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Listen to the Continental Drifters in Real Audio at: http://www.continentaldrifters.com/listen.htm

STARPOLISH: Let's start with a question posted on StarPolish: "I'm wary of supergroups. They always amount to less than the sum of their parts and seldom last because of the clash of egos. How is it working within your group?"

ROBERT MACHÉ: Well, if we're a supergroup, show me the money [laughs]! The fact is that we've all been in this band longer than we've been in any of our other respective bands -- except maybe Susan, who was born into the Cowsills. There's much more longevity. There's an amazing spark, as far as the performances go. We don't do this unless we're absolutely convinced that we give up more than a hundred percent every single time we step onstage.

PETER HOLSAPPLE: I agree with Robert. A lot of the problems that bands have, supergroup or otherwise, we don't run into very much. The band was organized extremely casually, as a songwriter's collective of friends who really liked each other's songs. That's the heart of the matter for us. We still go for it from a song-by-song basis. There's not a lot of time for egotism or weirdness. We try not to let ourselves fall prey to a lot of the stupid stuff that would ordinarily happen. I understand [the StarPolish member's tendency to be weirded out by that, because I think of a group like Damn Yankees: Those guys are all incredibly talented, but still and all they're volatile personalities, and we're all more calm and sedate. We did our excesses years ago, and now we're doing it just because we love the music.

MACHÉ: It's hard to be a supergroup when you're still your own roadie [laughs].

STARPOLISH: Peter, are you still schlepping your own Hammond organ?

The two-and-a-half or three hours that we play onstage, that's not the work; the rest of it's the work

HOLSAPPLE: Actually, I remember talking with you about this when we were sitting around at an awards ceremony, when I was doing the Hootie thing. I use a Korg BX-3, which is one of the B-3 knockoffs. But I do have a lot of gear to carry. Everybody's got an amp. We can fit it all in the back of a fifteen-passenger van if we take two seats out.

STARPOLISH: So the life that you're living out on the road really isn't that different from the way it used to be years ago. You're still in a van, you're still moving your own gear.

HOLSAPPLE: Largely, yes. Robert has a way of putting it: The two-and-a-half or three hours that we play onstage, that's not the work; the rest of it's the work. So we make it so enjoyable that we can't wait to play.

STARPOLISH: You've all been in this business a long time. Did you think you'd still be hauling amps and playing in clubs when you started out twenty-odd years ago?

MACHÉ: I'm certainly not surprised by it. It's just what we do. We're musicians, we're songwriters -- it's what turns us on. It's much more of a passion than a marketing plan. We'll leave the marketing up to other people.

STARPOLISH: But to have lasted this long, has it been a question of just taking it day by day, or have you had to work with a long-range goal in mind of staying in the business long after others would have left?

MACHÉ: I'd say both elements are in it. You go out on tour, and it's a day-to-day thing. Every single day is a new club and a new audience. You wake up in a different town every day; it's like having a new life. But through many years of playing you associate yourself with all sorts of different people. There's always a possibility that someone could call you up and ask you to play on their album. So there are some conscious associations that we've made too. You do want to further yourself, but in our cases it's about associating with people that we're fans of, and widening our family of musicians. We'd love to play with somebody like Neil Young or Richard Thompson, or have them as guests of the band. We do seek out people of like mind.

STARPOLISH: How do you keep up the enthusiasm for this kind of a life after so many years?

HOLSAPPLE: A lot of that depends on your peripheral organizations -- the record company, the booking agency, management, and so on. But it's also true that something in us has changed. If at any point any of us thought about rock and roll as a big career move that was gonna make us superstars and earn us pots of money, that's all changed; now it's all about the love of the music. That's a lot healthier. It's less about the creature comforts and more about what really gets us off. We just love to play; we love playing with each other. That's something that's changed for the better -- having a band like the Drifters in our middle age is wonderful. I can't think of too many people who have a ten-year-old band and are as happy as we are. We depend upon each other in a lot of ways, emotionally and physically.

