Rondo Brothers

A conversation with Jim Greer

(August 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

The Rondo Brothers are in high demand in a variety of industries - from the hip musical underground to the ultra-commercial world of advertising.  They've worked with their pal Dan the Automator on a number of projects, including a Killers remix, and produced MC Lars' "Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock."  Somewhere along the way, the "brothers" (Jim Greer and Brandon Arnovick) found time to release a debut album inspired by Hawaiian hip-hop.

Seven Minutes To Midnight, their latest release, defies such easy categorization, taking inspiration from the impending apocalypse and peppering it across a sonic swath of electronica, hip-hop, and indie-pop.  A number of guest vocalists are given time to shine, particularly 20 Minute Loop's ever-fantastic Kelly Atkins.

Jim Greer took the time to field some questions about the collaborative nature of Seven Minutes To Midnight, the doomsday implications behind the title, and offers a definitive history of the Rondo Brothers so far.

Were the songs that we hear on Seven Minutes To Midnight all written with the intent of putting them all together on an album, or are there bits that were held over from your various other projects - bits that you knew were good but didn’t work for whatever you were doing at the time?

That’s a good question. Basically all of them were songs where we started creating them, and as they got to a certain point, we’d look at each other and say “song for next album!” without thinking too much more about it. Like it was something we liked a lot and thought would be cool on an album. and then since we knew who we wanted to have guest vocal-wise, we’d be thinking “song for Kelly”, or “song for pedro”, or whomever. Then we’d send it to that person and see what they thought.

We ended up with some 40 of these types of songs...and the singers liked some more than others. It sort of took its own shape. A couple tracks definitely started as something totally unrelated and became record tracks. The song “Still Your Ghost” started as a Nikon commercial. That might be it actually. It was really hard to choose songs for this record because we had so many, and we didn’t have such an easy obvious musical theme as the first album (Hawaiian hip hop). We also wanted to be a little bit strategic this time and pay attention to the fact that it’s a world of iTunes and so forth, and in a way it’s good to have lots of variety on an album. we did definitely give people direction lyrically. It might not be obvious at first listen, but every single song somehow relates to something apocalyptic or mind-melting or thunderous or deadly or as a prism looking into a strange future. They all work in that context. It’s probably asking way too much of anyone to figure all that out though.

When you’re doing proper Rondo Brothers albums, do you feel more creatively liberated than when you’re working on remixes, films, commercials, etc.?  Or do you always feel fairly free in that regard?

You know, we’ve learned something really important, which is that you do what you do. We used to get really wigged out when doing a commercial or a remix or something that basically another non-musical person is going to judge, and potentially dislike, or ask for changes, or whatever. We used to feel like there was a “good” way to do the track and a million “bad” ways to do it, and how could we possibly find the good one.. but then we realized that it was most important that we just sat down and did something that we liked and that we could stand behind and that we were excited about. And that really frees you up. The bottom line is you’re not going to get every gig, and if you chase something too far beyond your natural boundaries, it’s going to sound lame. Way better to make a track that is just totally unique and weird and say “hey, this is what you should do cause we like it”. It’s a confidence thing. The thing is nobody, not even big stars or producers, get off the hook when there’s money involved. People like the Dust Brothers and the Neptunes, and whoever, you name it, they get hired and rejected all the time for stuff, and they don’t even care. It’s like, establish a minimum, work for your minimum, do good work, and if they use it, great, if they don’t, oh well. We’ve knocked out big things in like three hours, and we’ve had little things drag on for weeks. I guess the point I’m making is that “feeling free” is the only to stay sane. I will say that when we are suddenly blessed with time to work on personal stuff, or “next record “stuff, it’s a real relief not to be answering to anyone. It’s done when we say it’s done, not someone else. But the creative process is still the same.

I read that you road tested a lot of the new material before committing it to the record.  Was there stuff that was thrown out during that process, or did you find that most of what you’d prepared was going to work?

