Plastic oh no: A conversation with MANCHO

Chicago-based percussionist Marshall Greenhouse recently released Plastic Oh No (2020), a track-by-track reimagining of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band (1970), under his project MANCHO. We had a Zoom interview to find out why the original means so much now, how this rendition of eleven of Lennon’s most intimate recordings taps into their magic, and some more about Mr. Greenhouse.

Alright, nice to have you here. We’ll get started with the basic question: Who is MANCHO? Is it you alone or just the name of a project that you work on?

MANCHO is me alone in a variety of projects. I never had a stage name before, and I always just went by my own name, Marshall Greenhouse. I’m a percussionist; I’ve studied percussion since I was young and I’ve spent most of my life doing percussion, playing drums in bands, and, you know, a stage name would have been silly for being the drummer in a band.

I have another band called KAVA. KAVA’s a trio. We started more as a rock band in the vein of Queens of the Stone Age or the Mars Volta. More like that: a little bit heavier. And some slower stuff too, like the group Sleep. The three of us lived in Chicago. One person was like, “I’m moving to Colorado” and he moved to Colorado and the other person said, “Well if you’re moving to Colorado then I’m moving to California,” so the band split and we all lived in different places. 

Once that happened, I started getting a lot more into electronics because that’s how we would record together. So the band went from like a heavy trio, to more of an electronic group. Then, as I started getting better at that — that was, I think five years ago, or so — I started producing stuff on my own. I came up with the name “MANCHO” for my electronic production stuff.

So the first album I’ve ever released under the name MANCHO is this John Lennon cover album, but I’ve done some tracks and other stuff. I have a duo with my wife and it’s called Marshan Sounds, and when I perform with that group I do go by the name MANCHO because I’m more of the producer role in it: not an instrumentalist, more like a live producer.

Before we get too into the music, I do want to ask about some of your previous work. Something that caught my eye was the Chicago Afrobeat Project. I could definitely hear some of those influences on Plastic Oh No. I imagine that helped you make the music your own while not overblowing what is clearly a minimalist album.

Yeah exactly. I would agree completely. I think that as I’ve gotten older and more into electronic music, I find myself personally enjoying more minimalist music. I grew up a drummer and just wanted to play as fast and as loud as possible, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to appreciate silence and space a lot more, probably because I’ve spent so much time practicing to play fast. 

For the album I definitely went for a more minimalist approach. The Chicago Afrobeat Project is a group I started with a bunch of friends and the idea was to play Afrobeat music, which was from Fela Kuti and Tony Allen in Nigeria, and put more of a city—Chicago—approach to it. The group is still around. They’re still playing and I’m still friends with them, but I stopped playing with them a long time ago. I’ve always been interested in African music. I’ve always loved African music. African rhythms, the layering of different parts. The complexity of African music is in the layers. Rhythms can obviously get very complicated, but even with simple rhythms as a teacher, I can have four students play very simple rhythms and if they stick to them, and there are four happening at the same time, the overall sound is very complex.

So when I discovered Afrobeat music, I was like “Woah, this is African music,” but it’s played on drum set and electric guitars and has a funk and jazz influence, which is the stuff I grew up playing, so it really suited me well.

For this album, there’s no real denying that African music is still a huge influence in everything that I do.

How did you go about picking collaborators for this? How was the recording when you couldn’t meet up together? Was it just sending things over the computer?

Yeah, it was sending things over the computer. There were maybe two times when people just didn’t have stuff and came over to my house and I set up a microphone outside and just ran a wire, closed the door. Everything else was people just sending stuff in. The first track was my wife, who sings, and as I started thinking about it, I don’t want this to be our band doing an album. I want it to be a project I take on for myself, and I want different voices. 

The original goal was that I play every instrument and I’d have different people sing. I started thinking about different friends, mostly from college, music school, voice major friends of mine. But then also just different people who have sung in bands I’ve been in throughout the years. I got a list together of who I wanted to sing. I also posted on Facebook: “Does anyone want to contribute a song?” One friend I was in a band with a long time ago reached out via that, and that’s how the second song got started. 

