Punkadelick visits Wichita this week for a series of distinct events.
On Wednesday, Sept. 3, the trio — Mike Dillon, Nick Haas and Nikki Glaspie — will perform at Somewhere Works at 7:30. On Thursday, Sept. 4, they will participate in a limited-ticket event involving listening to their latest album, “Run White Boy Run,” to be held at a private residence near downtown Wichita. Finally, on Friday, Sept. 5, there will be a two-set, all-ages free show at Norton’s.
Interested parties can visit the Punkadelick Runs Over Wichita 2025 Facebook group for ticket links and other information.
Dillon, who plays vibraphone in the ensemble, has performed in numerous outfits over the last several decades, amassing credits with Les Claypool’s Fancy Band, Brave Combo, Critters Buggin’ and Clutch, among many others.
Haas is known for his work with the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey while Glaspie is a member of Snarky Puppy and has also played with Beyonce.
Dillon recently spoke with KMUW about the latest Punkadelick recording, his musical history and his musical future.
The following interview has been edited for length and for clarity.
Tell me a little bit about this new record and what inspired this one. It seems that you like to move around and deal with different styles, compositional ideas.
We decided to home in on our love of cumbia. It’s something that all my bands for the past 35 years have played. Growing up in Texas, I heard a lot of cumbia, conjunto music, and being a Latin percussionist, playing congas and timbales, I grew up loving Tito Puente, Pancho Sanchez, the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria. I didn’t really ever take cumbia that seriously until I was playing a gig in the ’80s with Brave Combo. They were primarily a polka band, but they played all kinds of world beat music. They introduced me to cumbia music and through them I really got the groove of it.
With this record, I said, “I’ve never done a record where every song is based on a cumbia. Let’s see what happens.” So, it was a conceptual thing. We weren’t trying to be typical, play it exactly the way you’re supposed to play it. I think it’s important, no matter what you’re doing, to do your own take on the music.
Yeah, because otherwise it’s like repeating a previous conversation.
Exactly. I learned back in the ’80s that if you did a cover, you didn’t try to sound like the band who already recorded it. If you’re doing a Led Zeppelin song, don’t try to sound like Led Zeppelin. There’s only one Led Zeppelin. I think that’s important. Steve Berlin, who is a friend of mine, plays on this new album, and we were talking about that. The whole concept of how in the time that was pre-social media, pre-internet, you could be a band around L.A. in the early ’80s or late ’70s and you could fail. Then, on your third try, you could be the band X. You didn’t have to come out of the gate sounding perfect. You were able to experiment and find something cool by not being afraid to fail in public.
Today, with Instagram and everything, it’s important to sound good all the time, and one way to sound good all the time is to play a cover and play it as close to the record as possible and not take any chances in creating your own sound. When I started playing with Les Claypool 24 years ago, we did a Pink Floyd song, and it didn’t sound anything like Floyd. That’s what we did with cumbia.
It’s funny that you mention lack of perfection. I just saw this video of Jeff Beck, at some point in the ’80s, playing “Blue Wind,” kind of a staple song for him. He blew the last verse in the performance I saw, then brought the whole thing to kind of a trainwreck conclusion. A mess. It was amazing and real, and it would never happen today.
You better not let it happen! Everyone’s got a phone! You see all these great performances by Charlie Parker or Charles Mingus or Thelonius Monk where they were able to control things. But I’ve read those stories about the nights when Charlie Parker didn’t sound good. Maybe he didn’t have the right cocktail of things inside him, who knows? But you’ve got to take chances with the music. That’s what I really like about playing in Punkadelick [with keyboardist] Brian Haas. I can ask him to do something that I consider compositionally intrinsic to the song, but he’s going to take the song and do whatever he’s feeling in the moment and do what he’s hearing. To me, that’s great. That’s the spirit of music. At least the music I like to play.
What was it that first got you into percussion?
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to play drums. If we were at a Holiday Inn in 1970 and there was a drummer playing down in the corner, I was fascinated. By the time I was 10, I was playing drums. My parents were public school teachers, and they supported my interest in music by finding me good teachers. It’s never stopped except for two years when I focused on sports, eighth grade, ninth grade. By the end of ninth grade, I thought, “Yeah, time to get back into the band.” The cool thing about percussion is that it’s never ending. I take lessons still.
It seems to me that you’ve played in so many different kinds of configurations and there’s multiple influences involved, down to where somebody comes from. You have Texas and Louisiana in close proximity to each other, but the musical approaches can vary a whole lot.
Wherever you live you’re going to pick up different things. New Orleans is such a great place for music, as we all know. I’ve learned so much living there over the years. The musicians I get to play with, they teach me something. They can inspire me to play something cool every single time. I fell in love with tabla at the University of North Texas. There was a professor there who brought in steel pans and had tabla players play and different African drum ensembles. To me, as an 18- or 19-year-old kid straight out of suburbia, it was a tangible way to get in touch with something deep and connect not only on an intellectual level but a deep spiritual level and realize that I was part of a tradition of learning.
It’s hard not to start sounding like a cornball describing it, but music is a heavy thing. People go stand in giant stadiums to be coded by their favorite musicians’ sound waves for hours on end in 100 degree weather, just to feel the magic of sound. I think no matter where you are as a musician or an artist, I think at some point during the day you just get back to the wonder and love of what you experienced the first time you saw someone do something cool on the stage or someone on TV or the magic coming out of your parents’ car stereo. All of that is what happened to me.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? You can be in a room full of people, and the music starts and suddenly people start moving with it, people who might not otherwise dance are dancing, and there’s this sense of oneness in the room.
Some people say that the first drumming may have actually been inspired by women [in a village] going to get water and their children decided to dance and then a drummer started imitating the dance. The symbiotic relationship in all of this is very important. It’s ancient. I’m just glad I chose to be a musician. I’ll be 60 [in September], and I still feel like a kid. I just want to play music all day and keep getting better.