That’s another very perceptive question. Our “road testing tour” consisted of a short opening set, opening for Chali2na, AG, and Casual, and Automator (who we also backed up). In that set were I think 6 songs, and one of them is this beautiful song that Kelly Atkins sings called “Count To A Million”. It’s really slow and kind of dark - depressing even - and when it came time to sequence the record it just didn’t seem to fit anywhere.  But I guess this a dumb answer because people liked that song live just fine. They liked everything we did with Kelly. Actually it was strange because some songs that we did on previous tours always seemed kind of lackluster live, but so great on the record..."Sing Into the Machine" is one. I played that song for a lot of people in the studio, and everyone always loved it, but then live it seemed slow and boring. Honestly I never really knew what to do about it. I sort of concluded that putting a song on a record has a lot more importance than whether you play it live, because truthfully how many people will you ever really play the song live for? Whereas if it’s on a record, it’s available for the whole world for all of eternity. So eventually it’s like, screw it, put everything that seems good out whenever you can.

As an NFL junkie, one of the more interesting tidbits I came across was that you guys were partially responsible for Chad Johnson’s “Ocho Cinco” nickname.  Can you explain that back story?

We did these two series of NFL commercials. One was back in 2003, one for [Bill] Parcells and one for Jeremy Shockey, then in 2005 we did NFL Town and Ocho Cinco. They are all on YouTube and really cool. The Ocho Cinco, they had this cartoon, and they wanted a hip hop track, and the guy we were working with said “maybe we could try saying his number in another language, like say ocho cinco or something”. He sort of suggested the concept, and then we ran with it, having there be a group vocal and so forth. Apparently it caught on with Chad himself and he took on the nickname officially. That’s just plain cool!! I am constantly surprised at how many people have seen that commercial. I run into dudes who basically think of that as a total classic, like the one in the seventies with the coke, and that one kid, and that other guy.

The guest vocalists here play a larger role than guest vocalists in the genre sometimes are allowed [they actually have cowriting credits].  Were the songs done in side-by-side collaboration, or did you guys do the music separately and then the singers came on and did their part?

All different ways. We almost always instinctively know right away who a track is for within minutes of its creation. So whatever early version we have, we send straight to that person. If they like it, we usually offer at that point to hold off until they can come over and work on it with us. Most of our friends/singers are local to us, so it’s more fun that way, and rather than spend hours finishing something where they might say “hey can we change the whole key up a step” or whatever, we get them in on it right away. That said, once in a while, we make a whole track and it’s done and then they do their thing. The key is to just let them do their thing. I’ve learned that the less I tell an artist who has experience, the better. More inexperienced/less confident types need more guidance, but all these people we have, they’re like writing and writing, and an hour or two later, they say “ok turn on the mike” and then they do it.

While we’re on that topic, I wanted to talk about Kelly Atkins, who I’ve been raving about for years.  I know that you share a label with her band - is that the original connection there, or did you know each other prior to winding up on Fortune?

I signed her band to my label in 1998-9 and have known her since. Working with her is a really special experience for us. She’s not only very talented, but one of the world’s nicest people and such a hard worker. She has saved our ass multiple times. It’s one of my goals in life to expose her to a wide audience and let her reap the benefits of her talent and dedication to music, if she’s cool with it.

Another collaborator that I wanted to talk about is [artist] Sam Flores.  I just got an issue of Juxtapoz magazine that was entirely devoted to graffiti, so I’ve been taking extra notice of the pieces around my neighborhood.  How did you get hooked up with Sam and what kind of direction did you give him?  I particularly like the singing robot on the back cover.

We were hooked up with him through a recommendation of our friend Samantha Stollenwerck. She was hearing the Hawaiian stuff and was like “get sam flores!” So we called him and hired him. He’s super open to ideas. We told him all the images we wanted and he just straight drew them. He’s an interesting guy and really fast and good quality stuff.

The album title and the album artwork obviously directly invokes the apocalypse, but there aren’t “state of the union” type songs on the album.  In fact, the album is pretty damned feel-good.  Was there a concentrated effort to keep the sociopolitical elements from seeping into the songs?

 The concept is more about...being blissfully ignorant while the world collapses around you. Then there’s kind of characters within that context. Songs like "Crazed", "Dune Stalker", "Houston", "New York Kid"… they are kind of anthems to dark knowledge from someone who is trying to ignore it. The other songs in some way generally reference joyful ignorance.  "Until We All Fall Down" is maybe the best paradoxical song – it’s a nursery rhyme about large scale death masked within this happy sounding 70’s sly stone kinda funk jam.

