Talking Animal Style with ALO’s Lebo

If you’ve ever attended an ALO show — and there have been many dating back to their days in the late 90s as UCSB students playing countless parties over the years, as well as countless parties all over the world in the years since — you know what an infectiously fun vibe this group has. That animal spirit (the official band name is Animal Liberation Orchestra, so named because music liberates the inner animal) burns bright in guitarist/vocalist Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, who co-founded the band with Zach Gill and Steve Adams when they were in junior high. 

Drummer Ezra Lipp joined in the late 2010’s, and they’ll all be joining us on July 24, at the Lobero Theatre, where (rather amazingly) they’ve been part of many other shows over the years but have never headlined one — until now. They share the bill with Donavon Frankenreiter on Wednesday night.

I caught up with Lebo from his home in the Bay Area last week.

You are living a lot of young kids’ dream lives — form a band with your friends in junior high and continue making music with them and making a living throughout your adult life. What’s it really like?  I feel super fortunate for that aspect, but it’s interesting because I don’t really think about that that much. … With ALO especially, we’ve been doing this together since we were 12 years old, three of the four of us … it’s so cool having done that with Zach and Steve. Especially because they’re the first people I played any music with. 

What’s it really like?  There’re all the awesome aspects of it that I love, and then there is the side of it, that it’s a lot of work too, but I don’t know, I like to work. Work’s fun. It’s stressful sometimes, but, without a little stress, you probably wouldn’t do it … you gotta have some motivating factors pushing you in the right direction. It’s definitely late nights and long hours some days and weird travel days and all that kind of stuff, but it suits me. 

All three of the original band members went to UCSB together?  Yes. Basically, the three of us, we started in seventh grade, kind of dabbling. And by eighth grade, we were doing some junior high cafeteria gigs, and we kept going all through high school. … We were writing original music and … we knew we wanted to stay together. 

UCSB was the one college you all got into.  We didn’t even go check it out. We were just like, we’re gonna go there. … We also knew at that time, honestly, there was a lot of legend around the Isla Vista parties and people who would play. So that was pretty appealing to us. Which is funny because I think for a lot of people that was appealing because of the party culture … for us, it was more like what goes along with that is people love having live bands. 

I have many memories of Zach and I jumping on our bikes on Thursday and Friday afternoons. We would ride around I.V. and if we saw a keg being loaded into a house, we would go right up and say, “Hey, looks like you’re having a party, you want a band?” 

You and Steve both majored in ethnomusicology.  Yes, and the aside is this thing in the jazz world they refer to as the “University of the Bandstand.” That’s a school a professional musician has to go to one way or the other. … it means you’ve got to get up and gig in front of people. Because of that whole scene that was going on in Isla Vista, we just got to gig all the time, many days a week, we would just get to play for people and kind of learn how to do a show and perform and learn how to play together — all that kind of stuff that you just can’t learn any other way but by being thrown into the fire. So it was a really kind of a neat time there. I feel like for us it was a good convergence of things.

In addition to ALO, you collaborate with a lot of other people. Do those collaborations relate to what you do with the band?  They relate a lot. … ALO is my main project, it’s such a core of what I do … we make our records, and we do our tours, and then there’s a bunch of other time in there. And I have come to really love playing with other people too, in different roles. I have actually thought about that a bunch. I kind of break it down into a few sort of musical roles for someone who does what I do. I know other musicians where they like to do that one role. But I found that for me, I really like to have a balance of the things. 

One is the collaborative band project, which is what ALO is, where, essentially, we all have a say in the decisions. We all write, we all do arrangement decisions, make decisions about how we’re going to tour, all that kind of stuff, very collaborative. And I love that. 

There’s also the role of being a band leader, which I do a lot through, I call it Lebo and Friends. I have sort of rotated lineups where I get different musicians together. In that case, I’m the musical director of the band. I put the whole thing together, organizing music, making sure everyone has what they need. I’m open to everyone’s ideas, of course, but I’m steering the ship and making this all happen and kind of running the show. That’s a role I really love too. 

Then there’s another role of just being a sideman, where you show up, it’s someone else’s gig, and they bring you in, in my case, to just play great guitar and sing some songs and I don’t have any real decisions to make. I really love that too.

Between those three roles, I just really like all three. I know a lot of musicians who like one of those three roles. … But for me, I find they’re all really different roles. And they really scratch different itches … I find that if it gets out of balance for me personally, if I’m doing one or two of them too much and not getting to the other, I sort of pine for them.

That sideman role can be really fun too, because I end up doing a lot of gigs where I can play with bigger artists, and kind of get into their worlds.

That includes the Grateful Dead world, playing with Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann.

I’ve learned a lot from those gigs. And the lessons, my favorite one was something Phil said backstage one night. He loves big concepts, coaching music that way. He said — I’ll preface it by saying I’ve come to believe it’s not just this music, to me, it’s all music — but he said, “with this music, we don’t try to put anything into it. We just try to let it pull something out of us.” … I love it. I approach all music that way now.

See ALO and Donavon Frankenreiter at the Lobero on July 24, lobero.org.