Photo by Matt Barnes
How did the Chromeo sound come together?
Dave 1: This is a funny story from a sort of “musical apprenticeship” standpoint. Basically, P and I discovered funk right about the same time — we were in high school together. In Montreal at that time, if you were a teenager studying guitar, chances are your teacher was really into jazz fusion. So I was learning Frank Gambale and Al Di Meola and Dregs type stuff. Then I discovered Maceo Parker, Parliament, and Prince, and it was, like, the opposite of all that. I remember thinking, “Wow, the guitar part is only one chord, but it sounds tight!” I pretty much stopped practicing jazz, and just wanted to learn more about funk. Every weekend, P and I would go to all these great used record stores. It seemed like everyone in Montreal was collecting prog at the time: King Crimson, Gentle Giant, early Genesis. Nobody cared about Chic or Rick James or Prince, so all those records were plentiful and about a dollar each! Our rule was: “If there’s a Jheri-Curl dude on the cover, buy it!”
P-Thugg: I’m originally from Lebanon, where there wasn’t much stuff like Michael Jackson going on, needless to say! I moved to Canada at eight years old, and my first musical awakenings included Michael, LL Cool J, and a lot of hip-hop. I grew up with the whole Teddy Riley sound.
Dave 1: That’s how we originally got into producing hip-hop in about ’91 — we were already listening to what it came from, and had all these jazz, funk, and soul records to sample. Come about 2000, there’s a big change. Everyone’s using the Triton and beats from sample CDs, and that really wasn’t our style. Luckily, we got the opportunity to do a more electronic-type project on Vice Records, which turned into our first album [She’s In Control]. P had been playing the talkbox since we were 15, and we still had all these ’80s records lying around, which we never sampled for hip-hop because they were too . . . ’80s! We started listening to them again, and it all made sense. For me, it was a way to channel my childhood dream of being the next Huey Lewis or Billy Ocean [laughs], and P got to go freakin’ Moog-crazy and Prophet-crazy and ARP-crazy with all these synths he loves, and play the talkbox.
So which one of those analog synths is your favorite, P?
P-Thugg: The Prophet-5. I swear it thinks it’s a person — it has mood swings! Sometimes it sounds great, sometimes it doesn’t, even on the same patch. It just has so much character.
Have you checked out the Prophet ’08?
P-Thugg: I have one. I’ve been comparing it with the Prophet-5 for about six months now. The P-5 is still the fattest, but the ’08 is up there. It’s real analog, stable, and doesn’t break. When I first heard it, I was like, “I need one of these now!” Dave [synth designer Dave Smith] was backordered, and he was so cool that he sent me one from his private stash — the serial number is 9!
Your records are full of great analog synth sounds, but when we’ve seen your live shows, your rig is pretty compact. Are you using soft synths?
P-Thugg: Frankly, I’m not a big fan of soft synths for analog sounds. But there are two ingredients to our keyboard sounds: warm analog, and then that digital, crystal-like quality you heard in a lot of ’80s stuff. There’s nothing soothing or “warm” about, oh, the DX7 harmonica, or that marimba patch they used on “Axel F,” but sometimes, that’s what I want. For this, I like Native Instruments FM8, and the plug-in version of the Korg M1 — they call it M1Le.
Is there any new piece of gear that you think really does nail it in terms of the analog ingredient?
P-Thugg: The Nord Modular. I have the expanded one, the G2X. It ain’t really analog, but it might as well be!
Speaking of the ’80s, your music is full of shout-outs to that decade. “Needy Girl” has a break that quotes the horn line from Rick James’ “Mary Jane,” and the straight-eighth Wurly chords that begin “Momma’s Boy” are pure Supertramp, to take just two examples.
Dave 1: No lie, we listen to a lot of records. We’re not at all ashamed of our influences, nor of the fact that a huge part of our creative process is listening to other people’s music.
P-Thugg: We don’t sample, and we never duplicate lines exactly, but we like to toy around with musical quotes. Think about how legit that is in jazz. You go see a straight-ahead jazz quartet, you’re gonna hear Coltrane quotes. You’re gonna hear the piano player quote Bill Evans or Brubeck.
