It was a Friday night and my friend Malath and I were walking nervously towards the Dolores Park playground. About an hour and a half earlier I had decided to Direct Message an LA band who was currently on tour in SF, The Crudes. They were currently on tour in California and I was planning on going to see them in San Francisco the coming week. In the Instagram DM I asked if they were up for meeting up to do an interview. They responded right away and to my surprise suggested we do the interview tonight. Mal and I excitedly jumped in the car and headed toward San Francisco.
As we got closer to the playground we saw a bunch of guys going down the big slide and all laughing. I quickly realized that it is was The Crudes and the band they were touring with, Espresso, going down the slide. We introduced ourselves and the bands couldn't have been more friendly and laid back, so our nervousness faded instantly. We all sat down in the playground and I began the Interview:
How did you guys meet and end up forming your bands?
James/Guitar/The Crudes:
We initially met through school I guess. Me and Fausto over here, went to elementary school and middle school together. So I met him a while back and we kinda separated when we left off to highschool and that’s where he met Isaac over here. So they were jamming and started to jam with another drummer… who is irrelevant. *all laugh* He might our bass player and drummer when they were playing with another band when they were playing a show at Highland Park. And then yeah I guess we all like gathered together because the other band dismantled, but yeah that’s basically it, just all through school I guess.
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
Each of us went to middle school together and then in 9th grade we had a band together and then we split up. Back in 11th grade going into 12th grade we formed again and formed under Espresso. So I’ve know Alex, who plays bass, since we were little kids…
Alex/Bass/Espresso:
So here’s what happened, he’s leaving out the fun part of the story! We were in sunday school, and he was like a really big bully to me.
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
He used to bring his mom to class.
Alex/Bass/Espresso:
And so therefore I brought my mom to class as protection against him and it ended up in more bullying.
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
And then Alex met Dash in class in 9th grade. And then so when we were in 11th grade we formed, and we’ve been playing together since then, so like three years.
What bands or artists are your biggest influencers?
Reuben/Bass/The Crudes:
My biggest influencers are a lot of Hip Hop artists and Rappers, like RnB and Neo-Soul. For example, like Robert Glasper, Hiatus Kaiyote, but also rappers like Jonwayne and Kendrick Lamar. It varies.
James/Guitar/The Crudes:
I mean as a kid it’s always like the rock bands you look up to as a kid and stuff like that, but over time you start listening to different things. It’s a little bit of everything, you take things from here and there, Hip Hop, soul or like, I don’t know it’s not very specific.
Fausto/Vocals/The Crudes:
I like Kanye West a lot, but that didn’t inspire the first album that much, it was more like 1930s blues.
What blues artists?
Fausto/Vocals/The Crudes:
I started off with the basic stuff like Robert Johnson, and then slowly moved up, and Louis Armstrong is a big influence on my vocals as well. My favorite and probably biggest influence is probably Janis Joplin. She’s one of my biggest influences because I used to listen to her when I was younger and like she just has this voice that feels like it’s touching some weird goosebumps in your back. And I was like fuck dude! This is the shit!
Nate/Drums/The Crudes:
I think what inspired me at the time was, hm... around the time of the album? Or just in general, like life?
Just in general.
Nate/Drums/The Crudes:
I think in life, it varies… When I was younger I liked a lot of rock, progressive rock, experimental rock. And then as I got older I got into Jazz, Hip Hop, and Soul.
Isaac/Keys/Organ/The Crudes:
When I first started out with Adam in High School it was because we both liked Jack White a lot so really big Garage Rock Influence, but then over time, as James said, as your musicianship develops you start to search for new influences and new inspiration. So over time, you know, a lot of Jazz organists. I definitely internalized a lot of Santana, the first record, Woodstock. Yeah so Santana, Jazz organists, Garage rock and now a lot of Neo-Soul and Hip-Hop.
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
Personally I grew up listening to a lot of punk music. I like a lot of Hip Hop like Wu Tang Clan and Cypress Hill. Yeah I’m sure whatever I say they'll say to so I’ll just pass it to them.