You’re right there’s hardly any politics. I can’t get down with political stuff, it’s just too obvious. Music and art should be something you interpret. If it’s done well, it is delivered with multiple meanings and you can think about that later. What’s sad is that I don’t think most people in America have our politics weighing heavily on their minds, unless they know someone in Iraq and are worried about them on a daily basis. It’s really easy to be detached in our society. We don’t seem to have anyone, any artists, who are kind of bringing people together to be aware. The only band I can think of  who really tried and did it is Green Day. I was extremely impressed with their courage and ability to lay it all on the line with that American Idiot record. Love 'em or hate 'em, they didn’t just make another pop album, they said something and said it to a lot of people.  But now you see how our music business machine is such a hungry monster - that album is through its cycle and now you hardly hear about it.

The end of your album begs the question:  how would you set the hands of the Doomsday Clock?

Right about now, it seems like it’s at…about 4 minutes in.

I read that article in SF Weekly on you guys and it mentioned that you two have been doing music since a very early age, but “gradually” moved behind the boards.  What initially sparked that transition, and what sort of stuff had you been doing up until then?

Well we are each a little different in that respect. I started four tracking at a very early age and always had an obsession with the craft of it. In fact I went to elementary school with a guy named Liam Lynch, who is now a talented podcaster and filmmaker - I met him when I was 10, and when we were in junior high he was a totally amazing songwriter and four-tracker – he showed me his four track and played me songs he was recording and that got me into it. I then rented a four track for a week when I was 12 and my friend and I recorded on it nonstop, all day and night, for that whole week, and it was the most amazing thing. I just couldn’t stop doing it -it was all I thought about. There seemed to be just endless things you could do. And since I was also a keyboard player, I found myself a commodity to local bands that needed keyboard players – so while doing that I started playing in bands. Add to that being a total overachiever, and then I was the guy in all my high school years setting up the battle of the bands so that my band could play, and all that sort of thing.

And then in my freshman year of high school I met a Korean kid who had a ton of killer gear and was a real genius with midi and sequencing – basically my mom couldn’t afford to ever get me any of the stuff to do it at home – so I started hanging out with him and with our Tascam 4 track, Kawai k1 keyboard, Roland Jupiter keyboard, Kawai sequencer, and Alesis HR-16 drum machine, we made literally hundreds of songs and recordings throughout my high school years. We were huge, HUGE fans of De La Soul three feet high and rising, and New Order – so everything we did was beat-driven, stony, instrumental music of all kinds. And I was into pretty much every style of music and was definitely trying to bring British psychedelic influences, new wave influences, songwriter influences.

Then when I went to college, between my first and second years of college, my high school band went to Wilmington North Carolina and got a gig at a redneck country bar on the boardwalk, where we played four sets a night, five nights a week for 4 months or so...that was an amazing experience, because we didn’t play country, we played whole Floyd records, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Genesis,  REM...lots of good old fashioned Midwestern classic radio rock (the kind that is popular in the Midwest, not made in the Midwest). They loved us there and we had this great redhead female singer named Charlene. After that summer I vowed never to play in  a cover band again (and I haven’t) but it was an awesome time.

When I went back to college I formed another band called Ibiza and we proceeded to play all around Charlottesville (I went to UVA) and in Richmond at punk clubs. We were kind of a ‘melodic punkpop’ type band but a little weirder, we really liked Faith No More and bands like that, again for me, it was kind of just getting my ya yas out, it was fun to play shows, but every time we went into the studio, which was fairly often, I just loved being in there. By this time we had been to enough big studios that I was getting a really good feel for producing, and I kept on taking the role of producer in the studio whether I wanted to or not, I just couldn’t help it. Actually engineers I worked with usually said something like “you’re good in here, you should work in a studio” pretty much every time, but I always felt like, “yeah right, after my band gets huge!”. Unfortunately at the time in Charlottesville the Dave Matthews band was just getting started, and they were basically the only band allowed to get huge out of that town. I saw them when they were still playing every Tuesday at the little bar. Another strange tidbit of that time was that unbeknownst to me there was another Jim Greer at U.VA (older than me) who was hanging around with guys who were just forming Pavement, Malkmus and one other guy I think. They were all older than me but they were there when I was there. That Jim Greer went on to play bass in Guided By Voices.

