It seemed like a good idea.
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Galactic was about to release a new album, From the Corner to the Block, and they had done a series of high profile events this year drawing attention to it. They played a sold out showcase date during South by Southwest, and they premiered much of the material at Bonnaroo. There was a lot of buzz surrounding the album, which featured the band and host of MCs including Juvenile, Lyrics Born, Gift of Gab, Ladybug Mecca from Digable Planets and Chali 2na from Jurassic 5. Rather than play another big event, Galactic decided a more intimate show at the Maple Leaf and a more sensible set length—by their standards, only an hour and a half—would be the way to celebrate the album’s release. They didn’t count on August or the overflow crowd.
“I’ve never seen my band sweat more ever on any other gig,” bassist Rob Mercurio says.
“I remember Stanton [Moore] is like, ‘I need ice!’ He sweat through the leather in his shoes,” guitarist Jeff Raines says.
“Stanton almost had heat stroke,” horn and harmonica player Ben Ellman continues, talking about Galactic’s drummer. “We had this vision of it being packed, sweaty, and hot and a memorable moment. You see Rebirth there on a Tuesday night and it’s hot and you’re blown away by this music you are listening too and it’s dark and you’re like, “Where the fuck am I?” That was the vision, but the heat overcame all of that.”
“At the end of that set, somebody was like, ‘Dude, are you going to play more?” Mercurio says. “I said, ‘Fuck no, are you kidding me?’”
The show included guest vocalists Boots Riley from the Coup and Mr. Lif, but when the band played instrumental version of material from the new album, it sounded like classic Galactic. On the album, the focus of “I Got It (What You Need?)” is on Lyrics Born’s street corner salesmanship, supported by Moore’s go-go beat. Live, the tense, nearly discordant keyboard intro by Rich Vogel sets the tone and the drums sound bigger, less like samples. Ellman’s harmonica has a whining, insistent that recalls the screech that defined Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause,” and Raines’ guitar is so thick with distortion that it’s almost metallic.
The Public Enemy echo could be accidental. Ellman’s earliest hip-hop memory is the Pharcyde and Mercurio’s is Run-DMC. Tellingly, Raines’ is the Beastie Boys’ rap-hard rock blend Licensed to Ill. “There is a huge side of our band that is really influenced by riff rock,” Ellman says. “Just in your face rock, Rage Against the Machine and Led Zeppelin.” At this year’s Jazz Fest, one of the most talked about moments was Galactic’s version of “The Immigrant Song.”
Galactic is thought of as a jam band, a funk band, and in its decade-plus existence, it has also been considered a soul-jazz band, and acid jazz band and who knows what else. Whatever Galactic is, it tours constantly—more than 200 dates a year—and the band has become very comfortable in its own skin. A devoted fan base, a defined style and a substantial musical history encase many bands in amber, trapping them in some version of What They Were. As From the Corner to the Block illustrates, those same things liberated Galactic.
In a sense, a hip-hop album could be seen as the next logical step for a band inspired by the Meters. The Meters’ funk found a second life when it became one of the central units of hip-hop’s DNA. The Meters were sampled by Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Ultramagnetic MCs and countless others. Galactic wasn’t trying to hearken back to hip-hop’s early days when DJs used two turntables to isolate and extend the breaks of drummers like Zigaboo Modeliste, but the band knew how important those beats are. Some grooves for the album were written over classic break beats while Stanton Moore was out of town. When he returned, he had to learn them. “He wrote them out and studied them,” Ellman says. “Then he would learn it and change it up.”
The album’s beats are a throwback to the Boogie Down Bronx, and at times, the band itself sounds sampled. On “Hustle Up,” there seem to be four distinct parts—bass, drums and wah-wah’ed guitar phrases under Boots Riley’s verse, then a second distorted, insistent guitar joins in the run-up to the chorus. There’s a short drum break, then the band picks up the second guitar’s rhythm in a fuzzy, driving riff under Riley’s exhortation: “Everybody on the floor / hustle up / muscle up, rustle up.” This segmented sound can be heard in a number of places on the album, but Mercurio says it wasn’t intentional.
“That style of sample-based hip-hop, in a way, was similar to the way we wrote the album because it was in pieces,” he says. “It wasn’t all of us in a room writing together. It was a work in progress and a mutating thing, trying different things out here and there. Maybe in that sense that’s why it (sounds like that), but it really wasn’t conscious.”
