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LBC CenterStage
Exploring the 00Soul of a D.J.
The evolution of a funky idea
by Lee Adams
 
For anyone who has yet to familiarize themselves with the Long Beach based 00Soul, this 8-piece multi-cultural boys club has been packing houses for more than 6 years with their unique brand of nouveau funk. Their 1998 debut release, "The Solid Sounds of the 8-piece Brotherhood," put the wah-wah pedal to the metal and may help put them among the ranks of other Long Beach luminaries such as Melissa, Sublime, Snoop and (borrowed from beyond the bridge) Mike Watt.
Classy, kitschy and not easily pigeonholed, the finger-licking street-smart funkadelia that is delivered up front by this band is actually an intelligent mix of funk, jazz, rock and Afro-Cuban rhythms. And the offbeat samples and loops that seem to direct rather than accompany every track may well be the cornerstone of 00Soul's success.
They tout themselves as making modern dance music from retro grooves but they are more commonly (and lovingly) described as turning out 70's inspired T.V. cop show theme music that brings to mind Huggy Bear, Barretta and John Shaft. Behind those samples is 00's founding father, loop guru and daring mastermind, D.J. Gary Tesch.
Perhaps funk music's most improbable impresario, Tesch is infamous in certain circles for his brilliant antics as promoter, spin doctor, and innovator of some very happy club memories over the years including rave-like shindigs Club Bad Trip and later The Funhouse which graced the fabulous Foothill for some long time. LongBeachCulture.org took the opportunity to talk to Tesch about his illustrious past as well as his continued contribution to the future of funk.
LBC: So before 00Soul, before you got into all this club stuff, who were you? When you were a kid what lead you to the music business in the first place?
Tesch: I just always wanted to be around it. Like, all I ever wanted for Christmas were eight-track tapes. I was always a loner.
LBC: Still have those eight-tracks?
Tesch: (Laughs) No. I was pretty hard on them. I did think about becoming a recording engineer in high school but I heard the money wasn't very good for a long time so... I fell into the D.J. thing because I was always the guy dragging his stereo to other people's parties. I got a break at one club by asking if I could D.J. a little with what they were already doing and they let me.
LBC: So you did a lot of free work to get your chops up and get your foot in the door.
Tesch: Yeah, it's like any hobby that becomes an obsession.
LBC: Tell me about Club Bad Trip?
Tesch: Back in 1984, I was the D.J. at this club, spinning a lot of 60's, 70's stuff mixed in with the current music of the day. And when the club closed, I decided to do something on my own, something I could promote myself. So at that point I went from D.J. to promoter. I had this idea to put together something as silly and 60's as I could with lots of smoke and black lights. We'd go into a club and create this atmosphere that would work as a backdrop to the music. Lots of bean bag chairs and beads and just, you know, so much smoke you couldn't really see.
LBC: You brought out all of that accoutrement to the club yourself?
Tesch: Yeah. Well I had quite a collection of that kind of accoutrement already and I would frequent thrift stores and garage sales looking for more. Anything I could find.
LBC: Do you still have that stuff?
Tesch: (Laughs.) No. You know, the problem with things like that is that stuff gets destroyed. Taking it in and out of the club ever week. We had a sign made out of Tinker Toys, a 3-dimensional piece that said "Club Bad Trip," out front. We were spending too much time just gluing things back together.
LBC: So you were doing this in the club that closed down?
Tesch: No. I was doing it at the Meadowlark Country Club in Huntington. Then there was this huge drug bust and they closed that club, too. Apparently I was the only one working there who wasn't dealing drugs. I actually came out unscathed. I hear they have a file on me but...
LBC: Whew.
Tesch: Yeah, it was a mess. But it was a great scene while it lasted. It was designed for people to have fun and we did have fun.
LBC: Now at that point, there were no other musicians playing with you, right?
Tesch: Right. I was just playing discs, and real sloppily I might add. Like, I'd put on the Stooges for three cuts then maybe get around to putting on something else. I was mixing in some disco, too. It was all over the place.
LBC: So when you put together The Fun House, you moved to the Foothill?
Tesch: Well, what happened was Meadowlark got busted by the Huntington Beach Police Department so I moved to a club called Isis and did the Bad Trip there for another two or three years. Then I met up with the artist, Kurt Benbenek, who ended up making a lot of the pieces that we used for The Funhouse. The Funhouse was another idea I'd had for a while.
