AN AMERICAN BAND

In the van ride from the stadium to the dive bar, Cameron Winter, the 22-year-old singer of Geese, is being humble.

"It is very crazy to see just how many jobs are involved, how early they have to show up. There’s ticket takers. There’s people who work at the stands and sell the food in the venue. There’s security everywhere. There are people who set up the sound. There’s people who work the monitors. There’s people who do video stuff. There’s lighting... All these people involved, just so you can get on stage and do whatever it is you do. I think of the pressure that comes with being a band that has all this money around, because at the center of all of that stuff is the music. That’s a lot of creative pressure. So opening is a great way to do stadium shows because your job is very simple.”

The singer, who has the shaggily fit look of a lacrosse captain who deals a bit of ketamine on the side, says this from the front seat of the Econoline that the NYC rock band Geese (consisting of Winter, bassist Dominic DiGesu, drummer Max Bassin, guitarist Emily Green, and touring member/keytarist Sam Revaz) use to trail behind the throuple of tour buses that the headlining band (an extremely popular hard rock act called Greta Van Fleet) requires to keep the hoi polloi of Live Nation gainfully employed.

The members of Geese graduated high school in 2020, passed on attending college, and released their debut album a year later. Despite the similar name and similar virtuosic chops, they are not to be confused with the jam band Goose. The singer’s humility is endearing. It doesn’t really suit him. Nor does the band’s live show, which I’d just witnessed for the first time with the singer making self-deprecating comments between songs, songs where the rest of the band presented a picture of sweet restraint in direct inverse to the wildly free, practically debauched in its sumptuousness, noise that was coming from them. Geese are not an indie band, at least not spiritually, despite how much humility they give. In fact, Geese would probably be better off, career-wise, if Geese’s music rocked a bit less. If their frontman sang with a bit less bravado. If the keytar was kept on the rack. If their songs were a little bit more about trauma and a bit less about the age of Kali Yuga necessitating the giving up of that ass.

Twenty minutes after the band van was parked on one of the cascading back alleys that crisscross around the bar, I’m trying to convey this to Geese. I’m trying to explain to Geese that their second album, 2023’s 3D Country (a sprawling hootenanny of Jeff Lynne bliss, Kid A atmosphere, Black Crowes-esque swagger, and the kind of yowling self-indulgence that the Strokes could only approximate if they had the self-destructive mojo to let Casablancas fully off the leash), is easily the best rock album of the past 15 years. I’m trying to convey to Geese that they are a collectively heroic figure; part of a tradition that encompasses every New York proto-punk band that changed the world, every New York noise rock band that changed my world, and every New York hard rock band that went down in flames because trying and failing to pull off open shirts and cowboy hats is as proud an NYC tradition as almost dying in a CBGB bathroom. I’m trying to convey to Geese that Geese deserve the world, or at least better. Better than what? I’m not sure. They did, after all, just perform in front of 19,758 people. At least 758 of which were there to see them.

Regardless, I'm trying to convey to Geese that they, like, matter, man. Because the background music is thunderously loud, I’m close-talking like I’m trying to sell or buy something.

In all this, I might be weirding Geese the fuck out.

Partially this is because of the Adderall sweat pouring off of me. Partially because I’m literally twice the age of Geese’s oldest member. Partially because being in Pittsburgh, the most beautiful city in America, always makes me excitable. And partially because there’s something historically unnerving about an alt-industry apparatchik type leering into a musician’s personal space and spit-talking about how they and their bandmates are the chosen ones, burdened by all the ghosts of Chuck Berry and Martin Rev et al. with the responsibility of Saving Rock ’n’ Roll. Under those conditions, it’s hard to take a compliment.

The question of who will save rock ’n’ roll is not academic. We’re in the backroom of the notorious Pittsburgh punk/Polish bar Gooski’s. We’re at Gooski’s because the musicians in Geese have just played the PPG Paints Arena, the closest to Geese’s hometown that the band will play as part of their three-week run opening for Greta Van Fleet, a band whose own claim to being the Last Actual Rock Band is more hotly contested than Geese’s, if only because Greta Van Fleet are approximately a thousand times more popular. Greta Van Fleet are also a thousand times more reviled than their opening act, who, despite having put out the best rock album of the past 15 years, aren’t well-known enough to have that many detractors. In something akin to the cycle of life, the Greta Van Fleet online fan base has been paying tribute to Geese by doing their part to shrink that hate gap.