I can play other instruments, but there’s definitely a ceiling to my ability, so there were points where I was like, “Well this song really needs to have a guitar solo,” and I’m not going to do that. I can strum a chord and play single notes, but I’m not going to do a solo. “God” has a tabla on it. I really wanted the tabla on it, so I have a friend that plays that, that just recorded it at home and emailed it back. 

“Hold On” has a nylon string guitar intro by a friend of mine from high school who always played nylon string but never did music in college, never tried to do it professionally, but just sits and loves to play by himself. But he’s super awesome! When I asked him to record it he had nothing, had never recorded anything, so he recorded that on his phone and sent it to me and I had to convert it to a different file. I did pay a really good engineer to mix it, and after mixing it sounds amazing. You would never know it was recorded with just a phone at someone’s house.

There’s so much in the philosophy of music: how it can connect you with the past. Did you feel a deeper connection with the “Ghost of John Lennon” in bringing this music to life again?

Yeah. It made me realize, too, how he made this album fifty years ago, but it’s so relevant today. John Lennon, how did he get to the level that he did? It’s because he didn’t just see things, like “this is how it is now.” He clearly had a bigger picture. I don’t feel like there’s an album more relevant to this last year, and he obviously had no idea that everyone would be, you know. It’s obviously interpretations; he didn’t write “Isolation” about being stuck at home because there’s a virus, but really every song could be reinterpreted for this last year. 

It did get me to connect with John Lennon again. I wasn’t really familiar with Yoko’s stuff, and it really did open me up to learning a lot more about her music career.

I want to ask you, getting into the John Lennon of it all: even though, as we’ve said, this album is incredibly applicable to everything that’s been happening, there are some songs that are incredibly introspective. There are songs that were incredibly personal to him and what he was going through that set a precedent for introspective songwriting. I wonder if that was difficult for the singers, and for you, to interpret songs like “Mother” and “My Mummy’s Dead” and these songs that might feel phony to somebody who doesn’t have that experience of losing their parents, doesn’t have that experience of loss and pain.  

Yeah, totally. “Mother,” I knew who I wanted to sing right away. You’ve gotta be able to belt. Again, my version is different than his, but you still needed someone who was able to scream and sound soulful. My friend, John Colleton, lives relatively close to you, near Berkeley somewhere. He also does music education. I definitely knew I wanted him to sing it. He too was obsessed with this album. We kind of got obsessed with this album together. He took the Beatles class with me in college, and our final project was performing on a rooftop of a building in school. That was super fun, and I have it on VHS. I need to find that VHS and digitize it.

I knew I wanted John to do it. We talked for two to three hours on the phone about this album, and what it meant, and how we were going to go about doing it. At the time I said I’m just going to end with “God,” and I’m not going to put “My Mummy’s Dead” on there. It’s a short song at the end, and that’s one I can’t say I relate to. John said “No, I definitely wanna do it. Just let me do it, let me take care of it.” He recorded it with one mic, him on guitar, while singing. When he sent it to me it was like a no-brainer, I was going to add it to the album. Since he sang the first song, having his voice on the last song really ties the whole thing together.

What’s funny about it is “God” is the one I found trickiest to do, in my opinion. I researched covers of these songs, and covers of “God” were hard to find. It’s just a really tricky one to try to do. My original idea for that was to not have one person’s voice, but everybody’s voice. Everyone to sing the song together and mix them all together, so what you heard you couldn’t tell if it was a younger voice, an older voice, a male or a female or anything. It would just have this godly sound. In my head it worked, but it was pretty much impossible to actually make it sound like God singing, so everyone traded lines and then I had an electric vocoder over it to “electrify” the voice a little bit. 

I had this idea that everyone was going to sing a line, or everyone sing the whole thing, and I’d pick lines out. John refused to do it. So the person that was okay singing “Mother” and “My Mummy’s Dead” was just not okay singing “God.” He refused to do that one. 