STARPOLISH: There's a weekend-warrior phenomenon, with guys in their fifties putting bands together decades after playing their last gigs, to try to revive the dream. But you never abandoned that dream.

Robert Maché Photo by: Mathew Arnold

HOLSAPPLE: I look at the people who signed my high school annual. They all said, "We'll see you at Madison Square Garden." Some of them actually did, when I was with R.E.M. or Hootie. But there was a point when I was maybe about 28, and a lot of the musicians I played with were saying, "I can't do this anymore. I've got to put childish things away." They sold their equipment and stopped playing -- and I kept doing it. I think that I've represented some kind of vicarious thrill for people to watch me continue to have some kind of visible and audible career. That's a very cool thing, too. I've never been to a high school reunion, but the next big one they have, I plan on prancing in there as the guy who never stopped playing rock music.

STARPOLISH: Does all of that come with a disadvantage? What have you given up in order to live as you do?

MACHÉ: Hell, yeah! You might look at us and say, "These people are nuts!" We say we're nuts half the time! Yes, there are monetary sacrifices and personal sacrifices. I go out on the road and I don't see my wife for weeks at a time; it's a drag.

HOLSAPPLE: We're a microcosm of that. Four of us in the band are parents. My marriage to Susan has ended, but we are parents of a daughter, and we used to take her out on the road with us. We do it less now, because she's eight years old and she wants to go and ride the horses at camp. So with the split amount of time with Miranda, we have to shake it down even further when we go out on the road. The other side of the coin is that she's been raised by these six people... it's like, "It takes a rock band to raise a child." She's had a rich and varied life because of the places she's gotten to go with us and the friendships that she has with Vicki and Mark and Robert and Russ. That's hard to put on a scale, whether it's good or bad. Susan might give you a different answer, but I think that the surplus of good vibe in this band is something that all of the people in our lives can feel. That "We Are All Drifters" song? That's us, and that's everybody. We like to feel that what we provide, in terms of a live experience or a multi-leveled record, is part of our job -- but we also get back from that. We get wonderful responses from people.

MACHÉ: We do have a wonderful new batch of very young kids who are loving this band.

HOLSAPPLE: Like that guy last night with the Social Distortion T-shirt?

MACHÉ: We also have a healthy amount of people who come to see our shows in order to live vicariously through these people who are doing what they'd love to be doing -- and can't, because of the lifestyle choices they've made. We provide them with an outlet where they can just enjoy themselves. It's like we're a small vacation for them. That's a very gratifying thing to be able to offer.

STARPOLISH: Is it hard to coordinate the worlds of parenting and traveling as musicians?

HOLSAPPLE: Not as much as you might think. Susan and I are very blessed in that we had a lovely marriage and an amicable parting, and we both are conscientious parents. Mark has got three sons, Russ has got a son. For those of us who have kids in school, we try to go out in the summer, because that way we're around for school, and that's an important time for your kids. We have a booking agency that books other bands that have kids. When Miranda was a little baby, we took her on the road. But as the years have passed, we've learned other ways of dealing with it. We try to not go out too much longer than two-and-a-half weeks at a time. I have a cell phone now, so I'm a local phone call away. She's got insurance from my job at Borders. She's a bright and loving kid, and she's having a good time at being a kid. Here's one thing: She might miss us for two-and-a-half weeks at a clip, but when we're in town, we're around a lot more than a lot of parents I can think of who have nine-to-five jobs; by the time they get home, they're too beat to do anything with their kids. We plan fun things, we get our kids together, we sit for each other. There's difficulty, yeah, but nothing is insurmountable. We're also blessed with having very patient and interested children. Somebody once said to me that it's good that Miranda gets to see her mother and dad working together in the band after their marriage is done, because it shows her that we have interests outside of her that we can pursue together. So it's all a learning experience for everyone; it's all new.

MACHÉ: I couldn't put it any better.