Riley became involved with the project after performing backed by Stanton Moore at a Future of Music Coalition benefit at Tipitina’s. The band approached him with an instrumental and the album’s central idea—stories and characters associated with corners—and Riley wrote to that. He then cut his vocal with album co-producer Count, best known for work with DJ Shadow, Radiohead, New Order and many remixes. “They tailored stuff around what I did,” Riley says. “They changed some sounds, added some keyboard parts and some guitar parts.”
In fact, the tracks Galactic sent the MCs were little more than sketches. “We didn’t want to go too far in the song writing and have it restricting to the person,” Mercurio says. “What we sent out was a really simple rhythm track with drums, bass, guitar or keyboard and if it had a change or something.” When the band got the track back and was satisfied with it—which wasn’t always the case right away—it solidified the track’s shape with additional parts. “That gave us one more chance for us to build around their vocals to make it fit into the song,” Mercurio says.
It’s tempting to liken the album to old school hip-hop, but most similarities are a function of the band itself. Yes, they chose MCs more interested in rhyme and wordplay than boasting about how hard they are, but as Riley says, “the elements that producers look for in hip-hop are the elements that funk producers used to look for—a driving beat, a drummer and bass player that stay in the pocket, and musicians that play parts.”
It’s also tempting to try to make some connection between the conditions in the Bronx that spawned hip-hop and New Orleans today. Both communities felt an extreme sense of abandonment, and neighborhood-related rivalries fueled violence, but that would be a reach. From the Corner to the Block doesn’t represent Galactic trying make a hip-hop album; it’s Galactic doing what it does and the MCs doing what they do. Besides, the band started the project in the months before Katrina. Moore was busy drumming with Corrosion of Conformity, so the band worked around his schedule that summer. “We recorded a lot of Stanton’s drums first, and we would write around stuff that Stanton had laid down,” Ellman says. “Chop it up and do whatever we needed to do to it, and have him come back and replay it as a performance. Our beds were based around anything we could get off Stanton before he left us and went on the road with somebody else.”
The writing method changed a bit after the storm. First, the band put recording on hold and scheduled a few gigs in the days after the hurricane, but, as Mercurio says, “Two minutes into the first show, I was like, ‘No way. Fuck that.’” The members briefly scattered and figured out what to do next. They had blocked out the time for recording and considered working in San Francisco when Raines found a studio in Snyderville, New York in the Poconos owned by a friend of his father. The owners of Red Rock Recording gave them access to the studio and a house to stay in while they needed it. “We were blessed by the generosity of so many people like so many other New Orleanians at the time,” Mercurio says. “It was a beautiful studio. Really isolated in an idyllic setting with all the woods.” With nothing else to do but work, they wrote the majority of the album’s grooves then and there.
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The decision to make a Galactic-meets-hip-hop album was a deliberate attempt to go against expectations. After separating with long-time guest vocalist Theryl “Houseman” DeClouet, an instrumental album would seem like the natural next step. “I think it’s what the world was expecting from us when we started on this project,” Raines says. “It’s still a record I’d personally like to make and probably find very gratifying. I think it’d be a cool record for us to do 10 straight-up, concise instrumentals. But how much interest it would have outside of our touring fan base? I couldn’t tell you. There was an interest in broadening our horizons.”
Ellman continues, “Since Theryl’s left, we’ve been on the road playing instrumentally for a long time. So maybe we were ready to work with vocalists again.” There is also no shortage of Galactic instrumental tapes in the world. “Tapers come to our shows and anybody that wants to hear instrumentally what we’re doing, it’s documented,” Mercurio says.
They also knew they didn’t want to use just one vocalist. “We didn’t want to record with one person and say this is our new singer because it wasn’t,” Mercurio says. “It would be odd to do an album with just one vocalist.”
From the Corner to the Block had a number of possible starting concepts. At one point, the album was going to be more narrative. It was still going to have MCs and would be produced by Lyrics Born, but their songs would come together to tell a story. “This guy overheard a piece of music, and he was looking for it and that brought him to different characters,” Ellman says. “The classic record digger character, and then the old school MC character, and all these different characters.” The logistics, however, became prohibitively challenging. “If everybody were in the same city, it would have been easier. If we could just call someone and say, ‘Come in right now, we got this for you.’ It was like trying to get the end of the story first, then the middle of the story, then have it somehow work out—it was near impossible.”