Dash/Guitar/Vocals/Espresso:
My main influences in like guitar playing are Jimi Hendrix and John Frusciante from the Chili Peppers, but also like Robby Krieger form the Doors, I love his guitar playing. And then for vocals I really look up to Bradley Nowell from Sublime and Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes.
Alex/Bass/Espresso:
I really wanted to get it before Dash because I was going to say I was Dash and that I was influenced by early Joe bros stuff and like The Wiggles, but didn’t get the joke I wanted to do ahaha. Anyway, It’s pretty funny, my biggest influences are all.. I sound like a very generic person, but, The Beatles, The Red Hot Chili, Peppers, and Sublime are my favorite bands of all time. I mean Flea is the one who got me to start playing bass and now Reuben is the one who keeps me going!
Do you think your city or community has had an effect on the type of music you play? Has your music scene inspired you or made you more ambitious?
Reuben/Bass/The Crudes:
Personally us, besides Espresso who we were forced to mix with, we never really meld with other bands because we're all working. When we're done with a show we have to go home and get ready for work the next day so we don’t have the luxury to stay around and party. And when we do we get too much into the party and don’t actually do it. In terms of the scene, it’s given us the freedom to do what we want. We never had to conform to a certain type of music in order to actually be able to play. I guess in a sense, the broad spectrum that people love in LA, like if you play music and it’s the style you wanna play, someone will like it, you just gotta find it.
James/Guitar/The Crudes:
Yeah like Reuben said it’s basically like, we just play our show and we don’t typically stick around, we load up, and get up early the next morning or whatever. We usually just do ourselves and don’t mesh with other bands for weird some reason, but we’ve vibed with Espresso really well this tour though, which is really cool.
Fausto/Vocals/The Crudes:
I could say the community has helped me and this guy(referring to James) play music because there was a Boys And Girls Club right next to our school. And then this guy got picked in for a guitar class at school and I saw this guy with a guitar and that’s when we became friends. We started playing and we used to go to Boys and Girls Club a lot, there was this guy who taught us Stairway to Heaven, and we were like “DAMN, that’s the fucking shit!” And then we used to like play AC/DC Thunderstruck over and over again in the room and then they helped out a lot because you’re not supposed to be there once you’re 18, but we were 19. One of the dudes who owns it donated 5,000 dollars just so we could get a music spot in there and they built a whole room for us with drums, a PA, we got like a whole set up, which was really cool. They really helped us out. But for LA, it feels good kind of being half of a band that’s from Boyle Heights. Me and him went to school in Boyle Heights and there are not a lot of bands from Boyle Heights, at least that I’ve seen. Everyone’s mostly from other sides of town. I don’t know, I guess Los Angeles has affected our taste.
Nate/Drums/The Crudes:
What influenced me was, when I first started playing music, my older cousins band, and going into high school all the senior bands really influenced Reuben and I. I started playing music with Reuben in Freshman year and we kind of carried on from there. I just like started seeing all the bands in LA and I wasn't really familiar because I used to play music in Lancaster, it was just different. From then on after high school, I met The Crudes! Since then we’ve just been playing with local bands like Espresso and became good friends.
Isaac/Keys/Organ/The Crudes:
Like Reuben has said we don’t really have the luxury of hanging with other bands after we’re finished playing, we have to get ready for work most of the time, but I guess, in the sense of community, I wouldn’t have met Nate or Reuben had we had not been playing a show together. Yeah, I don’t know, we’re not necessarily friends with a lot of other bands, we’re friend with Espresso, they’re cool as fuck. We just met them literally a week ago. We’ve been bonding over some hootin’ and we’ve been hootin’ a little too hard. Ahahaa. But personally the music from the community hasn’t really influenced me, but it’s given me a broader perspective on just the scene in general. It doesn’t really influence my playing or anything, I look to other artists for that.
