Its cup runneth over

The members of Tea Leaf Green have been called road warriors, and rightfully so. The jam band, which formed in the late 1990s, has developed a strong fan base from its seemingly nonstop tours around the country.

Formed in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tea Leaf Green, who will perform at the 9:30 Club tomorrow, has been compared to The Grateful Dead and gained popularity for its songwriting and fusion of classic and modern sounds. 

However, it was not easy for the band to achieve its current success. In an interview with The Diamondback, keyboardist Trevor Garrod said, "It's been a slow journey. It was never anything overnight."

The four-piece band came together on the campus of San Francisco State University in 1996 and initially played at college parties. After their college days, the band logged many miles on the road, performing at every venue possible.

"Rather than get jobs, we graduated and hit the road," Garrod said. "We've trolled the American highways and gone to all the nightclubs and bars you could imagine."

With its emphasis on live concerts, Tea Leaf Green gained a following by giving about 130 performances each year.

The band also promoted itself online. Before Facebook and MySpace served as effective publicity tools for many bands, Tea Leaf Green was able to take advantage of the technology available during its early days.

"We started around the time of the dot-com boom in San Francisco," Garrod said. "Early on, we had a strong presence on the Internet even before social networking sites."

Life on the road can be difficult, but the members of Tea Leaf Green are willing to devote much of their time to traveling just for the reward of performing in front of their loyal audiences, which often consist of a core group of fans who follow and record each of the band's performances.

"The boring part is traveling in a van for six hours every day,"  Garrod said. "But once I get on the stage, that's where it pays off. Of course, I'm sometimes tired, but that's one of the things I have to deal with. If you cut out all the other shit that goes along with touring and just do the shows, it would be perfect. But the shows are the best part. If the shows get boring, you might as well quit."

To add variety to its live performances, Tea Leaf Green changes its set lists from venue to venue and improvises heavily. In addition, it has developed an alter ego band known as Coffee Bean Brown.

The additional moniker came about as a crafty solution to an on-tour issue: Once, when the band was booked for a venue that didn't allow performances at other venues within a certain distance, it created the name Coffee Bean Brown to play at a bar in the area.

Initially a strategy to overcome restrictions, the pseudonym has become associated with a different kind of show. When the band is introduced as Coffee Bean Brown at a concert, fans expect a calmer and less elaborate performance.

"It's a signal to the audience that we'll be playing more low-key music," Garrod explained. "It takes us off the hook of having to provide an explosion. We're just going to try to play some music."

This different flavor of music is showcased on Tea Green Leaf's latest live album, Coffee Bean Brown Comes Alive, released in June and recorded in 2007. However, the band has not released a studio album since 2008's Raise Up the Tent.

"We just recorded a new record," Garrod said. "It's a record of old songs, but we've never recorded them. They're kind of our favorite songs that we haven't gotten around to recording. It was a record that we needed to make."

Tea Leaf Green is looking forward to crafting a studio album of brand new material.

"We're also working on a record of new songs that we're testing out on the road right now," Garrod said. "Hopefully that will be the new record. It took us a while to get back into the creative mode, but we're always trying to find different ways to construct new songs."

Tea Leaf Green will perform at the 9:30 Club tomorrow. Doors open at 8 p.m. and tickets are $17.

sthaper@umdbk.com