Bela:  Lobe was an art rock band that I joined when Courtney approached me years ago, almost ten years ago. I worked at a music store. He said, “Here try this stuff out, let’s play in this band and see what happens.” I played electric violin, wah-wah pedal, and a bunch of effects. Courtney played electric guitar, some accordion and some saxophone.

Courtney:  Mostly guitar in that band. Bela played some wild electric violin. He had his effects box. He’d get crazy stuff. It was cool.

Bela:  Yeah, it was fun. Sometimes we talk about doing a small project like that again.

MLP:  Like a Lobe reunion tour?

Bela:  Maybe not a reunion tour.

Courtney:  Wild electric music.

MLP:  Is there any of that music available?

Bela:  Some if it’s available. Not all of it.

Courtney:  There’s none officially available.

Bela:  We split up before our first album could be released. It was hard but it was good for us because we moved on to 3 Leg. It was a different project and it opened us up.

Courtney:  I think one of the things Bela and I appreciate about 3 Leg is that, Lobe was exciting, but it’s nice to play in an acoustic music band. We like the instruments and you can do weird different sounds with your acoustic instrument, you know? It’s good to preserve your hearing as well.

Bela:  Not that we’re actually doing that right now.

MLP:  How did it morph into 3 Leg Torso?

Courtney:  There were a few tunes that we did that had a 3 Leg flavor. As Bela said, we split up and Bela and I started playing together. I played klezmer music for a while so I had some klezmer tunes that I learned with Bela. We started playing on the street. We met Gabe when we were in Lobe. He was in another band, Seven Dollar Suit, and we had done a double bill. He played bass in that band but he said, “I play cello and we should get together”. At that point his cello was in the shop so we didn’t pay attention. But many months later he left a message on my phone machine saying, “Let’s do this”, and he played cello and it sounded cool. He left a really cool phone message. So I said, “OK, let’s do that.” We took from this duo we were doing and brought him aboard. Pretty soon we had a set of material and we were out doing some gigs.

MLP:  That sounds pretty seamless.

Bela:  It was incredibly seamless.

MLP:  Tell me about Meester Records.

Bela:  Meester Records evolved out of... OK this is how it happened. This girl broke up with me. I was bummed out. I needed some stimulation. Courtney had always been trying to get me to go busk on the street and I was like, “I don’t want to do that. That doesn’t sound like fun to me.” I called him up one day and said, “Hey, Meester.” My family’s Hungarian, I speak fluid Hungarian. I was kind of mimicking my grandmother’s accent when I was calling him up. “Hey, Meester. Let’s go out and play on the street.” He said, “Oh, Okay.” I showed up wearing what we would think of as eastern European dude.

Courtney:  Immigrant clothes.

Bela:  We went out on the street, over to Hawthorne. We played in the line at the Baghdad. People went nuts. They thought it was crazy. We pretended like we were from--

Courtney:  Some foreign country.

Bela:  And we called each other Meester. “Hey, Meester. How you doing, Meester?” So we were making a lot of dough. People were shoving dollar bills down our pants, and inviting us into restaurants. So we started going out meestering. “Let’s go meestering tonight.” Let’s go make a couple bucks. That’s how we came up with the name Meester Records.

MLP:  Bela, you are first generation American?

Bela:  Yes, I am. My family came here right before I was born.

MLP:  What was it like growing up—

Bela:  With a funny name? It made me tough, man. You see these pink knuckles? Sometimes people say, “What kind of a name is that?” And I say, “It’s Hungarian.” So what was it like? It was easy. I didn’t have a terrible childhood growing up. My adult life has been a lot harder on me.

MLP:  Was it difficult trying to balance a Hungarian household with American society?

Bela:  Not really. I’m half German as well. My mother’s German and my dad’s Hungarian. I spoke German first, then Hungarian, then English. A lot of people didn’t know that I spoke Hungarian or German. I don’t have an accent, at least on a normal day.

MLP:  You come from a family of musicians, right?

Bela:  My father is a conductor. He was a touring concert violinist. He played in the Oregon Symphony for twenty-five years. My grandfather: leader of a Gypsy band in Hungary. It goes back. I think his father was a musician as well. A long line of violinists.

Courtney:  From my perspective, looking at Bela’s life in America, one of the things that is different to me is his dad moved over here, but so did his dad’s mother and her husband. So his grandparents moved over here.

Bela:  Back in the revolution

Courtney:  They’re all really tight. They live close together and help each other out. His dad’s brother lives here too. I guess the concept of the European tight family; I see that from the outside. It’s cool to go and hang out there and they’re all speaking Hungarian. I have no idea what they’re saying.

MLP:  What about you, Courtney. What is your musical upbringing?

Courtney:  I don’t have any parents that are great musicians. My dad was a corporate lawyer. He’s a really good singer but he didn’t pursue it or anything. But he liked singing and he liked music. Early on he brought home a guitar for me. I grew up largely in England and he was doing some business in Spain and he picked up a Spanish guitar and he brought it home. And like many, especially, young boys, I thought, "I’m gonna be a rock star. I’m gonna get some girls and it’s gonna be great from here on out." That was around twelve. And as time went by I noticed that despite my efforts, I hadn’t become a rock star and I hadn’t succeeded in getting thousands of girls. But I did establish that I really like music. I was never a guy that had interest in learning popular songs. I always liked to make up stuff and so from an early point, I don’t necessarily call it composing, but my bent was not learning a repertoire of tunes but rather making up things that I thought were cool.

