Adam Gardner

I read that you had a green guitar built?

Oh! It's amazing! It's so good. I have it right here—I don't keep it far from me. This company First Act out of Boston said, 'Listen, we're building these guitars, and we'd love to build you a custom one.' They built a few for Adam Levine [of Maroon 5] that were gorgeous. They said the sky was the limit, so I said, 'I'm going to try to build the greenest guitar ever built.' So we did and not only is it the greenest guitar ever built, but it kicks ass! It totally rocks. The woods are all FSC-certified, sustainably-harvested wood, the finish is a water-base, no-VOC finish. The metal components—like the pickups and the tuning pegs—are reclaimed from older guitars. We did a carbon calculation and made it carbon neutral for 100 years. Actually, there are two guitars, and one is, yes, an emerald-green finish and that's beautiful and the other one has a natural finish. A lot of times they use mother-of-pearl or abalone as inlays which is beautiful, but abalone is getting overfished, so we used wood scraps for the inlays and it looks gorgeous.

Your wife was already an environmentalist, but what brought on your awareness?

We met in college, and she's always been into the environment—she actually got her graduate degree in environmental education while I was running around touring in my band! So just from being around her and living together and living our lives as sustainably as possible, I just felt the difference from what was happening at home to what suddenly changed when I was out on the road and seeing all the waste and seeing all the garbage left at the end of the night after a show. All my environmental information and inspiration comes from Lauren; it was just basically her influencing me and me going, 'Yeah, this is just common sense.' You don't even have to have any sort of higher purpose other than this is just common sense, it's silly to be wasteful

Do you let bands get involved with Reverb even if you don't like their music?

[Laughs.] I look at bands completely differently. Any band that comes to us, clearly wants to make a difference, and they came to us, so we're here to help any band that wants to do that.

And mass consciousness is catching up now—is there any worry that there might be a green backlash if it's seen as too trendy?

I wonder. I think if it's done right, then we can be okay. It's made a blip on people radar screens. When we first started out it was like, 'What? What's biodiesel? What do you mean, renewable energy? What's that?' so obviously people are way more aware. A lot of what we do is face-to-face outreach at the shows—at our Eco-Village—and that level of conversation has elevated tremendously. I think what Reverb's responsibility is, is to make sure this awareness keeps going and isn't just this trend that comes and goes. So, sure, is there a possibility of people getting tired of the message? Yeah, if the messages get tiring and aren't new and aren't exciting and fresh and fun. I think everything that we do happens under the umbrella that this has to be a positive, fun, inherently interesting message. It can't just be a preachy, doomsday message, like 'You better do this, otherwise we're all screwed!' It has to be like, hey, your cell phone's running low? Charge it up at this solar-powered station right here or hey, did you know the tour got here on biodiesel, do you know exactly what that is? Making it fun, making it interesting is critical to making sure that people don't get tired of the message or even worse, bring on some sort of backlash.

Explain how you actually work with the bands....

There's basically two prongs of things that we do: One is greening the tour itself, so making sure the tour has as minimal an impact on the environment as possible; the smallest footprint as possible. That can be everything from coordinating biodiesel suppliers to come and fuel up, for example, Kelly Clarkson's touring fleet of buses, trucks and actually having oil tankers come out, but it's biodiesel tankers, and fueling up the vehicles, to helping bands source eco-friendly merchandise or even coming out with, not just organic cotton T-shirts, but different merchandise items that they wouldn't normally sell, like reusable water bottles that can help reduce plastic if people stop buying those individual plastic water bottles. Making sure that those reusable bottles are being used backstage and looking at what bands are asking for from catering and making sure that it's local and organic, that the utensils are either reusable or biodegradable and making sure that recycling happens. We have staff out on the road to make that happen. We'll have somebody that travels as part of the tour. So for Jack Johnson, we have two people that have been on his world tour helping with the green stuff. He was already doing so much, we're just there to help make it happen more easily. The other side of what we do is the fan outreach and education in the front of house—all the things that you do see when you come to the show. We set up this tent Eco-Village that has local, national non-profit green technologies, and sometimes green businesses that are good examples of how you can do well by doing good. So what we do overall is: Biodiesel, eco-friendly merchandise, waste-reduction backstage, just generally looking at energy and making it as efficient as possible and actually calculating the carbon footprint of the tour and strategizing ways of making that as small as possible, and whatever's left over we actually make carbon neutral through supporting the construction of renewable energy products like wind farms. This year, we're going to try to reduce the emissions upfront as much as possible, so we're doing an online carpooling service, www.pickuppal.com, for the Dave Matthews Band. Fans can sign up online, there's a dropdown menu of what show they're going to, where they're coming from and they'll connect riders and drivers at the shows. And we'll do incentives where we'll pick a car that wins prizes from every show. We'll be able to calculate how much carbon is saved by doing that. It's going to be really great.

Do you think this will become more the norm with bands?