“geese are on right now and tbh i think they’re terrible, it might just be my opinion but i’ve seen a lot of people say they suck., just me?” asks Fit_Sherbert_2568.

From LLB73: “Honest to God, I did not understand ONE WORD that fell out of the singer’s mouth. Just STFU already lol.”

And Ring_Tha_Bell_97 says, “The lead singer reminds me of Jeffrey Dahmer, but less creative.”

Reading these critiques on Reddit (of which the above are a mere sampling), this reporter was dismayed. In my coastal elite bubble-itis, I thought that Greta Van Fleet’s fan base would embrace Geese’s (to my mind) accessible and groovy classicism. While not being abused to the level of, say, Prince opening for the Rolling Stones and, as would become clear later, winning over their fair share of “Gresites,” there was no getting around that what Greta Van Fleet fans want from an opener is another Greta Van Fleet. Or another hour of Jake Kiszka soloing.

Anyone hoping that Geese might respond to these slights with their own slander will be disappointed. If your average world leader spoke of their neighbors with the same level of diplomacy that the members of Geese speak of their tour with Greta Van Fleet, America’s arms manufacturers would go out of business because there would be no more war. Emily Green rationalizes some of the negative comments, calling Greta Van Fleet “pretty easy to get behind, and that’s not negative at all,” before adding, “To have something that’s very immediately recognizable as being what it is helps with crowd reaction.”

And then, as if taking responsibility for a fandom’s bad taste, the guitarist says, “With us, there’s a lot of things at once. A lot of bullshit too. I love all of it, but I think it throws a lot of people off. ”

Green isn’t wrong about Geese’s lovable bullshit. Even setting aside one’s threshold for (to me, goddamn wonderful) lyrics like “When the Ragnarök comes down and the sun and moon collide/We can make love in the end times,” Geese’s actual songs might try the patience of someone attending a Greta Van Fleet show, reasonably expecting an opening act with a similarly pre-chewed aesthetic. Geese’s music is digressive by design, with even their three-minute bangers containing side missions into gospel, postpunk, and enough fake-out fall-aparts to make even the most committed showgoer unsure when they’re supposed to clap. All these tangents are un-jammily intentional, with Winter describing the band’s songwriting process as “dictatorship by song." But unless one is familiar with the blueprint (or has as many albums by the Move as one has by Led Zeppelin), the overall effect is probably like expecting an episode of That ’70s Show and getting Too Many Cooks.

Later in the evening, despite having just escaped a stadium greenroom area positioned next to a line of urinals, and with the smell of YMCA swim lessons still hanging on all our clothes, Cameron Winter will offer up, in response to my admittedly not exactly well-intended prodding, what might be the only— outside of the always effective “How many albums have you sold, you prick?”—convincing defense of Greta Van Fleet I’ve heard.

“Greta Van Fleet does have a certain reputation. But I’ve met them and I've seen the people who work for them and how happy they are working for them. I've seen people erupt in cheers and start crying tears of joy at Josh Kiszka pointing at them and winking. And you could say that, like, ‘These are people who need to be reeducated,’ or whatever, but...” Winter says, not without some animation. “I think that to really, really, really take issue with any of that is to not see the big picture of, like, life.”

In this spirit, let me offer up some more praise of America’s critical whipping boys. Their fans, at least in Pittsburgh, absolutely brought it. And not just in fan interaction (which is to be expected), but in how their fans treated a Greta Van Fleet concert like a goddamn event. Like something special, with that air of happening being infectious. From our hotel window, my lady and I saw whole families leaving at 5:15 for a venue less than a block away, to line up early for a show whose doors were at six. And, like a TGIF-fed 100 gecs, th’ Fleet inspire young people to make an effort to not look like shit. Sometimes that translates into dark faerie approximations of homecoming royalty, sometimes it’s a “Save a beat, bang a drummer” shirt stretched over a beer belly, but it sure beats half the NYC yung hipster shows I attend, where the crowd might as well have just rolled out of their floor mattress. While the pageantry doesn’t quite make up for the actual music sounding like an AI rendition of Styx being piped out of a speaker at Walgreens, it’s not nothing.

And, again with Winter’s big picture in mind, it’s possible that expecting a fan base predicated on Led Zep reenactment would respond rapturously to Geese, just because there’s a few signifiers in common, shows a view of classic rock as narrow as what GVF are usually accused of embodying.