After UVa. I moved to San Francisco with that band, and started working at a club in the booking office, called the Paradise Lounge. There I met Toni, who manages Dan The Automator, and the Dr. Octagon album was just about to come out.  Because I felt ready to start making albums, I made my first solo album (Lucky Day) which was mastered by Dan the Automator, and then he invited me to play keyboards in the Octagon touring band, but that fell through when Kool Keith failed to show up, although I did take him for a ride in my 1964 Chrysler Newport and he offered to buy it. Luckily we rehearsed a lot so I got to jam with all four original Skratch Piklz, whom I later toured in Europe with when I played in Tipsy, so that was pretty cool. Basically this was now about 1997, and I was playing solo gigs around San Francisco, and booking at a club, and I was itching to be working in the studio, so I decided to start a record label and start putting out records. I found a band called the Gun & Doll Show that I loved, and produced their album Working On The Bomb. After that came out, they were on the cover of BAM and being touted as the next Pixies, and then almost immediately they broke up inexplicably, which was a real lame thing for them to do as I had just borrowed something like $30,000.00 to produce and release their album. Note to self: when signing bands, make them promise on paper to support their album. Lesson learned. I kept on though, and kept releasing records from bands like 20 Minute Loop, and the Monolith, and Herman Jolly, and Eric McFadden..and more.

Then I joined an electro-lounge act called Tipsy and toured France, Japan, and the U.S… then I did a lot of work for RCA Records as a songwriter and producer for a bay artist named Essence, which was another great experience, in fact perhaps the most life changing, because it put me in the studio with Bill Bottrell, who is just one of the greatest record producers of all time. The most amazing part was that everything he was doing, his instincts, he was confirming what I had been doing all along. I kind of realized on that first day in the studio with him that I was born to produce, because I saw that I shared his instincts, not that I knew how to execute them sonically, but I shared them. Not long after that I was asked by Dan the Automator to go to New Orleans to work on the Galactic “Ruckus” album, and he brought Brandon as well – we had known each other well from the Paradise Lounge, but had never really worked on music – and we did a good job as a team there in New Orleans...another great experience – 8 weeks or so living in New Orleans writing lyrics and music and working at the studio every day from 4 – midnight. When we came back from New Orleans we were offered a chance at a couple NFL commercial/cartoon things, and we rocked those, and the Rondo Brothers were born. Brandon owns a house in San Francisco and we were able to convert part of it into a studio, and now that’s where we both work, so it just kind of worked out well.

Brandon, whose story I will make a bit shorter – he grew up I think less looking to produce and more of a guitar god type guy. He has some kind of trippy parents and definitely grew up in a liberal California household – in fact his family was friends with some great characters, Bhagavan Das comes to mind, if you know anything about Ram Dass and the whole “Be Here Now” world – Bhagavan is one of those famous guru guys who definitely has a bizarre story. The point being we ended up recording Bhagavan on our first album, on a duet with Kelly Atkins, the song “Sacrifice”. Anyways Brandon was a total deadhead when he was in college and I think he went to a lot of dead shows and imbibed a lot of chemicals. He was also doing a band called JoJo at the time, and they actually ended up moving to San Francisco and doing quite well there, a total pop/rock band, but they played at the Fillmore, and Slim’s a lot, and pretty much everywhere. Brandon definitely took up the production role in that band, and is extremely skilled at computers and did graphics for along time – so when digital recording started happening, he was right there on the curve and started learning protocols and such right away, whereas I was more of an analog guy and didn’t go digital until I basically had no choice. Brandon had another band after that called Tokyo Marine Fire and that’s when he really built a studio into his house and started recording the band at home, and he also has a place with his sister down in Desert Hot Springs, right next to Palm Springs, which is a full and well equipped studio. And Brandon also knew Dan, and is Dan’s go to guitar player, so he played on Lovage, Deltron, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and toured with all those projects, and ultimately the rondos were then the opening act and backup band for Handsome Boy Modeling School and then the NBA 2K7 album.