STARPOLISH: Robert, do you have kids too?

MACHÉ: I'm having a ball trying [laughs].

STARPOLISH: Peter, what do you do at Borders Books?

HOLSAPPLE: I'm selling books. I've been doing a kids' story time for almost three years on Friday nights. Hopefully I'm going into a supervisory capacity.

STARPOLISH: Do you book music talent?

Any new band would do itself a favor to make sure they're saying what they have to say in the most interesting way

HOLSAPPLE: Unfortunately, because we're the only Borders in the entire South, we have to deal with an events coordinator out of Houston, who is not terribly familiar with the way our store operates. We're kind of an island, and we're about four blocks down from the largest Barnes & Noble in terms of square footage in the whole chain. So we fight a tough battle, but we provide a lot of good stuff for people too. Now, there's a great example: listening stations that have popped up for Hear Music, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. When I was a kid, there was a booth where you would take whatever open copy they had of the new records, and you'd play it and decide whether you wanted to buy Sweet Baby James Now, I want to say we have 250 different titles on Listening Post, and that's marvelous. You can pick up a pair of headphones and get a taste of it.

STARPOLISH: Do you feel that issues of ego and other things that split up bands eventually disappear once a band reaches a certain number of years of being together?

MACHÉ: Sure. As far as longevity in a relationship, if it's based on a friendship, it'll hang around. We've been together for 10 years, and we're very good friends.

STARPOLISH: Neither of you was in the original lineup of Continental Drifters, but do you still run into people whose allegiance to the band dates back to those Tuesday nights at Raji's in L.A.?

HOLSAPPLE: Oh, yeah. My first gig with the Continental Drifters was as a fan. Carlo said, "You've got to come down and see this new band that we've got. It's great, all these songwriters, you'll love it." I went down and was blown away. Then they asked me to come and sub on guitar one night when their guitar player wasn't going to be there. I was like, "Okay, I can do that." Eventually their keyboard player decided to leave, and it seemed like the natural place to go. It felt so comfortable. I felt like I had been drawn into this emotional thing that was very cool. The other night, up in Seattle, we ran into somebody who had gone to the Tuesday night things, and they were shocked to find out we were still together!

STARPOLISH: The music industry has changed a lot since you broke into the business. If you were starting out as a band today, how different would your approach be to getting started?

HOLSAPPLE: First of all, musicians need to have a good sense of self-editing, and not put out music to be publicly [consumed] until it's something special. With the advent of new technologies, like MP3 and downloading and Napster and streaming radio, the ballpark has been opened up considerably. It still doesn't take the place of good songs. If you don't have good songs, you don't have a leg to stand on. A lot of people are so hot to trot about getting something out that they fail to take the time to look back and say, "Well, I could have done this better." So now that you can make your own record at home with Pro Tools and burn out however many copies you need, you still have to find the aesthetic reasons to make it say something, rather than feel like, "Shit, I'm gonna put something out, and I'll get 140,000 hits on the Internet." Any new band would do itself a favor to make sure they're saying what they have to say in the most interesting way.

STARPOLISH: Are bands that emerge from home studios less stage-savvy than bands might have been 10 or 15 years ago?

Peter Holsapple Photo by: Mathew Arnold

HOLSAPPLE: I suppose that's possible, but don't forget that I come from a long line of gearheads down in North Carolina, like Stamien, Mitch Easter, and Don Dixon. We grew up with four-tracks, and we'd try to jam as many tracks on there to make it sound as much like the Move or Nazz or the Beatles as we could. Still, the songwriting had to come. I wonder if there are fewer venues that are willing to take a chance on new bands? I know that a lot of venues have got their electronica nights and their trip-hop nights, so they'll just book Fridays and Saturdays for live bands. That's closed up a little bit.

MACHÉ: There's also going to be a generation of kids who really don't care about playing live. You can set up in your house with a video camera and put it right onto your website. You can reach millions of people at once without having to go through the doors of a club or put out anything at all. I'm wondering what will be going on pretty soon with live music.

