, and that’s how the Grays started. We just jammed – there was no band, and no original songs that were shared. We literally played Kinks and Beatles. It was amazing because we could play “Something”, and we could all play the crap out of it the first time we got together. That was pretty exciting. But again, I felt like there was some edge missing that was really important to me when I was around 24, 25. I really wanted to put my imprint out to the world, and not compromise it with anybody else, the way I had done with Jellyfish.

A mutual friend of ours called a person at Capitol Records that he somehow knew was interested in us. This guy at Capitol had my demo tapes and Jon’s demo tapes. He might have even had Buddy Judge’s demo tapes, and he had these all independently. Our friend called up the guy at Capitol Records and said, “You’re never going to believe who’s in the room: Jason Falkner, Jon Brion, Buddy Judge, and Dan McCarroll. They’re a band.” We all got home to independent messages on our machines, saying, “I’ll sign this [band] sight unseen. You guys have a record deal with Capitol if you want.” It just snowballed, and it turned into this thing.