LBC: What kind of things did he put together?
Tesch: Oh, he did murals and 3-dimensional pieces that my wife worked on and some other people. We brought in lots of mannequins. There was a mural-type doorway you'd walk through to enter the Funhouse, clowns you'd pass, a lot of carnivalesque kinds of things. It was a big production. Took us two or three days to set it up.
LBC: I hear you were spinning discs among carnival games like "Pin the Needle on the Junkie" and "Knock the Head Off the Dead Guy."
Tesch: (Laugh) Yeah, that was the Funhouse. Did you heard about "Plug Bunkie?" That was where you'd throw a bean bag in the clown's butt and his eyes would light up and he made farting noises. That was always the favorite.
LBC: Yeah. Everybody I've mentioned this interview to has had a story to tell me.
Tesch: It was all eighth grade humor.
LBC: Then somewhere during the Funhouse experience, you started bringing musicians into the scene.
Tesch: Right. It was so much about the scene and the games and stuff that the music was getting lost. So I tried to pull it back to the music. I started spinning some Caribbean, African, some Latin, some jazz. It was getting boring just leaning on the carnival thing. That's when I brought in some horn players and percussionists to accompany the records. That setup was called La Conga.
LBC: You were playing to huge crowds as I understand it.
Tesch: Well, it was a labor of love for the first six months at least. We did that at the old Java Lanes. We did it at Bogart's in the Marina before that closed down. Then we moved to the Foothill and did it there every Friday night. It took a while before we started pulling in big crowds. The musician thing was very experimental at that point. This whole band thing came out of a lot of experimentation.
LBC: So, what was the year when you finally settled into the Foothill?
Tesch: Early nineties. I had to beg Bonnie (Bonnie and Ron Price were the original owners and operators of the Long Beach landmark.) to let me have Fridays. I understand I was the first person she ever let do anything like that. But at the time the club was slow on Fridays so she gave it a try.
LBC: So what are we going to do now that the Foothill is gone?
Tesch: We were ready to move on. We needed to stop the monthly thing and move forward. It was too easy to get comfortable with that. So, it's forcing us to get on with it. I don't know what Long Beach is going to do.
LBC: So what was the leap from The Funhouse to 00Soul? When did you decide, hey, these guys sounds more like a band than just a party so...
Tesch: Well, those guys all had other gigs. Nobody could rehearse. I wasn't very focused on putting together a band at the time. None of us were. So I started getting serious about working on my own, collecting samples. But the technology wasn't really there yet. You could only sample in mono and you couldn't really get things to mix and match like you wanted so I set about putting together an actual band, people who wanted to rehearse. And that was really a recording project, not a live project, when I made that transition. I just wanted to hear what this stuff would sound like.
LBC: Who joined up?
Tesch: Ian Yater was the first player I brought on board. He had done the club thing with me for a while. He's a great guitar player but he didn't always have the patience for the looseness of that early stuff. It was always hit and miss.
LBC: It was just a jam back then.
Tesch: Right. So he was into putting something together where we could think things out and rehearse, get it tight. So we started bringing in people and it kept getting bigger and bigger. We were trying to get the sound we wanted.
LBC: Now, I'm hearing this and I'm thinking, okay, you convinced eight guys to work for free? For how long?
Tesch: Because I already had a thing going at the Foothill and was working with people like Steven Hodges and Anthony Arvizu, we were bringing in like 300 people every night. So, I had the venue and the crowd. That afforded us the opportunity to experiment and actually make some money. Not a lot of money at first but some. And the excitement was there. Everybody thought this could really be something.
LBC: You must have worked your ass off to just get that to be something that would be interesting enough to, you know, bring eight players together. That's impressive.
Tesch: Like anything, you go in thinking you can pull it off. We started in September and it was summer before we ever played live as 00Soul. Then we'd do a great show and then a not-so-great show. It took another year before we were really solid. But all through that time, we still had the Foothill. At first, it was probably my name that brought people in, people who knew me from the other gigs, but it very quickly became the band that was filling the house.
LBC: When I listen to the album, the melodies and rhythms seem to accompany what you're doing instead of maybe the more traditional approach of laying the samples and loops on top. Very conceptual pieces. How do you guys write the songs?
Tesch: All different ways. Early on it was definitely loop driven. But then we found as we recorded that some of the work was better without them. So now, sometimes I just add flavor to what's going on.