STARPOLISH: You spoke earlier about the broad demographic of your band, and specifically its appeal to young listeners. Are you suggesting that there may in fact soon be fewer young listeners who care about hearing bands play live?

MACHÉ: Any kid who goes to see a live band is gonna have a great time. There's an electricity to live music that you will not find anywhere else. There's a complete immediacy, and a transference of energy, that's just beautiful. But there are kids who don't realize that this is a really important part of the experience.

STARPOLISH: Maybe they'll realize, after a while, that the connection that live gigs offer simply can't be reproduced through the Internet?

MACHÉ: It's a very social thing. A lot of fans are almost in clans now. We've started to see that same sort of thing. We have people who have come to see every show on a particular coast. With the advent of chat rooms and bulletin boards, they can immediately review it, tell all their friends about it, and say, "Come on down, we'll see you at the next show."

STARPOLISH: Lots of people are talking about the constriction of pop music playlists, but the success of your band suggests that there are other markets expanding to allow for a wider audience response to alternative acts as well.

Any kid who goes to see a live band is gonna have a great time. There's an electricity to live music that you will not find anywhere else

MACHÉ: Oh, absolutely. We just got a cable modem at my house, and we're going crazy with listening to streaming Internet radio stations. Instead of turning on one radio station in New Orleans now, I can listen to Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, I can listen to WFMU, I can listen to Meg Griffin's stuff. We piped in a search word for "Americana" the other day and came up with 181 radio stations. It's kind of like how in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when album-oriented FM radio first came about, it was the most exciting time. Looking at the playlists, there are so many amazing independents whose names I've seen, but I just can't afford to go out to the store and pay twenty dollars to take a chance on something. So to be able to hear it in my own room in great streaming quality, it's knockin' me out. I love it.

STARPOLISH: As an artist, though, aren't you concerned about earning appropriate royalties from downloads?

MACHÉ: Not at this point in time. There are reasonable legalities that have to be followed, but if there is a new format and new ways to get it out there, that's exciting to me.

HOLSAPPLE: Having been in a band that put out four very well-respected albums in the Eighties, and being in the position now where not one of those records has been in print for several years in the States, the idea that people could actually access dBs records through the Internet is great. I'd rather that people hear it. I've tried not to make is so that I have to depend wholly on music for my paycheck. It's as slight as insurance companies say it is -- they don't like to insure musicians, because we're gig-to-gig. But I'd rather see it almost like public-domain folk music, because people get to hear it. It also makes it so that people write the music for the love of it, for all the right reasons, and not because they think they can use the word "survivor" in the song and somebody will link it to the TV show and they'll sell a million copies.

STARPOLISH: What is your policy toward fans taping your concerts?

HOLSAPPLE: Use high-bias tape. Don't use 120s, because they don't' work very well. Look, we don't really have a problem with it. I don't think a lot of stuff is going on that makes it difficult to do this kind of thing. Our European label, Blue Rose, has got live stuff of ours on record for people to hear and download. I want to say that there's a very close parallel between the Drifters and New Orleans, in that both are well-kept secrets, and both only require looking into it a little bit to see the breadth and depth of it all. The idea of people being able to burn a CD from a live show, if they want to listen to it, that's the key right there. I work at a Borders store, and people still come in and buy stuff. They want to know. Sure, there's a lot of N'SYNC and a lot of Britney Spears out there, but at the same time there's a Drifters, and there's a Lucinda Williams, and there's an Elliot Smith, and there's Ryan Adams, and the Silos. … There's a raft of good music, and you just have to find it. You're not gonna get help from radio. You're certainly not gonna get help from the video channels -- those are all just advertisements. So it's easier to search it out. The field is a lot larger, and it's a wonderful thing.

For more information about the Drifters, tour dates and to purchase CDs, visit the band's website at http://www.continentaldrifters.com, or the Razor & Tie site at http://www.razorandtie.com.