When: 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Where: Zoo Amphitheatre, 2101 NE 50.
What made you want to be in a band?
Steve Schaben, guitar: I met a friend in the fifth grade who had a guitar; that kind sparked it for me.
Is he a band member?
Schaben: No, but Big G still plays around Oklahoma City.
So, why the name Green Lemon?
Schaben: Before the band relocated to Colorado, we were known as Grass. A lot of bands were named Grass or had Grass in their name. We fought over names until we agreed on Green Lemon.
How do you compare your style to your musical heroes?
Schaben: We all have different heroes. We have a lot of electronica in our music. It's mixed into every song with different aspects such as the reggae songs with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh. We also want the synth-oriented electronic sound. I am a big jazz fan, but it stays pretty far from my musical heroes. Wayne, the other guitarist, likes U2. You can hear the electronica in his playing.
Would you ever cut your songs for radio play?
Schaben: I don't think we would. If you were to cut "White Cat" to four minutes, it would be meaningless. The great thing about that song is that it goes through a series of modulations. That is what drives the song. It leads into the ending and makes it more significant.
Reggae is an underrated genre. Do you play it to bring more attention to it or is just a fun thing to write?
Schaben: Absolutely. We try to incorporate the electronica aspect into it. There are things about reggae that have been completely untapped, because it is an underplayed and underrated genre.
What's your craziest fan experience?
Schaben: One time when we were in Wilmington, in North Carolina, and our bus was kind of a renovated school bus. The radiator cracked, and we were sitting there looking at it because we didn't know what to do. A redneck in a pickup pulls up and says, "I think I can fix this radiator leak. Yeah, go get me some pepper." Just ground black pepper. For some reason, our bass player goes in and buys a container of pepper which he pours it into the radiator. Of course, it does nothing. And so they give him some money, and he says he'll come back and fix it tomorrow. We get picked up by our opening band, with all our equipment, to go down to the show and play the show.
We get back to the bus about 4 a.m. and the bus has been broken into: All of the money is missing, the entire safe is stolen. Of course, we don't hear from redneck the next day. He's not answering his phone. Probably gave us a fake phone number. Basically, we learned to lock the bus up pretty good.
What lessons have you learned on the road?
Schaben: Don't trust rednecks and crackheads. Everything that's happened, good or bad, it's all led to this kind of progression that has very much changed who I am, my outlook on just the world in general. I don't know that I'd take any of that back. Also, don't buy buses that are older than you are.
-- Chris Colberg