“When we were kids, Max and I went on a trip upstate on one long weekend from school, and we shared earbuds, and we listened to Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star and our little minds got blown. Like, we sat in silence for a car ride. We listened to it twice in a row. We fucking thought it was insane,” Winter says, reminding this reporter that, in terms of ’70s influence, the Hammer of the Gods isn’t the only game in town. “It was like those clips of color-blind people who put on those colored glasses.”

Even for the band itself, their current space truckin’ iteration is a left turn. Geese’s first album, Projector (the demos of which caused an old-fashioned circling of industry sharks), is a very fine album, but it’s one that any gifted Brooklyn band, young enough to not still be hungover from everything that came in the wake of Is This It, could have made. For anyone who lived through the aughts, it would have been reasonable to write Geese off as rich townies reenacting the preferred sounds of their class and lineage. In retrospect, Projector sounds better than that, both in comparison to the mediocrity of the Indie Sleeze Revival it predicted (but was never part of), and in how—with a suffusion of color and drone providing extraneous flair throughout and with tracks like “Fantasies/Survival” rising into double-time Robert Quine-esque guitar leads—the album hinted at what Geese might be capable of once they came into their own.

Which, on 3D Country, they do. So much so that the album seems to have somewhat baffled those who were delighted to have an age-appropriate Strokes/ Franz Ferdinand whose shows they could attend without fear of being serially brushed up against by 40+ hipsters looking to live out the plot of Juno.

Geese are a classic rock band. But less in the style of Greta Van Fleet and more in the expressionistic way of, say, Black Midi’s Geordie Creep and his post-everything take on Steely Dan, or the way a band like Geese BFFs Water From Your Eyes will take a Sting song and blow it to smithereens. Rather than attempting to re-create '70s stadium grunting, Geese work the long line of acts that were left-field at the time (like Gabor Szabo, Elis Regina, the aforementioned Rundgren). While Geese drummer Max Bassin’s “3D inspiration” Spotify playlist is 63/64th contemporary hip-hop (with no less than seven Playboi Carti tracks), that’s no counterargument. Being influenced by Ski Mask the Slump God freestyling over a Timbaland beat is just a degree removed from being influenced by Kraftwerk or Seida. At this juncture, saying your sound is influenced by Kid A or the production style of Metro Boomin is just a difference of signifyin’ ones and zeros.

Still, it’s the l/64th non-rap song of the playlist (the Pointer Sisters’ prog-funk masterpiece “Pinball Number Count”) that feels the most intuitively correct. Not because it’s a proto-math-rock work of genius and not because it was written for Sesame Street. But also, not not because of these details. As Winter says, beginning to really sound like a proper lead singer, “My dream, my pipe dream is—and this is almost every band’s pipe dream—is to bridge the gap, to take a concept that is difficult, not because it wants to be difficult but because life is difficult, and to communicate that in a way that’s not in this place that’s only accessible by living somewhere specific, right? Or being a specific kind of person.”

Earlier, still in the van, and perhaps preemptively tired of justifying 3D Country’s shift from post-punk to post-prog-C&W-psych, Winter says, “We did make the vast majority of the record when we were still teenagers. I guess we were making a conscious effort to, like, make music that did not sound like it was made by teenagers. We were really trying to be clever.”

Again with the self-depreciation, but this thankfully abates after some time at Gooski’s. When asked if any of the band’s personal lives come into play in the lyrics, Winter elides the topic by being funny (“Throughout high school, we were certainly celibate. Not necessarily by choice but because we were fucking sweaty. We were spending every weekend in a basement, trying to copy some stupid recording we all liked”), then by conceding life’s insistence (saying, “I guess everyone’s dating, or has dated, or has entered that world, and it’s inevitable that that comes into the music”), before finding his groove in a speech worthy of a frontperson of any era.

“But I write the lyrics and I...don’t...like...lyrics that tell very specific stories.” As Winter leans into this, punching out each word, he doesn’t literally lean in. He slouches, like he’s on a long, straight highway and he trusts the cruise control.

“I was listening to the Hot 100 recently and a lot of, like, vulnerable—quote, unquote—‘vulnerable’ lyrics are like that. They’re just like, ‘You were on the phone with me at 5 a.m. and I said...’ That stuff is like, they’re pouring their heart out. But I don’t think they’re fucking pouring anything out. They’re not saying anything. You can relate to someone who has had the same or a similar experience to you, sure. And maybe that’s what people want. But I fucking don’t get anything out of that.

“And I think that what some people see as misdirection, or a refusal to be vulnerable, is actually what I think is a necessity in making a good point about anything.... That’s why none of our personal lives come in vividly. Because I don’t think it matters.”

