The new deal Percy Hill come to Portland After All BY SAM PFEIFLE

For a band that was once poised to be the next Phish, Percy Hill sure don’t play out a whole lot anymore. Here they are, releasing their first studio album in six years, and the closest they were planning on coming to Portland, where they’d once frequently haunted joints like the Stonecoast, was the Rochester Opera House. But the adoring public can be a bitch, right? They’ve had such good feedback on After All, following a grand launch at Boston’s Paradise and an all-ages gig in Rochester, that they’ve decided to add a few dates, just to keep the natives happy.

Percy Hill will hit the Big Easy on April 22, and now have plans to venture as far south as Hartford for an all-ages gig in the great state of Connecticut. They better watch out, or they’ll soon find themselves with a schedule to match the one they created for themselves in the late ’90s, which saw them venture out to the West Coast and back three times and do 42 states in ’97 and ’98 alone.

"We decided to stop the full-time touring thing," says singer/guitarist Joe Farrell, sitting beside singer/drummer Aaron Katz. "The road is not necessarily for us." But, wait a second, "the road" not for a jam band?

I can almost feel the pair wince. They kind of look at me. Am I that kind of asshole? "We don’t subscribe to any sort of category," says Katz, maybe a bit wearily. "We make music, we write songs, we play shows."

I backtrack. Hey, jam band isn’t a slur. The Grateful Dead were the most successful band of all time, if you ask me. Phish? I’m not ashamed to admit that I probably listened to them 90 percent of the time for all of 1994, after I hit Burlington. Widespread Panic, Strangefolk (also former Burlingtonians — I partied in their Isham Street basement a couple of times (I think)), Particle, Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, the Greyboy All-Stars, the Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule — nothing wrong with any of those bands. I think all of them are generally associated with musical creativity, improvisation, loyal fanbases, and killer live shows. What’s wrong with any of that?

"Yeah, but there’s all that stuff that people associate with it," laments Katz. "Like patchouli."

And, seriously, none of those bands seem to take to the studio the way Percy Hill have with After All. "We gel so well in the studio," says Katz. "We get excited being in there together." For most jam bands, the studio seems like a chore; something to tear them away from their natural habitat. Farrell notes that "when we got off the road, it was really an attempt to keep the whole thing going." Like a family, he says, Percy Hill can sometimes only stand so much of each other. "We took time away to keep it fresh," he says. "But it was not necessarily a conscious decision."

Katz loves the studio so much he’s started his own production company, Waterway Productions, with Andrew Gallagher, who engineered and mixed After All, a project that took a full year to realize. That’s a long time, but Farrell says it never got stale. "For me, it feels like doing a painting," he says, "where the song continues to take on new life as you add colors and textures, and so it grows and grows. We had played some of the songs a lot already live, but for me it’s like the song isn’t really born until we take it into the studio."

Then, when they take it to the stage, you never know what’s going to happen when Katz and Farrell team up with keys-player and vocalist Nathan Wilson (also a main songwriter, with Katz) and bassist John Leccese. "The song is the springboard," says Katz. "We don’t ever go into any musical situation with any idea of what should go down. It’s really just how the song feels in that moment."

But Farrell backtracks from that a little: "There’s always the desire to be able to deliver it in a way that’s comparable to the record," he says. "If people don’t recognize stuff from the album they can be discouraged, maybe."

If Percy Hill can replicate the tight grooves, Steely Dan harmonies, and vintage sounds from After All at the Big Easy next Friday, it’s unlikely anyone will leave discouraged.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com

Percy Hill play the Big Easy, in Portland, on Friday, April 22. Call (207) 871-8817. Check out future dates at www.percyhill.com