Before we get on to what you’re doing, it’s incredible the impact this album has had and yours is, I think, a very warm tribute to this record. 

One of my personal goals is to see if Yoko and Sean… what their opinions would be of it. I don’t ever need approval for things that I do, because I do them for myself, and I’ve put it out there, and I’m fine with it. But just knowing what they would think. It’d be nice to know. Unless, of course, they’d be like “How DARE you try to do this?”

I think they’re a little more easygoing. If you’ve heard Sean’s renditions of Beatles tracks.

That’s right. I would say his stuff too is a big influence on this album. 

I’ll end with: Do you want to tell us about anything you’re doing right now. Any projects. Any programs? 

The friend that pointed out that it was the fiftieth anniversary of Plastic Ono Band was like, “You know McCartney’s came out the same year?” So I was going to get them both out this year. Then it became a point where no way was I going to finish this album and do another one. Initially I thought after this one was done I’d go straight into the McCartney one, finish it, and put it out this year. Then I realized I needed a break from this super detail-oriented [work]. 

A friend saw me. Me and Wiebe will get together and play live minimalist, atmospheric music for yoga classes, something I really enjoy doing. She asked, “Will you record a sixty-minute song for a friend of mine for a birthday present.” So I recorded a sixty-minute thing that’s one track, non-stop, kind of supposed to follow the flow of a yoga class: start out super chill, end super chill, peaks in the middle. I really enjoyed it. Now I feel that, rather than these short songs that take weeks and tens of hours to put together a three-minute track, it’s a relief to do these long, minimalist, atmospheric pieces. I wanna do lo-fi, [the kind of music] that people sleep to.

I also have a band called KAVA I mentioned before. We have an album that was supposed to come out last year but was delayed a little bit. Last night I listened to all the tracks back from the person who mixed it. My work is done on that, it’s really just taking notes, and [thinking] “Mark, turn the drums up” or “get rid of this.” That album will be coming out soon.

Once my brain is chilled out and needs more detailed work, I’ll probably get to the McCartney one again. I’m really enjoying the super long, drawn-out stuff. 

I’m also a teacher. I love teaching. Teaching is something I never wanna give up, even if I made good money doing music, which I think is kind of nearly impossible. I think a lot of people teach so they can do their music, and that’s definitely how I got into it but I really do love it. At the beginning of the pandemic all of my students that I was seeing regularly, I was trying to come up with ways to still work with them. Instead of private or band classes I decided to set up a program. 

At the time it was called the Teen Music Conference. I had run a teen music conference before. There’s music conferences all the time and they’re always for adults. There’s never any that are specifically geared towards younger musicians. The name is going away because I don’t want to limit it to teens. I don’t want someone who’s 23 but new to the music industry to be turned off from it. So I think it’s just gonna be called “Livin’ Live.” It ran in the summer and I did two sessions in the fall. My friend from LA who’s a songwriter taught the songwriting class, and I did music production. A friend of mine who tour managed for the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala, she did a class on tour management and introducing people to different jobs in the music industry, and music business. Someone did a class on how to make a career in music and what are the different options from “we’re going to talk about licensing” to “we’re going to talk about working in a venue.” 

Online classes were available to anybody who wanted to sign up. I didn’t want to limit it to only people who could pay for fancy classes. It was all run by whatever people could donate. I had a suggested donation cost for the class, but I accepted anything. If you wanted to pay a dollar to take the class, you could pay a dollar. Some people paid twice as much. 

I do want to get that going again, but that was definitely a lot of work, and I found that it was really difficult to get a lot of people interested in going back online after they had been online all day for school. Summer was awesome. First session of fall dropped down a little bit. Second session of fall dropped down a little bit. Now I’m running some classes, not through the program, but still doing a couple of them, just with my current students so I could see them online. Once classes open up I want to get it going again because people have more practice taking classes online, and once they go to class in person they’ll be more interested to do this again. 

The idea, to summarize, is: prepare young musicians for a career in music by introducing them to people that are currently working in the business.

That is a noble venture, to be sure! Alright, thank you for being on!