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Instead, Galactic went with the simpler concept of stories and characters associated with street corners, and the first choice for producer—Lyrics Born—connected the band to the first batch of MCs including Gift of Gab. The first recorded track, though, was with Media Darlings’ MC Know-One, who toured with Galactic along with Bionic Brown and DJ Quickie Mart in 2005. “The track, is going to end up on one of his records; it didn’t really work out on our record,” Ellman says. In addition to the Media Darlings crew, Galactic has also toured and performed with Lyrics Born, Jurassic 5 and the Roots.
Another concept they considered was the New Orleans Playboys, riffing on the Los Lobos side project with producer Mitchell Froom. The Latin Playboys albums presented a more contemporary, post-modern take on the music Los Lobos grew up with, and Galactic considered doing the same thing with New Orleans music. The one track with that concept that made the album is “Second and Dryades,” updating the Mardi Gras Indians traditional music courtesy of looped drums and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux. The track sounds like a DJ’s approach to Indian music, reproducing the rhythm—including a ringing cowbell—but modernizing the sound, cutting instruments in and out of the mix, some of which sound like a melody overheard on someone’s transistor radio. It’s one of the tracks that is harder to play live because it was so chopped up. Even Boudreaux’s vocal is treated as a sample.
Now that the album is done, the next challenge is taking it to the world. The MCs have committed themselves to be available for touring, so at least one or two will be a part of the show for the foreseeable future. With the exception of a few songs, almost everything can be satisfactorily performed live as an instrumental. The tempos speed up in those cases, and the intensity ratchets up. “When you’re live and you are an instrumental band, you have to do more to connect with the audience more than when you have vocals because that connects with them,” Rob Mercurio says. “You don’t have to blast their faces off.”
Bring up the band’s “jam band” reputation and the members are quick to point out that the label has more to do with the audience than the style of music these days, and that audience is looking for bands that take musical chances. “I think the definition of that audience is they’re a really open musical audience,” Jeff Raines says.
“I felt like people might not like the record, but people will always come to the show,” Ben Ellman says. “Even if the record got panned and people hated it and it got terrible reviews, and we went on the road, we’d still have people come to the clubs because people still know that what they’re going to get at the show.”
Mercurio continues, “There always will be a lot of predictable albums where you put it on and you’re like, ‘Okay, this is what I suspected.’ The ones that do shock you for better or for worse get talked about.” So far, reviews have been mixed, with critics generally loving the band, the title track with Juvenile and the Soul Rebels, the tracks with Lyrics Born and Mr. Lif, and contending that the rest of the album rises and falls with guests’ contributions.
None of which matters much to Galactic. Though the band has been defined by the road, its growth has come with a home studio to work in. They had one in the building attached to TwiRoPa Mills, but after TwiRoPa suffered structural damage during Katrina, Galactic had to find a new musical home. It now has warehouse space Uptown that Ellman refers to as its lab, where the instruments and recording equipment are set up and ready whenever anyone has a creative moment.
“Our goal is to make a lot of records now and work,” Ellman says. “People have kids; we’d rather stay home more and work on music in the studio than slug it out on the road all year around. Hopefully, that’s what we get to do more and more, just put out music. When we’re home that’s all we do—come in here and work on music.”
Before the interview, Ben Ellman is ecstatic. He just bought an iPhone. He complains about his old phone and how beat up it is, but he finally concedes, “I’m a gadget guy,” and he bought it because he wanted it. At the risk of making a lot out of a little thing, there’s something telling in that. Galactic has embraced modern technology. It was one foot in the traditional relationship between a player and his/her instrument, but since 2003’s Ruckus, its other foot is in a more tech-savvy funk. And while many New Orleans funk bands have remained rooted in the post-Meters 1970s, adhering to the eternal funk verities, Galactic is a part of the modern world. Dr. Dre, Pharrell Williams, Manny Fresh, Kanye West and countless other hip-hop producers are to funk today what figures like George Clinton once were.
Galactic has established a distinctive musical personality partially through the natural development that takes place over a decade, but also by taking musical chances in a town with a strong, sentimental attachment to its past. The chances weren’t huge—Galactic didn’t dabble in acoustic folk or something farther afield—but in a city that has largely looked the other way and tried to ignore the success of No Limit, Cash Money, Juvenile, Lil’ Wayne and bounce, embracing hip-hop is a risk.
“I think we’re cocky that way,” Jeff Raines says.
Published October 2007, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 20, No. 10.