Dave 1: If people listen to “Momma’s Boy,” then go buy a Supertramp record, I’ve done a good deed! [Laughs.] I remember when I got my first Supertramp album as a kid — it made my week, so why not pass that pleasure on? [We couldn’t agree more, so check out Key Tracks on page . –Ed.]
P-Thugg: Make a real study of Steely Dan, and you’ll discover mad references to jazz and soul from the ’50s. That’s what musicians do a lot — we take something we grew up with, and try to make it our own.
You’re about to shoot an episode of Daryl Hall’s web show, “Live From Daryl’s House” [www.livefromdaryls house.com]. Psyched? Nervous?
P-Thugg: Both. I almost never take my Prophet-5 out, because it’s sensitive and irreplaceable, but I’m taking it over there. I’m wondering if he can show me some cool shit to do on it! That’s the kind of stuff I can’t wait to ask him — not “So what’s it like to be a gigantic pop star?”
Dave 1: Before you called, I was practicing “Adult Education.” Hall and Oates are geniuses! We relate to them a lot, and also to bands like Steely Dan.
Why?
Dave 1: Because they’re white dudes like us, who got enthralled by African-American music culture, like us. I studied music a lot as a kid — I could play “Spain” by Chick Corea at 11 years old. But again, once we heard things like Earth, Wind & Fire, we were like, “This is the coolest thing ever!” Ever since, it’s been about paying tribute to that.
A lot of “white dudes” are seen as poseurs for trying that, but you’ve avoided the Vanilla Ice syndrome and earned respect. What’s your secret?
Dave 1: You have to write lyrics that come from who you are. If our lyrics were just, “Baby, let’s have sex” or tried to imitate gangsta rap, we’d lose that. Me, I’m a neurotic Jew, so I’m gonna write songs like “Momma’s Boy” or “Needy Girl,” which is about a girl who won’t stop calling and is driving me nuts. Earth, Wind & Fire doesn’t have songs like that, because it’s not who they are, but we can have songs like that.
Beyond the lyrics, there’s huge cred in the sound itself. The bass lines, the big Prince-style synth stabs, the P-Funk-esque noodly parts — you’ve really got all of it dialed.
Dave 1: We’re obsessive about that, and it’s precisely because some people look down on our stuff for being so poppy and retro. If we were doing it all with plug-ins or sample CDs or whatever, it wouldn’t have the sonic depth that it does. Keyboard players and real gearheads know what’s involved in getting those sounds to sound right — that’s why instrument mags are our favorite interviews.
P-Thugg: It’s true. When we’re doing a lot of press, sometimes I’m having a bad day, or I’m tired, and I’m not really friendly to a lot of the interviewers. Then, the guys from gear magazines come in and I light up. . . .
Dave 1: P is the guy who can talk for three hours about an oscillator!
Some fans love you because of the almost satirical retro aspect. Some see you as cutting-edge. How do you see yourselves — serious, silly, somewhere in between?
Dave 1: You can be a mélange of all those things, and of dozens of different influences. You can take paying tribute to those influences seriously, but not be pretentious about it — you don’t have to be doing some next-level, Brian Eno, collage-type stuff. You can write songs with funky Moog bass and lyrics about girls, from a place of being sincerely devoted to your art. That’s what post-modernity is.
SIDEBAR: THUGG SHOT
Photo by Angela Boatwright
THUGG SHOT
Name: P-Thugg
Alias: Patrick Gemayel
Gear:Vintage: Korg MonoPoly, Moog Prodigy, Roland Juno-106 and SH-101, Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Pro-One, Yamaha DX100. New: Ableton Live on Apple MacBook Pro, Akai MPC1000, Dave Smith Prophet ’08, MicroKorg, Nord Modular G2X, Rocktron Banshee talkbox.
Top Five Heroes: Roger Troutman (Zapp), Donald Fagen, Quincy Jones, Ray Parker Jr., and Teddy Riley.