LBC: One of the most interesting things about it, for me, is that there's almost a narrative to the songs via the samples you've brought in. And in that there aren't any lyrics, predominately anyway, they sort of guide the listener along. It's a very unique approach. I hope you don't get too far away from that.
Tesch: Oh, no. We won't. I mean, I'm not a musician at all. But I do have an ear for what I like and I just bring that in. We just try to do things together, to listen to each other. They fall into what I've brought in or I add flavor to what they're doing. It goes back and forth. I'm just another layer to make it more interesting.
LBC: When "Brotherhood" came out, it came out to great reviews. One of the awards you've garnered is the L.A. Weekly Music Award for Best Dance Music Artist in 2000. How did they hear about you?
Tesch: I think it's just about getting people to the shows. We got lucky and someone from the Weekly was at the club one night.
LBC: That's a nice way to have it happen. You didn't have to solicit yourselves at all.
Tesch: Well, that may be the one thing we don't do enough of. Probably the weakest thing about the band is that we don't promote ourselves well.
LBC: That's ironic, you being a promoter and all.
Tesch: Yeah, but I haven't gotten into that next level, management and all.
LBC: Did you get any radio attention from the good reviews and the Weekly award?
Tesch: We were on KPFK a lot. And world wide we did pretty well. Not locally so much. I think we got a little play on KCRW. We were hoping that would turn into more than it did. But around the country and in Europe we did better. And the Internet hit right at the right time.
LBC: Any label attention?
Tesch: We did when the album first came out but we had already packaged them and they didn't want to lose those initial local sales. They got cold feet. But honestly, we didn't really pursue it. The next one, we're definitely going to promote it up front.
LBC: Do you think the songs being predominately instrumentals has worked against you with radio or labels?
Tesch: If I had to guess, I'd say that's part of it, and that there's eight of us, and we're not spring chickens. That's if there's a reason at all.
LBC: What other bands are doing anything like this right now?
Tesch: Most of the stuff that's in the same ball park as 00Soul is more loop driven. And we don't do any scratching or anything. What we're doing is more organic, I think.
LBC: See, that's what I think it would be. There's nobody else doing it and labels are real scared of anything that's too different. Their mentality is like if it's hard to pigeonhole, it's gonna be hard to sell.
Tesch: Yeah. Regardless it's got to be about the songs. But if we had lyrics, it would help a lot. Our drummer, Mike Vasquez, is a great singer and writer. We'll be doing a couple tracks on the next one with vocals, a little more commercial, maybe.
LBC: Amazon.com has been real good to you fellas. Have you made a lot of sales from your relationship with them?
Tesch: Yeah, we sold a lot. Now, the record is a couple years old but we still sell some here and there.
LBC: How many have you sold?
Tesch: I don't know exactly, but over 7,000. We could've played all over Europe and across the country if we'd set up the first album correctly. So, we're going to do that this time around. Maybe use the weight of the first one to get us through the door. I don't think we're going to just hit the road, though. Most of us have kids now. But we'd like to make a living off of it. We all still have day jobs, you know.
LBC: Yeah that's rough, eight guys with families.
Tesch: We're definitely getting out more this time around but I never know where the road's going to lead. I think we just need to write. After we get this album done, we just need to start writing again. I have a lot of ideas I'm ready to bring in. You know how it is, when you're doing one thing you're anxious to move on to the next.
LBC: When is the next one coming out?
Tesch: We're just saying spring.
LBC: Do you know what you're going to call it?
Tesch: Nope.
LBC: Where will we be able to find it?
Tesch: Fingerprints in Long Beach and our web site. At the shows. We always have them at the shows. There's different stores you can get them at at different times. The best way to know is to go to our web site and find out where they are.
LBC: You're gonna be at the Lava Lounge on New Year's Eve, right?
Tesch: Yeah, two sets. I think we start at 8 or 9. And we're looking forward to it. We haven't really done a serious Long Beach show since the Foothill closed.
LBC: You guys have been together now for over six years.
Tesch: We try not to think about it.
LBC: How have you managed that?
Tesch: I think it's because we all still believe in the project. We get along better now than we did at the beginning. We know each other better now. At first, egos always come into play. But then everybody starts listening to everybody else. And we just believe in it. We feel like if the timing is right, you know how things go in this business, but if the timing is right, we could take the music to the next level. And I think we do have something special. We enjoy it more than not. And when you really know and respect the people you're working with, the time on stage is a great feeling.
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