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
So we live in Los Angeles, and in LA there are a lot of bands, but there are not a lot of good bands. No, but to be honest there are a lot of bands so it’s pretty saturated. It’ just saturated bro. You’ll walk into a show and you'll see one cool band out of seven that just played. It makes us want to work harder to be the best musicians we can be and make the best songs we can so we can stand out. It makes it cool going to other places like San Francisco to be able to say you're from Los Angeles, people get a stigma, because it can make you sound more legit than you are when you say your from Los Angeles when you go other places. It kinda gives you a little bit of an edge, but as far as the music going on in Los Angeles, it hasn’t really influenced what we are playing.
Dash/Guitar/Vocals/Espresso:
I agree with Colin in that other bands don’t really influence our sound, except for that in the way that everyone sounds the same so we wanna try as hard as we can to sound different and we’re all from a Suburb of LA called La Crescenta and there were no other bands in La Crescenta. So we kinda started in no scene and we kinda had no other bands that we knew to look up to, so we kinda started from scratch and that's where get our, where I think we get our, unique sound.
Alex/Bass/Espresso:
I love every single band that is in the LA scene and I love surf rock! I think it’s the coolest thing! I think any beat that goes *imitates fast tempo surf rock drum beat* I want it, I want it, I want it. I want bassists who play with picks and play only root notes! I want a lot of chorus pedal! *everyone laughs* Gimme chorus pedal on the guitar. The most reverb! Two note riffs! *imitates two note riff* That’s all I want! *everyone laughs*
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
Very elongated lyrics! *sings* I…. like to plaaaayyyyyy…… music! *everyone laughs*
When did you guys realize that you could start playing together and get gigs?
Reuben/Bass/The Crudes:
The first band I was in, which was like age 14 to 17, we thought the only thing you could play was like the Risky or the Roxy or the pay to play venues, in your mind it’s huge, but at the end of the day anyone could play if they sell the tickets. I didn’t notice there was an actual scene where people get together and make shows for everyone and like they get bands, it wasn’t until I was like 18 until I realized that was the way to go.
Fausto/Vocals/The Crudes:
I had no idea there was a music scene, we were playing like shitty ass shit, I had no idea what the fuck we were doing, but we used to play this place called Tribal Cafe in a hotel in Echo Park and Tribal was cool! *everyone says yeah!* It’s free and they let you do whatever. When we got a manager that’s when we kinda figured out there was a music scene. She helped us a lot, and we were playing a lot of Backyard shows. Then we started getting asked for shows on Instagram and shit. We did a lot of free shows in 2016, we were just fucking playing and then I don’t know people started asking us.
Nate/Drums/The Crudes:
I thought like once you started playing shows it was gonna be like….Kendrick Lamar? *everyone laughs* Like I was excited to be playing like… Coachella? *everyone laughs* But no, ahaha, you really gotta work your way up. Ahaha I had a dream once I was on Conan and it was just the most insane dream. I thought that was how music was, but you really gotta work your way up there.
Colin/Drums/Espresso:
We really didn't know there was a music scene and we’d really just play places like Tribal Cafe with people that we knew from our high school. Then I fucking went on Instagram and I don’t know what I did dude, but I found out about some bands that were local and put them on a show and then we figured out there was a scene.
Are there any modern bands, like bands that are touring right now, releasing music right now, that you guys look up to?
The Crudes & Espresso (everyone was talking, couldn’t really keep track):
The Beach Boys! *everyone laughs* Hey, They’re still touring! Ahaha
Snarky Puppy, Robert Glasper Experience,
On the real, the late and great Charles Bradley!
Oh and Chicano Batman! Yeah!
That's kinda all the questions I have, is there anything else you guys wanna say or mention? The Crudes & Espresso (everyone was talking, couldn’t really keep track): You guys are really cool! Ah thank you guys!
The Crudes and Espresso are not only very talented musicians, but really cool guys. The fact they even responded to my Instagram Direct Message is great, but they also decided to meet up with complete strangers to do an Interveiw.
HUGE shoutout and thank you to both bands for agreeing to do this and hanging out with me and Mal.
Please check out their music and support them:
The Crudes
words by Mac Cornish