Winter says “I don’t” again, in a tone that can’t decide whether it’s apologetic or defiant (and settles on the latter).

On that matter, I'm siding with the man’s tone. The truism about “nice” or insufficiently damaged people rarely making good music is self-serving bullshit, foisted upon a bloodthirsty/sentimentalist public by musicians who want to cheat on their underage girlfriends and a music media that can’t imagine a business model not hopelessly intertwined with its subjects dying young and often (with the occasional redemption arc thrown in whenever one of Jann Wenner’s pals needs a new liver). But, happily conceding that Paul McCartney exists, it’s also true that it’s a rare frontperson worth their salt who, after a couple drinks, can’t conjure up some juicy, self-righteous broad strokes about the nature of art. Geese’s lyrics are intelligently oblique, so it’s nice to see that there’s some barely sublimated rage underneath. And it’s more than a little telling that Winter’s jeremiad is inspired by the Hot 100. This, taken in conjunction with their inspo playlist being all Future and no Big Thief, indicates that Geese’s ambition is such that they, consciously or not, consider the Olivia Rodrigos and Post Malones of the world to be their peers and/ or competition. If that’s delusional, well, I’ve snuck out of enough community-minded, nice-guy indie rock shows that you’ll have a hard time selling me on reasonableness as an inherent virtue.

It’s through their unreasonableness that I argue for Geese being a truly “classic” rock band. That term, as well, doesn’t need to imply any inherent virtue. But it does, to me, imply a certain grandiosity of spirit, but one that still scans as “rock ’n’ roll” (as opposed to being, you know, prog) by undercutting any pomposity with its own sense of the absurd. Whether it be Max Bassin throwing Brazilian psych polyrhythms up against country swing, Em Green treating her guitar like a silver mine, Dominic DiGesu’s almost unrelenting fluidity (when dude gets into Mick Karn, it’ll officially be over for all the other bassist hos), or Winter’s fearless vocal acrobatics (which he irritatingly downplays, as though cascading from M. Gira bellow to Thom Yorke keening in a single phrase was something to be ashamed of), Geese translate classic rock’s arguably dead language correctly; as high, pagan liturgy, with a fuck-ton of a-wop-bop-a-loo-bops around every corner. Maybe Geese’s way with words isn’t undead enough to persuade Greta Van Fleet fans to get past their preference for zombie rock, but, like Mr. Rundgren said about the Onionheads way back in 1972: “You want the obvious, you'll get the obvious.”

A few months after Pittsburgh, I’ll see Geese opening for another, more spiritually aligned to the band, stadium act. During a four-week run with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (where the Australian psych band promised three-hour sets), Geese are playing first at the Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. They used their allotted 45 minutes to maximum effect, blasting through their set with enough hometown-hero gusto that it almost transcended the “quieter than the headliner” rule that the industry has mandated for openers ever since the first classic rock star got their first bout of rock star ego. Further, whatever cynicism I might have felt about the band misspending their time opening for Greta Van Fleet is erased when I later talk to Emily Green on the phone, asking the guitarist to compare and contrast the two tours. After a bit of fishing for some shit talk (which Green declined to provide, admitting a slightly more shared kinship with King Gizzard but refusing to paint Greta Van Fleet as anything short of entirely pleasant), she tells me this:

“The first show of the Gizzard run, in D.C., I was gifted a gurse by a fan. You may be asking, what is a gurse?” (I was.) “Well. This girl, she hand-knitted this purse shaped like a goose, with a little cowboy hat stitched into it; like really, really delicate handiwork that must have taken a significant amount of time to do."

With a hint of triumph in her voice, Green says, “And she heard us for the first time at a Greta Van Fleet show.”

Encouraged by this, but unwilling to just roll over for the Geese guitarist’s magnanimity, I switched sides and pointed out that, with the exception of some druids in attendance, Greta Van Fleet’s audience was far better dressed than the crowd at Forest Hills. If Greta’s fans were decked out for prom, the Gizzard crowd at Forest Hills was decked out for the first day of summer school. In this, Green once again demurred, so I didn’t bother adding that I also much preferred PPG Paints Arena’s eau de chlorine to the waves of skunk permeating every corner of the King Gizzard show. I knew better than to try to get anyone in the band to admit what we all know to be true: Rock ’n’ roll won’t be saved until Geese are headlining their own arena tours, which they’re working on. 758 people, and one downy purse, at a time.