.png)
Playwright David Adjmi began working on the play Stereophonic, a five-time Tony award-winner and the most nominated play in the history of the awards, in November 2014. He wanted to recreate the feel of a rock documentary live on stage, portraying a 1970s-era British American band gathering in a studio to record the album that could make them superstars … or tear them apart. (Perhaps a bit of both: If you’re familiar with the making of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit Rumours, you have some idea of the dark, but beautifully lyrical emotional places where Stereophonic will take you.)
But you can’t make a play about rock music without, y’know, rock. Adjmi recruited Will Butler, formerly a member of Arcade Fire and an Oscar nominee for the score of the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her, to give the play’s musical interludes verisimilitude appropriate to a show set in 1976. On the eve of the show’s Las Vegas debut October 21 at the Smith Center, Butler spoke to the Weekly about the origins of Stereophonic’s sound and fury.
How did you get involved with Stereophonic?
It was a blind date with the playwright, David Adjmi. My friend Mo was like, “Do you want to meet with this playwright?” And I was like, “Sure.? She's like, “He's a real playwright.” I was like, “Sure, I don't care.” [Laughs.] We met in a diner on the west side of Manhattan and just hit it off. He hadn't written a word of the play, but the concept was there: This is a band in the studio. You'd hear them do something transcendentally beautiful, and then they’d stop in the middle because something weird happens. You’d hear them doing a take and then stop and fight because the drums sound bad in their headphones, but they’re actually mad at their dad. It’s about the fractured nature of the music, and the excitement of doing something and then trying to make it perfect. And then starting to hate it, as you're making it perfect. It all felt too real to me.
Was it your choice from the beginning to set Stereophonic in the 1970s?
Yeah. I think it was ‘76 from the beginning, which is kind of a symbolic time: The bicentennial, the year before punk. It's in that grand era of peak material culture for music, when microphones were gorgeous, tape machines. And the 1970s was a mythic time to be in the recording studio.
We still had the energy of the 1960s, and the drugs had gotten better.
Yeah, exactly.
You were part of one of the most successful indie bands of the 2010s. Did that make it easier to compose this music, or harder?
I went into Stereophonic not knowing a lot about the pop and rock music of the 1970s. I knew a lot of punk; I knew a lot of post-punk. I knew a lot of German experimental bands in the 1970s, the Velvet Underground. I knew the New York scene. But I didn't know Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, or Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. And I consciously chose to not learn it. I was like, “Well, in the '70s, Led Zeppelin hadn’t listened to Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen hadn't listened to Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen listened to Van Morrison and Phil Spector and girl groups. And he was friends with the guys in [influential synth-punk band] Suicide; he was friends with these hardcore punk rockers. I'm friends with punk rockers, and I know Van Morrison and I know Phil Spector’s girl groups. So, I'm gonna start from there.”
Great idea. And did you limit yourself to the recording gear they would have had available?
Well, funnily enough, all the best s**t is still from the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. You can get cheaper gear, but you can't get a better microphone. You can't get better equipment than what they were using in 1976; I mean, there's a couple things, but they’re mostly just for ease, like digital stuff. At home, all my guitars are cheap, weird, mid-70s guitars or early ‘80s guitars, and the amps are from the ‘70s. And I have a tape machine from 1974, a four track that I use. I was using that, and it did influence the composition, because when you play a ‘70s guitar through a ‘70s amp it sounds like the '70s, even if you're playing contemporary music.
After you made the music, did you allow yourself to go back to listen to Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty and say, “Okay, nailed it?”
Yeah, very much so. Stereophonic opened two years ago off-Broadway, and then between off-Broadway and Broadway, we made a cast recording. Then I was like, “Okay, let's listen to Fleetwood macros. Listen to Tom Petty. Let's see what the snare drum sounded like. How did they mix it?” It was very much nuts and bolts, but also trying to make it sound like 2025, because we wanted the record to live in the present, but also to dig in on those touchstones.
So, you're writing the music. David Adjmi is writing the dialog, weaving the story. How much conversation did the two of you have during that process? Do the songs help tell the story? Does the story need the emotional push of the songs?
Well, the songs didn't really exist until the script existed. I would send him demos every once in a while, just to let him know I was thinking. But it wasn't until he had done a solid draft that the music really began to take shape. I mean, lyrically, the songs somewhat drive the story. But a big thing I learned while in the room working with the actors is that the second you have three people singing in harmony and it sounds good, it's such good character development. You're like, “Oh, these people know each other; these people have an intimacy.” And hearing three people sing in harmony sounds so 1970s. These people have spent a lot of time in a room to sound that good together.
And I did try to approach everything in character. When I wrote the song for [the character] Diana, I was like, “Who is Diana? She’s some kind of nature poet.” Kind of coincidentally, at the time I was reading a lot of Emily Dickinson, so there's a lot of Emily Dickinson in there. And I was constantly sending David voice memos, and I was sending demos to Daniel Aukin, our director, and Justin Craig, our music director, and just seeing how people reacted. I tried things in the room with the actors as we were workshopping it. It was extremely collaborative.
The actors on stage play their own instruments. In some cases, they learned them for the show itself. Was that a consideration when you wrote the songs?
I've spent my whole life in bands, and I know a lot of bands. And you can be a real idiot and still be great in a band. [Laughs.] I was never worried. I mean, it ended up being quite a lot of work to get it in shape, but the thing about a band is how people play together and how they hang together. And it can be very simple. Listen to something like “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone; the bass line is literally one note. It's a genius bass player, just playing one note the whole time. And it just feels like a band. There's a groove; there's a communication there.
So, I knew, as we were sending it on people, that I could dumb it down, because I'm not that technically proficient. I mean, I'm a musician, and I've been playing music my whole life, but I'm not some wizard on the guitar. Some of these songs I can barely play and sing at the same time. We’re asking the actors to do more than I'm doing. I was like, “This isn't a punk band, but music doesn't have to be complex.”
Have you given thought to continuing to write music for the stage? Would you ever consider doing a full, written-through musical, or is that too much?
No, I love it. I love theater. I love the collaborative nature of it. I've stumbled into such a lovely community—all our producers, David, Daniel and all the actors. Every actor who's ever touched this material, I would work with again. And people are hungry for good music from the stage. People are so thrilled that there's rock and roll coming from the stage. I don't know that I would do a version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma … Well, maybe I could! Maybe I could do a musical like that. There's definitely something in theater that I'll keep poking at.
We’re in a weird time for music right now, with AI-generated stuff and people recording albums on laptops. Are you hopeful that Stereophonic might convince young musicians to try the old ways? Get old microphones and three-part harmonies into their heads?
Well, the play is about giving of yourself and trying to make something great, And I don't mind modern methods; I love modern creativity, and I love that there's a thousand flowers blooming. I do wish that people would get a million-dollar budget to make insane records, like the old days. The cocaine budget of this band in this play would just make so many beautiful records. [Laughs.]
But I love young people coming to see this play. I love anyone coming to see this play, but I love the college kids or the teenagers coming to see this play. I remember seeing shows and plays when I was 18, and they really shaped how I see the world. So, yeah, I do have dreams of getting in somebody's head.
STEREOPHONIC October 21-26, times vary, $35-$172. Reynolds Hall, thesmithcenter.com.
English (US) ·