To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People March 16, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/cintra/2000/03/16/problem The Negro Problem Yes, there is life outside the L.A. music biz; two self-made troubadours tell how (and why) they live it. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Cintra Wilson I was in the truck, having one of those outrageously shitty days where the world seems full of angry 23-year-old belligerent idiots with thick necks and shaved head-sides who hazardously cut in front of you in traffic, then flip you off, as their extra-loud Mega Bass speakers blare from SUVs defaced with unauthorized decals of an un-Calvin-like homeboy Calvin pissing on the ground with an evil smirk. The bastards were everywhere, and the sky was the color of blood poisoning and the wind was whippy and bleak and gritty as only New York wind can be -- studded with whirling eddies of the East Coast filth-pollen of seasonal depression. I was half-listening to my favorite listener-supported radio station (anybody notice how the quality of life improves when all corporate influence is extricated?) and caught the following lyrics, from a resonant, yowling voice that sounded like a black Cat Stevens, about the plight of a gay Ken doll: Someday soon I'll be in your child's room I'll be forced to kiss Barbie's plastic tits And I will hate myself, and what's more, I'll hate you Suddenly the fist in my rib cage unfolded. Somebody, somehow, had broken free of the norm and was writing pretty, acoustic-guitar lines with nifty chord changes and totally irreverent lyrics, despite the lack of cash and stadium blow jobs they were likely to get from it. Wholly without hope for major-label distribution, and for my money, that's a good thing. I sat in the car double-parked and clutching the steering wheel, refusing to move until the band identified itself, and discovered that the Negro Problem, a small outfit from L.A., were doing a monthlong residency at New York's Knitting Factory. I made it a point to go see them; to go out, at night even, on a week in which I would rather have done nothing but hide under my couch and take all the Percocet left over from last year's oral surgery, and whimper and chew my thumbs. A whole set by the Negro Problem sounds like a fusion of the Fifth Dimension, Chicago, James Taylor, Burt Bacharach, ELO, the Five Stair Steps, the Beatles, David Sedaris and Tenacious D. I usually figure if you can hear more than nine influences, the band is "original." The Negro Problem are alive in a way that other bands are dead, because they own themselves. I interviewed Stew (just Stew), the smart-mouth of the operation, and Heidi Rodewald, the hot chick of the band, about their lives as self-made troubadours. They are clever musical weirdos who have carved out a tenable piece of the entertainment world for themselves, wrangled their 40 acres and a mule, grown their own infrastructure and kept things going a lot longer than other bands who think industry record deals are the only way to do things. The Negro Problem prove there is life for musicians outside the L.A. music industry. Bloody refreshing. And here, kids, they tell you how to do it, over croissants at Fortunato Brothers in Williamsburg: I told your manager I thought you were a broke-ass Cole Porter for the '90s. Stew: Wow. Thanks. We're just trying to keep ourselves entertained, basically, because I sure as hell know I'm not singing to the 14-year-olds. Jakob Dylan you're not. Stew: Exactly. So, I'll take the people who either know who Cole Porter is or those that don't know but kind of know -- that know enough to know that he's good. Because these days you've got two people -- the people that know things, who've read things, and the people who have just heard the echoes of things. And that's OK, I don't mind. I don't mind people who haven't really read "War and Peace." Have you? Stew: No, I haven't. Some of us have actually read things and some have just heard the echoes, but the great thing is that we can reference things, like Cole Porter or Noel Coward. Anything that smells slightly sophisticated to me at this point in history is subversive. Because, can you believe it? You turn on the TV, and you can still see these rock 'n' roll codes -- you know, jeans and long hair and slightly dangerous, this fake danger, like you see in the videos, like Kid Rock. You don't want your daughter to go out with him, do you? Well, of course not. But he doesn't even exist! He's this bizarre prototype of scary, dangerous rock. And that's so over! I mean, these guys all have lawyers; they're not dangerous. The Negro Problem fall between the cracks of any of the categories that would earn you major-label butt-sniffing interest. The fact that you've been able to keep yourselves going in this Jakob Dylan-type, L.A. music climate is a wonder. Stew: It's a wonder to us. The band has been together for about five years. It started out as a conscious decision to write songs with good lyrics. We knew that if we wrote songs with good lyrics we would attract a certain kind of person, and there wouldn't be tons of people, but once we got 'em, we got 'em, and they would be fans forever. It's like we were selling a certain kind of drug that we knew they could only get from us. And then we just kept playing and playing in L.A. We knew that by calling ourselves [the Negro Problem] it would hit people who admired the balls and who had the sense of irony. I don't know what happened to irony. If [irony] was in a box, on the Mayflower, they threw it off. The English and other guys still have it, and somehow we lost it. We had it in the '70s and then it went away. It got overly prosecuted in the '80s and then political correctness stomped out the last dying ember of it. And now it's gone. Stew: Absolutely. We started to get this really strong following in Los Angeles of people who were just fascinated that we were even existing. I think people actually came to see us, just to see, is this going to still exist in a month? I can't believe it, because surely these guys are going to quit and go off and get jobs at IBM or something. Do you have enough consistent gigs in L.A. that you're able to not have day jobs? Stew: Some of us still work. We make enough money where we don't always have to work. Heidi: Right now we're not. What was your hardest period -- your worst job in your driest hour? Stew: I've been a security guard, which is how I finished all the lyrics to the record, because I can't finish lyrics unless I'm either on a bus or working a really boring job. I can't sit there with the quill. Where were you a security guard? Stew: In Santa Monica, at an empty