Doug Shaw, Geologist, and Me

Brian Weitz has a fond memory of Doug Shaw whenever he settles into a venue’s green room. Shaw, a longtime fixture of New York underground music who remains little-known outside of it, is old friends with everyone in Animal Collective, and came along as the opener on a European tour behind Merriweather Post Pavilion, the album that turned their defiantly strange band into an unlikely symbol of indie’s big late-2000s brush with the mainstream. Someone on the Animal Collective crew got a bad cold on that tour, and Shaw insisted on adding lemons, ginger, and a sharp knife to their rider. At the next stop, he spent his pre-show warmup time preparing tea for everyone in the touring party. “That was 15 years ago, and to this day, we still walk in and I don’t think anybody’s taken it off the rider,” Weitz says. “There’s still a piece of raw ginger sitting in our dressing room, and I think of Doug every time I see it.”

I was interviewing Weitz—better known to Animal Collective fans as Geologist, the band’s headlamped electronic noisemaker—about A Shaw Deal, his new-ish collaborative album with Shaw, and I had to interrupt him when he told this story. My band toured with Shaw in 2022, a monthlong trip around the continental U.S. with six of us in one van. It was our first big tour after COVID, and it turned my relationship with Doug—I might as well drop the pretense of last-names-only journalistic objectivity at this point—from something like casual acquaintance into something like family. Somewhere in the rural midwest, we stopped for food, fuel, and a smoke break at one of dozens of identical Quik Cheks and Circle Ks, feeling worn down and running late for the next show. Doug disappeared, as he’s liable to do from time to time, especially when you’re running late. He eventually returned with six shots of ginger, procured from what must have been the only raw juice shop in a 150-mile radius, and insisted we all take them before getting back on the road. He would have prepared the brew himself, he explained, but this was the best he could do in a pinch.

Doug’s habit of ginger-pushing reflects a sweetly paternal streak that might not be immediately evident upon meeting him. Other aspects announce themselves more quickly. There is Doug the life of the party, always ready with a joke and a posh caricature of his own London-born accent in which to deliver it. And Doug the adventurer, seemingly untethered from life’s daily obligations, who cajoled my bandmates and I into spending a day off in Big Sur rather than at whatever practical roadside stop we would have otherwise made, then convinced the management at a scenic hotel to give us a deeply discounted room because we were touring musicians. We spent much of the night all crammed into a hot tub clearly intended as a romantic dip for two.