MLP:  I noticed on the CD that you wrote a lot of the tunes

Courtney:  I wrote a lot of the tunes. Bela, I think, has two tunes on that CD. When the band first started I was somewhat young in playing the accordion and I was interested in writing new music for the accordion that would be like modern chamber music. I didn’t believe there was a repertoire that existed. So when we were a trio, I think that CD exists as more modern chamber music. This (new) CD is kind of different. That was sort of my composer bent. This is a place for me to get a group together and have an original voice and play music that is interesting and move forward the accordion.

MLP:  So it’s basically a vehicle for the accordion?

Courtney:  That is one of the goals right there.

MLP:  Did you get all the players to create that particular sound?

Courtney:  Bela has a distinctive sound, partly from his eastern European roots. I wrote a fair bit but I would say, “Bela, there needs to be something here,” and he’d make up stuff and we’d come to something that would work. One of Gabe’s particular talents is coming up with cool original parts. It worked well with, “Hey, we got this going on. What can you give us that will go well with it?”

MLP:  Bringing in new players for the Astor in Paris, was it your intention to create something different?

Bela:  Yes. If we succeeded, I’d be happy.

Courtney:  As a trio, there’s a lot of individual responsibility. One of our goals as a trio was to sound big and full. And we all were very busy at our instruments creating whatever that whole sound was. One of the things when we expanded was we wanted to share some of that responsibility with other players. We wanted to deal with guys who were going to play cool, groovin’ rhythm parts because that’s hard to pull off, just with our instruments.

MLP:  When I saw you on Station to Station, that drummer you have is amazing. He was really fun to watch.

Bela:  I love Gary; Gary is very solid; very easy to work with. He’s a veteran. He’s been doing it for years. He played with the Harry Partch Ensemble for I don’t know how long.

Courtney:  Twenty years

Bela:  Twenty Years?!

Courtney:  That’s what he told us yesterday.

Bela:  Oh, my god. I didn’t realize that. Amazing guy. We’re happy to have him on board.

Courtney:  Those were some of our goals when we expanded. And also over time we wrote new material and orchestrated new material. Our goal was to be bigger and have a different sort of fun. We wanted a vibe player because Bela had written that song Frog....Secret Agent and he had written vibes in the melody, which had a lot of character. That was one of the first reasons we got a vibes player. That’s been a really good color. Not just the vibes but also the xylophone, which is almost circusy, instantly almost a humorous instrument. And that’s also cool for a lot of things that we do.

MLP:  Tell me about the song Giant Stomp.

Courtney:  I work with a local troupe, Do Jump. They had a show and they needed some music. On our first CD that tune, Divertissements for Performing Bears, there are certain characteristics of that that I like. When I was going to write new music for Giant Stomp, the first motif, I sort of took influence from Divertissements for Performing Bears. Because Do Jump, the nature of their show is a lot of change and metamorphosis, the piece had to go through a lot of different things. The first thing was they had huge people walking around on stilts so Giant Stomp needed a circus energy. I perform it with a different band over at Do Jump. When I brought it into 3 Leg it got orchestrated a slightly different way and got lusher. And Mr. B added his hot, wicked violin solo.

MLP:  What is the writing process for you. Do you have complete ideas or do you work on them as a group.

Bela:  It can happen both ways. Either a complete idea or the start of an idea. Someone might say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea for that. Let me play it.” Giant stomp came fully prepared. It was entirely composed. He said, “Play your solo here,” and the rest of it was all written. Other tunes, like B & G’s--

Courtney:  B & G’s; that was a collective effort.

Bela:  Le Beau’s Hole was completely scored out.

Courtney:  We like everyone to be reading and writing music. It’s not like you need those skills to be a good musician but they sure help in the conveying of information. We did this thing a few weeks ago with this guy David Greenberger, with PICA. David Greenberger is this guy that does spoken word pieces. He gets his text from talking to people in retirement homes. He talked to a lot of people here locally. He’s based in New Jersey or New York, and he got a lot of text. We got together with him and over the course of six days came up with music that goes behind his things. We did a couple of performances and then recorded it. The thing we like in 3 Leg is the ability to work quickly and generate something new. We don’t get to do that all the time but that’s sort of a skill to have the band being able to do what it does well. It’s like, “Ok, here’s a project and we have six days to do a performance.” And that was a prime example of everyone pulling together and it coming together well.

Bela:  This CD (Astor in Paris) took us two years to record, that CD took us seventeen hours to record.

Courtney:  Seventeen hours in one session. That CD will come out next year.

MLP:  I heard you guys practice everyday. Is that true?

Bela:  We used to. Five days a week, man.

Courtney:  As a trio we did five three hour rehearsals a week. Now we do two three-hour rehearsals a week. You don’t want to do it all the time but it’s nice when something forces you and everyone can do it, because then something big happens.

MLP:  Was it difficult, working with each other everyday for three hours?

Bela:  Not really.

Courtney:  It was easy. Back then we were somewhat younger. Bela is now married. I’m seeing somebody. Life’s a little bit different right now. But back then we were--

Bela:  (mocking machismo) We were single and swingin’.

Courtney:  Yeah, we had more free time. To get the music to the level that we wanted it took a serious level of commitment and we all wanted to get it there. -mlp

www.3legtorso.com