Having toured the world with Jack Johnson, songwriter/drummer Adam Topol returned to Los Angeles to cook up a jazz-infused, dub project in the Culver City home studio of guitarist/engineer Franchot Tone. Their debut longform Dos reflects the duo's community ideology, featuring a host of luminaries, including Culver City Dub Collective regulars Chris Joyner (Sheryl Crow, Amos Lee), Kool G Murder (The Eels) and Dave Ralike (TV On The Radio, Breakestra), and guests Ben Harper, Money Mark, Matt Costa, and Bedouin Soundclash's Jay Malinowski. Real Talk LA caught up with Adam and Frachot after a gig for Indie 103.1's Smoke-In at the Malibu Inn to talk about Culver City and its questionable dub roots.
So Culver City, is it the new Silverlake?
Adam: No I don't think so.
Franchot: Not yet. It is up and coming however.
Adam: Yeah. We intend to put it on the map as the new dub capital -- second only to Jamaica of course.
Franchot: It's funny on MySpace we get these enthusiastic messages from people from Culver City who just love that we're representing Culver City on the world stage.
Traditionally great music has come from god-awful places, but dub is one genre that has always had its roots in divine places.
Franchot: There's an element of irony and humor in the reference.
Adam: If you look at us we're clearly not King Tubby, we're not Jamaican, though we love the music. It's a way of us being a little bit playful and honest about where we're from, yet that we love it and respect it. There's a bit of playfulness there.
So how did two white boys get into dub music?
Franchot: With me, it started with the more mainstream stuff, Bob Marley, Toots & The Maytals, bands like that. Then when I hooked up with Adam he showed me this whole side of music that came before that, and helped me to delve deeper into that.
Adam: It's embarrassing to say that I remember my defining dub moment. I was really drunk in high school, and someone passed me a pipe and I got really stoned, and I was so out of it, and it was the first time I'd heard dub and somebody toasting, and it just opened my mind to it. Ever since then, even though I've kind of mellowed out now, it's this transcendental thing. I can listen to it and it just puts me in a relaxed, happy state of mind.
Adam, for you dub music came by way of Cuba to Culver City, because you studied out there. How does an American even get out to Cuba?
Adam: I was going to school in Boston studying jazz, and I wanted to get into Afro-Cuban music. If you're a student you can go out there and study, and there's a program that let me study at the Escuela Nacional De Arte. I was really disenchanted with music, and I wanted to maybe pursue other careers. I started going to Cuba. It was there that I got into the culture, and got into the fact that making music was a spiritual thing and that it was a community activity. It had such great soul and it renewed my enthusiasm for drumming. So I just kept going back to study more.
There's a hell of a community on this record, do you want to talk about some of the tracks and the guest artists?
Franchot: Well the one we've just played on the radio here was a track entitled "Bad Reaction" that was initially on our E.P. as an instrumental song. The goal for our new record was to bring in some singers. A lot of people can't identify with instrumental music - it's the voice, that's really what a lot of people identify with. J.P., the gentleman that owns the label that's releasing our record, said you got to check out this guy Bedouin Soundclash. Bedouin Soundclash has this singer named Jay Malinowski, who's immensely talented. We sent him the track, and what we got back was a lot more than just vocals, he had put on some melodica and helped with the arranging. That was a real neat collaboration to do something virtually with some guys we'd really admired that we'd never worked with or even met face to face. Then some of the other collaborations were more intimate.
Talking of singers, you have another local singer/songwriter, Matt Costa, on the record. Which track did he do?
Adam: We wrote a track kind of based on the "Leaves of Grass," those poems by Walt Whitman. My idea was to do something kind of transcendental. It was a two-way vocal collaboration with Chris Joyner, who's a really great singer and who plays keyboards with us, and we had Matt come and sing too. Matt really does get the whole Portishead Bristol thing, whereas Chris comes from more of a California soul background, so the way he approached it was from that angle, and so it gave it two sides.
And that track's called?
Adam: "Mr. W." W for Whitman.
The interesting thing too is that you talk about putting vocals back in your music, when of course the roots of dub are actually about taking the vocals out of reggae music. That's how reggae musicians would traditionally create the B-side dub tracks. So it's interesting that you're putting the voice back into dub.
Adam: Yes, it's a little twist on the whole thing.
Was it a conscious decision?
Franchot: I think the decision goes back to making it accessible to more people. Taking that dub element that we really captured on the initial record and elaborating on it. That's where I saw it coming from.
Adam: I totally agree. We wanted to do a dub record, and there are elements where I really feel like it sounds like a King Tubby song or a Lee Perry song, but then a song like "Waltz for Tomahawk" is almost like dub jazz. It's almost like a Gil Evans track
There's a lot of tracks on the album that have a heavy jazz influence. Where does that come from?
Franchot: I have no jazz background, so it's certainly not my influence.
Adam: It was a two-fold thing, at least for "Waltz for Tomahawk," I was checking out Gil Evans and a lot of the Miles Davis stuff, and then Coltrane's Africa/Brass record. Zero 7 and a lot of bands, they'll dub out jazz. A lot of people are doing that so it's really not very novel. But I came up with an idea of a waltz that has a dubby, film noir thing. I just sort of felt like there's no way we're going to recapture what those guys do, Lee Perry, or King Tubby, or The Mad Professor, or the Scientist, why even try? Why not tell a little bit of a different story with it.
Going back to the accessibility thing. Today you're here with Native Wayne being interviewed for his show on Indie 103.1, which is one of the few places you can hear reggae and dub music year round. You know there's this general rule of thumb in America radio that states you can't air reggae before April. What are your thoughts on how reggae music is ghettoized on mainstream radio?
Franchot: I think it's somewhat unfortunate because I remember where I grew up back East it was very popular in certain communities. I remember the only reggae you could really hear was UB40 as far as radio. I think it's unfortunate. I wish they'd play more. I wish the mainstream, so to speak, was more open minded about it.
I can't think of any other genre that's ghettoized it terms of seasonality in the way that reggae is. It's like corporate America dictates that you can only listen to it when the sun comes out.
Adam: Yeah. What's up with that? I mean going to England was such a happy thing for me because there people just love it. England's not a sunny, tropical place, but people really get into it. So when I was there I'd thing 'God this is so cool, I wish we were more like this.'
I know you've gigged a lot in the Southland, and you've even got as far as Colorado. What format does the touring band take?
Franchot: The touring band up until this point has been very large and has included Rusty Logsdon, who goes by the name Kool G Murder, on keyboards, he plays in the Eels, Megan Amy Sheafor, a singer / horn player, David Ralicke is our horn player, jazz flutist and dancer, David Urquidi plays horns, José Esquivel on bass, Chris Joyner on vocals and keyboards. That's the core group.
That's quite a stage full. Are you also hoping to get some of the guests that played on the album to play live with you?
Adam: Some of the people on the record have already sat in with us and some will. But this started as a studio project. Just the two of us getting
our friends involved, without touring in mind. But once you put out a record the way to promote it is to play live. So it's more of a studio project that's shaping into a band, rather than a band that's shaping into a record.Update: The Culver City Dub Collective will be touring with Jack Johnson in August 2008. Check out their website for more details.