business park. A bunch of gray offices with cellotex wall panels? Stew: Exactly. But hey, it worked. Also, the way we were able to last was by doing something that L.A. bands who are successful don't do, which is we went to various towns over and over again, whether they wanted us to be there or not, and just kept playing and playing until we finally developed a following there. Unlike a lot of other successful Los Angeles bands, we can have a record release party in Arizona or San Diego or Portland. We bought a van. We tour a lot, because we're smart enough to know that the big cities are basically jaded. They see you a few times; first they watch to see how far you're going to go up, and then, of course, they watch to see how fast you're going to fall. A lot of bands are under this illusion that the whole world is Los Angeles. And the city is very good at creating that illusion that it is the whole world. [Bands] just think, well, the industry is here! David Geffen lives here! He parks his helicopter here! It must all be here. Why should I go to San Diego? Why should I go to Mesa, Ariz.? Heidi: It feels really good to do great in San Diego. Stew: We go there and we make money. It's just being old-fashioned, like being a folk group or a blues group. Rock guys are stupid! They're uneducated working-class peasants that have suddenly been given this opportunity, and after a month they're suddenly, like [British accent], "I cahn't have regular coffee, I want a cappuccino! I can't take a bus, I want to be chauffeured around!" And I'm like, hold it, you were a peasant two months ago. Why don't you just get in the van and go? Just carry some equipment? People believe their own bullshit, these myths, this Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin thing, and that's so gone. That's ancient, it's Jurassic, it's not real. So you've carved out a wonderful little plateau for yourself. Stew: You have to, these days. Does Kid Rock really think that anyone is going to care what he says in the next year? Do you guys have any horror stories about major record labels that have been interested in you? Stew: The best story I can give you is some guy looked me in the face and said, "You know, you really have a great sense of melody, you really write some clever lyrics, but let me tell you, there's two things you need in your band. You need a song that mentions a car and a song that mentions a girl's name or a girl's phone number." And I looked at him and thought, somebody call Robert Altman right now, and tell him that he's a documentarian. "The Player" is real life. People really say things like that. This guy said, "You know, I'm a big fan, I really get what you're doing, but you've got to have a number like [singing] '8-6-7-5-3-0-nii-yine.'" This guy was buying me really expensive Chinese food, and I was just thinking, OK, this is what it's all about. [The major labels] don't know what to do with us, and frankly, I don't blame them. Walking into a major label for us right now is like us walking into the Pork Store over there on Fifth Avenue and saying, "Can you handle us?" and they're like, "Well, you know, we do pork, maybe we could fit something in." Heidi: And we don't want to wait. Stew: It would be nice if we had met maybe one friend who had had a good experience with a major label. But we know all these people, and they've all done it, and they come to us and they all say the exact same thing: "What you guys are doing is the right thing." What happened with my friends is, the record company pays your rent for nine months. For nine months you walk around thinking you're a rock star. They put you up on some crappy tour with some bands you have nothing in common with, and then they take two years to release the record. You hate the songs by the time the record comes out, but you have to play them. There are really quality people [who can't find good label support] -- Aimee Mann has to put a record out on the Internet. That's goofy. Love her or hate her, some major label should be able to do something for her. Heidi: What's really cool that happened to us is the last record; it was financed, in the beginning, from a major label going, "Here, here's some money, go do some demos for us." It was great. We did the demos and then we gave them the tape, but we didn't even think about it. We just took all [the tracks] to a different studio and finished the album and put it out. And everyone else we know in L.A. would have gone [star-struck voice]: "Now we're waiting to hear back!" Stew: We laugh at these bands who spend all this time recording with all these gigantic budgets. Bands who take too much time in the studio generally don't know what the hell they're doing. They've written 10 songs, they get a deal, then the second record comes out and they're like, uh, I'm working my way through song No. 4 -- that's so lame! Then, it's like, "Oh, let's send them to New Orleans for some inspiration." You don't know how many people I know who have been "sent to New Orleans." New Orleans is like a bus graveyard for rock talent. You have a whole tier of rock stardom that young band hopefuls should know about. It's a way to reroute their careers so they can actually do music. Stew: It would be pretty impossible for us to do what we do if [Heidi's job] wasn't a music-oriented job. Heidi: I work with studios. I sell recording tape. Stew: They understand the world that she's in. Heidi: I'm kind of leaving [work] a lot now, kind of pushing it. Stew: You can't leave your average job for a Thursday and a Friday to go out of town. Heidi: It's not safe, nothing's safe. We're old enough to where we've already gone, "This is what we're doing." We can't say, "No, wait, we should work, we can't go to New York." Stew: It's a paradigm shift -- most people, like people who quit our band because they can't handle it, say, "I can't go to New York, I have a job." We just go, "We have to go to New York. How can we do it?" Heidi: We figure it out later. We don't know what's going to happen next month. We're kinda scared. We don't know where the money is coming from. We have a giant van we have to pay for. Stew: Things do tend to work out, if you rethink the situation. They don't work out if you think, "Oooh, I want to keep my job and I want to keep my band. How do I do it?" Then you're fucked, because you're on the fence. You have to say, either I'm here or I'm there. salon.com | March 16, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Cintra Wilson lives in New York. Her book, "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and Other Cultural Revelations," is being released by Viking in July. For more columns by Wilson, visit her column archive.