| |  | 7 Questions With Ben Harper
 | Ben Harper
and the Innocent Criminals |
With four studio records to his credit, Ben Harper just released his first concert album, Live From Mars, a document of Harper's last two years of touring and performing with his backing band, the Innocent Criminals.
Harper and the Innocent Criminals typically spend more than nine months a year on the road, and the road is calling them out once again — this time for the launch of a North American tour on April 20, followed by summer stints in Europe and Japan.
Shortly before the release of Live From Mars, Harper talked to David Basham about how he and longtime accomplice JP Plunier went about assembling the live set, as well as his plans for a well-deserved vacation from the road and the studio.
MTV: What were some of the concert albums that influenced you or served as touchstones while you were working on Live From Mars?
Ben Harper: Bill Withers' Live at Carnegie Hall, Babylon by Bus from Bob Marley & the Wailers, and At Fillmore East by the Allman Brothers. Those are a few of the concert albums that are just as important to me as any studio record. Recently, someone made a good comparison between Live From Mars and Neil Young's Live Rust, although we flipped the order of the acoustic and electric sides on ours.
MTV: How hard was it to whittle hundreds of hours of tape down to the 25 tracks that made it onto the finished double album?
Harper: It wasn't too tough to decide what were the good performances, but once you got it down to the best two or three versions of one song, then it became a real challenge. In the end, we went for best overall feel in choosing each of the tracks.
In some instances, we'd have an incredible vocal take — some of which were my proudest moments — but the rest of it, like my guitar playing and the band, we just weren't together. Sometimes we'd have this incredible bass solo or there'd be the most incredible tom sound from the drums, but we wouldn't end up using it.
We definitely wrestled with that, but we also went the other way and left off tracks that were too clean. They'd have clean vocals, guitars and drums, but they were just too stiff. If it's too clean, then you may as well be doing another studio record.
MTV: With its mixture of different songs from different shows over the last two years, Live From Mars seems more like a live anthology than a true document of a Ben Harper concert. Did you consider releasing a record culled from one single performance?
Harper: We could have recorded a whole show and made that the live album, but that puts a lot of pressure on you and the band. It would have been too much to roll into some town and go, "OK, this is it. We've got the mobile truck outside, everything's patched in and we're going to make a live record today."
There are a couple of reasons why we didn't go that way. First, there are already a lot of Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals bootlegs out there. We didn't want to make another bootleg. We wanted to make something that's a live statement and goes beyond that. Also, I don't play that many acoustic numbers a night, so I wouldn't have been able to have that separate acoustic album as part of the set.
MTV: You usually only do a few acoustic songs as part of the encore, so why did you want to explore that aspect of your shows across a full disc?
Harper: We wanted to focus more attention on the quieter songs, that's for sure. With the last couple of records, and particularly Burn to Shine, we sort of pulled away from the acoustic side of the band. We wanted to go back and make that statement and let everybody know that that is still an important part of what we do — before we put too much distance between now and then.
MTV: On the live "The Woman in You," you deliver a tour de force vocal performance, alternating between a whispery falsetto on the verses and a blistering chorus that you practically scream. How careful do you have to be with your voice during those busy months on the road?
Harper: A lot of the partying and carrying on — along with the drinking and smoking — a lot of that has had to go during the last few years. I've had to put all my focus and attention and energy into singing and playing and making the shows stronger and stronger.
I know that's sort of breaking the rock and roll code toward partying and life on the road, but f--- that. That sh-- was getting tired anyway. I want to be doing what I'm doing — as well as I'm doing it now — in 20 years. Smoking, drinking and carrying on all the time just won't get you there.
MTV: How did the band come up with the medley of "Faded" into the cover of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" that ends disc one of Live From Mars?
Harper: We were in rehearsals and jamming on "Faded" one time, and I noticed that both songs were in the same key. I just started kidding around with "Whole Lotta Love" and threw in that whole "ba-ba ba-ba bam ba-bam ba-bam" guitar lick. [Bassist] Juan [Nelson] and [drummer] Dean [Butterworth] launched right into it, which caught me a little off guard. The next day at sound check, we kidded around a little bit deeper with it. Then all of a sudden we're playing it as part of the regular set list.
But let me tell you something, man. That song is a motherf---er. It's no joke. That song is serious business, and I consider it that. Of course it's fun and it's music, but [Led Zeppelin singer] Robert Plant didn't have to play that guitar line while he was singing. [Guitarist Jimmy] Page's riff on that song is drastic. Every time I play that song, it truly challenges my abilities.
MTV: What other projects have you been working on during the recent downtime, and what are your plans after the next round of touring?
Harper: I played on two tracks for Rahzel's new solo record that's coming out — I think it's called Superhuman — and that was a blast. That was one of the best recording experiences I've ever had. I also played on a couple of songs for [former Black Crowes guitarist] Marc Ford's solo record that should be out soon. There's some amazing songwriting on that record as well. It just blew me away.
As for me and the Innocent Criminals, we're going to push hard and tour behind Live From Mars through the end of July, and then we're going to pull back for a second. With four [studio] records since 1994, we've been hitting it hard and we've never had more than two months off in that time. So, it's time.
Even when the band gets a few weeks off, I don't. That's the time I'm called upon to do photo shoots and press interviews, or I'm on the phone, taking care of legal and label business. My time off has always been sort of fragmented. This is going to the first real break I've gotten since '94, and I'm going to take it.
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