San Diego Union Tribune
Hovercraft puts its music before personalities
by George Varga

Beth Liebling ran, not walked, after she graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in journalism nine years ago.

"I went to graduation, but they never mailed me my diploma, and I didn't care. What I was going to do with my life had nothing to do with them," said Liebling, whose love of writing and photography was outweighed only by her passion for intense, envelope-pushing music.

She promptly moved to Seattle to be with her singer-songwriter boyfriend, who had left San Diego to join a promising young rock band. But her time here proved invaluable to Liebling, now 31, happily married and the bassist in the experimental-rock group Hovercraft.

In addition to hosting a music show on KCR, SDSU's student-run radio station, she worked as a concert production staff member at the Open Air Theatre and Rio's, a now-defunct nightclub in Point Loma. She also co-founded Sub-40 Productions, which staged goth-rock and industrial dance shows upstairs at Winter's, another defunct club located near SDSU.

"I booked some good punk shows in Rio's, and I worked at the OAT and helped book shows at (SDSU's) Montezuma Hall. I learned a lot. There's a lot of work most people don't know about that goes into putting on a show."

Liebling's hands-on knowledge of the concert business has helped her greatly as a member of Hovercraft, the cutting-edge trio she co-founded in 1993 with guitarist Campbell2000. (To keep the focus on their music, band members use stage names.)

The band, which now includes drummer dash11, is on tour to promote its latest Mute Records album, "Experiment Below." Hovercraft performs here Friday night at the Casbah with grunge godfathers the Melvins.

The album, like Hovercraft's live shows, offers a heady aural kaleidoscope that focuses on shifting textures, throbbing rhythms, heady blasts of dissonance, and gradual and sudden dynamic shifts that paint specific and abstract images, often with bone-rattling intensity.

Accordingly, the all-instrumental trio performs on a darkened stage, as stark film clips from old educational movies and newsreels play behind them. The emphasis is on the music, and the moods it creates, rather than the musicians.

"A lot of it is trying to remove the audience from looking at who's playing, and getting more into a cerebral place that's more intuitive. We try to create a waking dream state, which is the way I like to listen to music," Liebling said.

"People have said that, once we start playing, they forget where they are. That's what were trying to achieve -- creating an experience, more than a separation between the band and the audience. We just try to go in and not think about rules or structures, although there are points within the films that we try to hook up with, musically."

Liebling, who uses the stage name Sadie7, cites such progressive-jazz icons as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as key inspirations, along with surrealism and dadaism. She is especially impressed by the way Coleman and Coltrane created their own musical language, and by the highly intuitive interplay that distinguished the two saxophone legends' bands.

"We discovered Ornette's music after Hovercraft got started, and I understood his approach as soon as I heard it," she said, citing Coleman's revolutionary harmolodic approach, which treats melody, harmony and rhythm as equals and requires each musician to be responsible for performing all three simultaneously.

"Ornette has a great sense of spontaneity, and taking an idea that occurs at the moment and being able to express it. There's so much value to that. It's an important part of just being human, and to be able to express those things and have an avenue for that. It's undervalued in our society."

Liebling has shied away from interviews, both because she wants Hovercraft's music to speak for itself, and to avoid having the band be overshadowed by questions about her husband, Pearl Jam singer (and early Hovercraft drummer) Eddie Vedder. "I think it's an advantage to be married to an artist," she acknowledged. "A lot of people I know who are in relationships and tour with bands have a constant struggle, because the other person in the relationship -- who doesn't tour -- doesn't understand it.

"Having someone there, with an artistic understanding, who you can bounce ideas off, is great. We've toured and witnessed many (things) that could've been big problems. People who are not participating on the creative side have a lot of romantic ideas and don't realize all the work required. That's part of the magic -- (audiences) just seeing the art and not knowing what went into it."