Ben Harper: ‘All Roads Led Back to the Innocent Criminals’
On his final day of rehearsals in Los Angeles, Ben Harper has come prepared to celebrate. He enters the big room where he’s reconvened his band the Innocent Criminals and pulls out a tall bottle of Johnnie Walker. It’s been three weeks of work for the band, relearning nearly 60 songs from their shared history, and their first concerts in over seven years are only days away: four sold-out nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco.
“It’s been in the works, or at least in my consciousness for a while now,” Harper says of reuniting the Innocent Criminals, who were involved in most of his projects before going on hiatus in 2008. “Enough time had passed to where all roads led back to the Innocent Criminals.”
The whiskey will have to wait, as the band once more dives into two decades of material, encompassing rock, soul, reggae and Harper’s distinctive haunted lap-slide blues. In between songs, band members will discuss set lists and Harper will be on his laptop shopping for a new carpet to use onstage. Later on, he’ll take a few minutes to work on his skateboard kickflips on the concrete floor.
“Some bands waste a lot of time in rehearsal rooms. These guys like to get to work,” says keyboardist Jason Yates. “I prefer it that way.”
“You get back on a bike and you remember how to ride?” says percussionist Leon Mobley with a laugh. “We’re riding.”
Even before these weeks of rehearsals, Harper gathered Yates, Mobley, bassist Juan Nelson, guitarist Michael Ward and drummer Oliver Charles at the Village recording studios across town to begin work on a new album. Harper says it was the best way to start again, creating new songs before looking back. Their last studio album together was 2007’s Lifeline, recorded in Paris.
“I wanted to start the reformation of the band by moving forward with new material,” Harper explains, bearded in a T-shirt and wide-brimmed hat. “There’s something about the urgency and enthusiasm of making a new record that somehow tee-d up rehearsing the older material.”
Ward, the band’s newest member who joined in 2004, says the album’s direction is still evolving. “We’ve already recorded some pretty meaty rock songs, some heart-wrenching ballads and a reggae thing, so the potential direction of the album is still there to veer here and there.”
Harper is an artist who likes to plan ahead, and in recent years he’s checked off some longtime dream projects: among them a Grammy-winning blues record with Charlie Musselwhite, a tender folk record with his mother, and the stripped down rock ‘n’ blues albums recorded with his other band, the Relentless7.