Ben Harper And Relentless7
He may have rocked festivals and stadia the world over as a solo act with a guitar in tow. But times have changed. Tim Donnelly travels to New York to meet Relentless7, Ben Harper’s visceral new band.
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I did not care that I was soaked to the bone or that my favourite leather jacket now smelled like stale ale. Hollering through the cold downpour and dancing in ankle-deep puddles on the corner of East Houston and Clinton Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at two thirty in the morning, I wanted the world to know what I had just seen and heard at the Mercury Lounge that night. They were loud, they were raw and they’d thrown down an absolutely massive set.
The band in question, Relentless7, were not unfamiliar to me. They feature a ringer in their singer/slide guitar slinger Ben Harper. No longer the trailblazing leader of the Innocent Criminals, Harper is now the recognisable face of Relentless7, who are, in no particular order, Ben plus guitarist Jason Mozersky, bassist Jesse Ignalls and drummer Jordan Richardson.
To many music fans, Harper is a musician who has flown under and around the modern rock radar, touching down at massive festivals from Bonnaroo to Byron Bay, leaving huge clouds of positive energy in his wake.
Though he is married to Hollywood royalty with wife Laura Dern, and is partner in a clothing company named ‘Propr’ with actor David Arquette, he has finally embraced being a star by doing the opposite of what musicians do: he’s starting over mid-career. The difference between Ben and the others is that it is all being done under his own volition.
The ‘forming a new band thing’ isn’t a re-invention ploy by Harper. For him, Relentless7 could be perceived as a huge gamble: to form a group with unknown musicians and not rely on or barely play his successful back catalogue is not exactly a recipe for success. Will it work? A look in my stinky, sticky jacket pocket a couple of days later reveals a cocktail napkin suggesting there’s every chance it will: “As heavy as anything from Seattle, as roadhouse as anything from West Texas, as soulful as anything form Memphis and as righteous as anything from New Orleans.”
A month and a couple of days later, I find myself face to face and elbow to elbow with Relentless7 on a cramped couch in the artist green room at Sirius satellite radio. It’s 11am, early for rock star standards, and their glazed attention come into focus when a properly caffeinated Harper looks at me with cob web-clearing intent.
“It is a new day and it’s important to say this: this is a band. This is a band that could not exist without the other three guys,” he declares. “It’s really the first time I have not been the centre of the circle, a corner of the square.”
The music they are making together is so adventurous and tight that they decided to write new material rather than play Harper’s songs, a huge affirmation of faith in their ability. Word of caution to the hardcore fan: do not expect to hear ‘Steal Your Kisses’ from this band. Expect to be rocked.
At thirty-nine, Ben has dropped into the biggest wave of his creative life, looking to share the juice rather than use it all to himself. “They command their own and it just works its way into this collective of four guys. They are musically uninhibited and it’s reckless abandon, man. It’s fucking reckless abandon,” Harper insists, his hands thumping his chest.
And with that, he stands up and leaves the green room. They’ll be on air in a few minutes, it’s not even midday yet, and Harper, it seems, can’t wait to play some new tunes.
The story behind how Relentless7 formed is stuff normally saved for show biz fables, not rock ‘n’ roll reality. In the late nineties, Austin-based guitarist Jason Mozersky was in the right place at the right time, thanks to his job working as a driver for a local music promoter. One day he had Ben Harper in his van. He did what ballsy, naïve, confident, or yes, even desperate musicians do in that situation: he asked Ben to listen to his demo.
Harper agreed to listen and was, in his own words, “blown away” - and helped Mozersky and his then band, Wan Santo Condo, get a record deal. Mozersky’s band may have fallen apart, but his relationship with Harper continued to grow.
In 2005, Harper asked Mozersky to lay down a track for his Both Sides of the Gun
Harper threw them into the deep end of the performing pool early. On their first gig, they had to share the stage with the Beastie Boys, Tenacious D and Crosby, Stills and Nash. The crowd: 10,000 strong. “I said, ‘You know what guys, I‘m doing this show for Obama. Come on out, let’s hit this, let’s charge this as a band, this is the right opportunity, the right moment.’
“This was a statement and for me a brave choice to just put them out there to show them what it looks like and to see for myself what it would look like. The boys stepped up like they were playing these venues their whole lives,“ recalls Harper. “I was like, these motherfuckers are bad as shit. They stepped right up and crushed it, and you know Beastie Boys fans don’t play around. They do not play, man.”
The election of an American president who looks the way Harper does was a matter of time, according to Ben.
“Being from my cultural ethnicity, I’ve always felt like it was only a matter of time, but then again I’m an optimist to a fault, so of course I thought it would happen. It’s incredible and I think it will be an international symbol of a political shift and change for the world to follow.”
White Lies For Dark Times
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