I do. That's the good news. A great example is a trucking company called Upstaging. When we started this, we had to fight tooth and nail with the bus and truck companies to have them understand that biodiesel isn't going to hurt their vehicles. Then, cut to last year and this year where the trucking and busing companies are coming to us saying, 'Hey, all of our artists are asking for biodiesel, we're ready to use it, but we don't how to locate it and you have this database, can you help us?' Some bands are taking it upon themselves, too. and saying, 'Okay, we can do this. We can figure this out.' And that's great. In a lot of ways, Lauren and I always joke that our end goal—our mission—is truly to put ourselves out of business [laughs]. At the end of the day, we're hoping that biodiesel is so prevalent. I actually had the honor of testifying to Congress about biodiesel. It was definitely the most nervous I've been. But basically I said to them, 'Please put us out of business.' Anybody who wants it should be able to pull into any truck stop and get it. It should just be at the gas stations. It shouldn't be something that takes a lot of work and time to find. Unfortunately, that's where things are at right now. There are a lot of suppliers and we're forming a network with various local suppliers around the country. I definitely feel that it’s growing and that's good. It takes time. They need to know that there is a demand for it. And, of course, there are lots of political things in the way as well. There just needs to be some legislation there. There are levels of how sustainable biodiesel is itself too, just like anything. Not all biodiesel is good, so you have to find what we call the 'righteous stuff' [laughs]. Biofuels have gotten some criticism and you have to look at all of it. The issue is that ideally biodiesel won't be made from food crops; it can be made from plant waste and wasted vegetable oil. There's a biodiesel plant here in Portland and one in New York City, there's a number of them where they make biodiesel from the wasted vegetable oil—they collect fryolater grease from restaurants and turn it into biodiesel. If anybody's interested in learning more about biodiesel, they should go to a company we're affiliated with, which is the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance: http://www.sustainablebiodieselalliance.com/.

How are you green at home?

It's pretty easy where we live in Portland because we can walk to work; I rode my bike to work today. We live in a condo building and we were able to get the condo association to agree to get composting happening. So every unit composts—they have their own little personal compost and then we have a compost bin out back. Tomorrow is mulch day and we'll spread our compost on the flowerbeds. Sot it was neat that we were able to engage our condo building—they were totally into it. I think the biggest thing that people don't think about in their personal lives, that makes a huge difference, is food—and people love their food. Lauren's a vegetarian, straight up. I try to eat as low on the food chain as possible. I'm not strictly a vegetarian. If I do eat meat, I only eat if it's local and organic and grass-fed, etc., but I think that's a really important thing to look at from an individual basis. Look at what you're eating and where it comes from. Even if you're eating organic, if it's being shipped from Argentina, it's bathed in [shipping] oil. The average meal travels 1500 miles to your plate—that's way too many. You don't have to go to fancy food stores to get local and organic food—go to farmers' markets, join a community supported agriculture (CSA) at www.localharvest.org/csa/.

What's your eco-sin—something that maybe isn't the greenest thing, but you can't do without?

I know what mine is: I like to shower. A lot. I use the shower kind of the way that somebody uses a cup of coffee—I don't feel like I've woken up until I've had my shower. I probably take longer and more frequent showers than I could… I still use a low-flow showerhead but… [laughs].

There's always that fine line of not feeling bad—you do what you can.

That's an important message. We worked with John Mayer last summer and we're working with him again this summer, and we're actually helping brand this program of his that he's calling 'Another Kind of Green' (AKOG), and that's exactly his point: 'Look, I drive a Porsche, I'm going to continue to driving a Porsche, but I'm going to run my buses on biodiesel, I'm going to eat local and do as much as I can." His message is, everybody pick a few of those things that you can do—you don't have to sacrifice your entire lifestyle to do it—but pick some things that are doable and take it from there. I think that's a totally valid perspective on the spectrum of the environmental movement.

Did you and your wife start Reverb together?

It was definitely her idea. I got more involved as things developed, but yeah, we co-founded it technically, but when it comes down to it, she thought of the whole thing—she thought of the name, the concept and said, 'Do you think this is going to work?' and I said, 'Totally, it's going to work.' I play in a band called Guster and I've been lamenting our impact on the road and had been talking to many other bands that felt similarly so when Lauren brought up the idea, I thought, that's going to be perfect, I know a bunch of bands I could call right now that would be so psyched to be involved. That was probably 2003, and one of the first bands I called was Barenaked Ladies, because I knew that they would want to do this and I knew that [lead singer] Steven Page, in particular, was into the environment and sat on the board of the World Wildlife Fund. They were doing a tour with Alanis Morissette in the summer of 2004 and we just brought the concept to them and they thought it would be great. So that was our first tour—the Barenaked Ladies and Alanis Morissette. We started there and it just blew up, and now we've greened over 50 major tours, 750 concert events and reached millions of people—I think we're up to 5 million people now, face-to-face through the Eco-Village at shows. This summer we're working with Jack Johnson, John Mayer, the Dave Matthews Band, Maroon 5, Counting Crows and Jason Mraz. So it's gone from one little tour that summer in 2004, to eight tours the next year and now it's gotten completely nuts.