Chino Moreno was waking up with coffee the morning after the second date of the Deftones’ U.S. summer tour when Las Vegas Magazine’s Matt Kelemen caught up with him by phone. The band had just returned from touring the European festival circuit and started adding material from latest album Gore to their two-hours sets. The Deftones are also mining their song catalog to provide unexpected surprises, as fans attending the Aug. 30 show at the Joint inside the Hard Rock will soon find out.
I believe I am catching you between shows in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, correct?
Yes sir, I just got to Baltimore this morning.
How does it feel to be off your European festival set and on your U.S. headliner set?
Good, man. Obviously it’s good to be back home. Last night was the first show of the tour, so it went pretty well. We probably played one of the longest sets we’ve played. It clocked in at two hours long. We usually, on our headlining set, play an hour and a half, tops, but we were just going for it last night. We added a lot of new songs, a lot of deep cuts we haven’t played in a while. It was pretty interesting.
I saw the set list. You threw everything into that.
Yeah, it’s good. It’s typical for us to get songs where we want them before playing them live, getting into them and playing them over and over again. They sound pretty good, man, so it’s fun. I feel like they fit pretty well with the old stuff.
Did you have down time to rehearse the songs after Europe?
No (laughs). No, not really. We actually all live in separate cities. A couple of us live in Sacramento still. Sergio live in New York, Stephen lives in Los Angeles and I live in Oregon, so we don’t really get a chance to … I mean, aside from working on our own and just playing along to the records at home we don’t get a chance to rehearse much while on tour, which is kind of a good thing kind of a bad thing. It’s really good when you have a break to have a break, but what we do is we’ve been going to Nashville a few days before the tours start and rehearsing there. We did that again this time and it worked out pretty well.
So it wasn’t like you were working on the new material at sound checks.
No, we always say we’re going to and never do. It’s kind of like the way … even when we say we’re going to work on writing songs and we’re going to rehearse stuff, we usually don’t. We get to sound check, which is usually about a half hour long, and we usually just make sure the sound and everything is correct. I don’t think we really have the patience to go through stuff and really start working it out. And when were home everyone’s usually in that mode, so the best thing for all of us is to leave home, meet somewhere neutral and just sort of lock ourselves in a room and bash it out, you know? It seems to work.
What were the reactions like? This was the first time you’d played “Acid Hologram” and the title cut from Gore live. Did they already know the material?
It seemed like it. As a fan of music I’d see these bands that I like, and usually you go and they have a new record out, even as you may or may not like the new music … sometimes it can get overbearing when bands play too much new music. I guess we keep that in mind in a way, but at the same time there was this kind of reaction from people like, “Why aren’t you guys playing more new music?” So far we’ve only played a couple of tracks off Gore, so just the fact that we really dug into it because people were asking for it, and it seems to be going really well.
You guys have really varied up your sets this tour. According to a fan who posted your July 31 set in Buffalo, that was the first time “Kimdracula” and “Beauty School” were played live since 2011.
Sometimes we get into these things where we play these songs we’ve been playing for years, and we feel we play them pretty well and we get comfortable with that. Especially when we have to play shorter shows like we did at festivals and stuff this year, we’re just trying to cram in what we know we’ve played well. We kind of got stuck in doing that, and I think it was important for us to step out of the box and look at everything in retrospect: “OK, what haven’t we played in a while?” Once we started adding these songs it was like, “Wow, why didn’t we do this a long time ago? These are fun songs to play.” So actually our idea is to keep on doing that, and hopefully by the end of this run, in another month or so, hopefully we’ll have some more stuff, some of these other songs we worked on in Nashville as well that we haven’t debuted yet. Just change it up and keep it fresh for everybody and ourselves.
I listened to the first four songs in your current set. It was pretty easy to imagine the momentum and energy levels the audience was feeling, and following “Swerve City” with Acid Hologram” is a nice segue.
It does feel pretty good. That’s the way I did it when I wrote the set. I just opened up my iTunes and pulled up all of our records, and just started putting them in a playlist order and then listened to them that way. I went ,“Wow, these sound good. They sound good in this order. Let’s rehearse them this way.” And we did. It worked out.
Gore sounds like it was made by a band with youthful energy. Did it feel like that during the recording or when you heard the finished product? Was it the result of renewed energy?
That’s hard for me to say. I think I have a warped perspective on who we are and how we do what we do. It’s always a challenge, I will say that. As much fun as we do have hanging out together and writing music together after all these years, it’s still definitely challenging. We kind of don’t know what we’re doing anymore, and that’s sort of the fun of it, I guess in a way. We don’t have this big idea of what we’re trying to create and how we’re going to do it. If every time it’s a little different, I really think it adds to the excitement of making records still. Obviously in our youth when we were making records it was sort of that same mentality where we weren’t sure what type of music we were making or where we fit in music. That’s always been fun about that approach: not knowing what we’re doing, what we’re creating. We kind of carry that through when we’re making records now. We’ve tried a couple of times with previous records to sit down sort of talk about what direction we’re going or what we’re trying to create, and it always seems to … seems like when we do that we box ourselves in and then we start following guidelines and then it kind of sucks the fun out of just like reacting. So nowadays we just decided to not do that, spend less time talking about it and just getting together and doing it.
The band has been pretty open about its influences, and one of the cool things is as the music progressed you could kind of hear them flavor the music without figuring out exactly where they come from. When I heard “Caress” from your covers record I was like, “Drive Like Jehu, of course.”
Yeah, we have a collective base of things we’re into musically, but we also have a lot of things that we turn each other onto a lot. Last night I tried an experiment, which was kind of fun. Each night before we go on stage there’s like a half-hour changeover between the first band and ourselves, and I usually always make a mix of music that pretty much plays from the time they get offstage to the time we go onstage. And it usually changes daily. I just do it because it’s fun. I have the same music playing backstage that’s playing over the P.A., so I kind of know where we’re at and how much time we have before we go onstage and it kind of psychs me up. I feel like we’re on the same wavelength as the people out in the crowd listening to the same thing and preparing for the show. So last night I did this experiment where I had this jump drive and I passed it around to the band and told everybody just to put five songs on this jump drive. Then I got it 20 minutes before changeover and I made a mix of a couple of songs from each of us and then played that before the show. This way everybody got a chance to sort of … and then I’m going to change it pretty much every day or mix the music once a week, but it’s kind of cool. I don’t know if people realize it, but the music they are listening to is basically us putting music into a hat, then making a mix out of it and playing it. It’s very random, from song to song, but it’s funny it kind of shows out personality in a way. Our band’s personality.
You’re inviting them into where your musical heads are at.
Yes, definitely.