photo: Jessie Rogers

Western Massachusetts gets a bad rap. I’m not saying I didn’t flee immediately upon the completion of my educational requirements (like, I literally left on graduation day…), or that the winters are particularly pleasant, but with UMass, Amherst College, Smith, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and a myriad of other colleges in such close proximity, the Pioneer Valley has produced it’s share of musical greatness. Bands like Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr and Apollo Sunshine all got their start in the dorms and basements of Western Massachusetts. And maybe you’ve heard of that little alternative rock outfit called the Pixies?

I got the chance to sit down with Casey Hayman (a.k.a. Platypus Complex) and Joe Cardozo of Cold Duck Complex, the hip-hop outfit made up of members born and raised in the frigid west, to talk about turning bedroom jam sessions into their massive UMass following, what it means for the collective now that they no longer live in the same dorm room (or, uh, state) and what’s the deal with this whole “Cold Duck Complex Presents…” thing.

–Jessie Rogers

OPENING ACT: THE TEAPARTY 10

On our site you may have seen the TeaParty 10, the questions that we ask everyone that we interview.

Joe: Oh, I did see that. Oh, I was dreading that.  I’d forgotten all about it though.

Well it doesn’t have anything to do with music, so you guys are off-the-clocks in terms of being a band. We are just humans, now.

J: But I love hiding behind my badge…

OK! So! Question number one: What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Casey: Grape Nuts.

J: Oh that’s a good call. Although I also really like Wheatabix.

C: That’s like a British thing….

J: Well, you know, a lot of my family is British…or African…

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles or Mouth from The Goonies?

J: I would like to say Mouth, only because I know who that is.

C: I think I would say Mouth, only because he’s Corey Feldman.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

J: Blender. Because it’s takes all kinds of tastes and makes them one.

C: Uh…I think I’d be a toaster oven. Not a regular toaster, a toaster oven. I can adapt to many different uses.

You wake up to find that you got a tattoo. You don’t remember where it came from. What did you get?

J: Probably a tear drop….in my eye.

C: Probably the Chinese symbol for harmony… on my inner thigh.

Same thing except this time you are inexplicably one of Jim Henson’s muppets. Which muppet are you?

C: I don’t know which one…but I’d be one of those guys up on the balcony. I don’t know their names. One of their names is Waldorf.

Mustache or jowls?

C: Mustache. I think that’s Waldorf

J: Wait did you say I have a tattoo of one or I am one?

You are one.

J: See the first thing that comes to mind is Animal because I have  this Animal T-shirt and I feel like he’s seeping into me. But I think I’d be more likely to be the Swedish Chef.

Are you, uh,….all over the place?

J: No, not at all. I just feel a connection to him. He’s got food, he’s all over the place…

C: Nobody understands him

J: Nobody understands him, man.

C: I think I’d like to get a tattoo of Waldorf.

J: OK “Harmony” and Waldorf on your two inner thighs.

Awesome. If you were a type of  facial hair, what type of facial hair would you be?

[…Long, thoughtful pause…]

J: Well, I’ve always had this vision of checkerboard… beard…face… I’ve always wanted that. I haven’t done it. I’ve done a lot of strange facial and head hair but…

Checkerboard beardface?

J: Checkerboard beardface.

C: I’d be a neckbeard.

What is your dance-around-your-apartment-in-your-underwear song?

J: I hate to say this, especially because it’s been, like, five years, but that Kelly Clarkson song, “Since You’ve Been Gone.”

It’s such a crowd-pleaser.

J: It’s a can’t–miss jam.

C: …?

J: You can see the style here. I say the first thing that comes into my head and I don’t know if it’s true or not. But he gives you the real deal.

I don’t know…checkboard beardface was a pretty great answer.

J: No that was real. I meant that with all my heart.

C: Well, this is not the most hip answer at this point. But I think  if I was honest I would have to say I think “Paper Planes” still does it for me.

J: If I were to answer another one that was also older… I don’t even know the name of it… It was on that Atmosphere album right after “God Loves Ugly”….”Trying To Find A Balance.” That song used to get me fired up.

Would you rather be a sumo wrestler or a rodeo clown.

J: I actually wanted to be a sumo wrestler when I was little. I was really fat when I was little and I was really upset about it and looking for a reason for it to be OK…and I wanted to be a sumo wrestler.

C: I think I’d have to be a rodeo clown because I have a clown fascination. A lot of people are scared by clowns, I’m not scared by them…they have a magnetic quality.

If you were a type of cheese, what would you be?

C: Jalapeno cheddar. Or buffalo mozzarella.

J: Goat cheese. Soft and spreadable.

What is your favorite word?

J: The first word that came to my word was “gesture.” It can mean a lot of things. It can be very meaningless like a flip of the wrist, but a kind gesture can go a long way. It can be very meaningful.

C: I think mine would be “ambivalence.” Not in the sense of not caring about something… but the original sort of meaning of the word which is feeling two ways about something at the same time. I feel like that sort of characterizes the way I see a lot of things.

Photo: Jessie Rogers

THE MAIN EVENT: THE TPB INTERVIEW WITH COLD DUCK COMPLEX

So tell me about how you guys got started.

C: Three of us went to high school together—Joe, Makaya who is our drummer, and our original keyboardist was Jesse Goldman. They started playing together in high school and I was making sort of primitive, hip-hop based songs in my bedroom and then we sort of came up with the idea of collaborating and did some things together and it just took off from there. Joe and I were in college together while Makaya was still in high school and we ended up meeting Jeff D’Antona, our next keyboardist.

And when was this all going on? Where?

J: 2001 we all got together… 1999 Casey and I were freestyling in Casey’s bedroom…2000 I started playing with Jesse and Makaya… 2001 Casey started playing with us.  This was in Amherst.

So you are all actually from western Mass. And you still live there?

J: I’m in New York and Makaya is in Chicago.

What does that mean for you guys as a band?

J: For the last couple years, it’s been pretty sparse. We only get together every couple of months. We haven’t been playing a lot of shows. Most of our time has been working on this album. Well, you know, with this coming out, we’re playing a bunch of shows now, a bunch in September. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep it up and play more regularly.

Let’s talk about the album. It’s a “Cold Duck Complex Presents…” album?

J: Well what that means is that I’d had the idea for a while that I wanted to produce an album of stuff that was more of what I had written, music-wise. When this came around, the timing just seemed right. We were all spread out and we couldn’t work together as easily and regularly. And a friend of mine I’d met named Ed, I’d just put an offer out there to him to help me make an album.  It just seemed like the timing was right. You know, it’s our band. Most of the songs on the album are things that we’d already been playing together as a band. The basic idea behind it is that Cold Duck Complex is still a collective, but this is a smaller project within Cold Duck Complex. And at times it includes all of the members of Cold Duck Complex and we may play shows with different line-ups and things like that, but the idea is to just give us more flexibility in that way—to keep the whole thing as a collective even when we’re all spread out. It was a great opportunity for me, to have these guys’ support to get to do something like that. And it’s given us some fuel to still be able to do our thing as a group.

So what about your creative process as a collective? How does your music get made?

J: We did a lot of just playing together and starting there. When Casey was first coming to our rehearsals and thinking about joining the band, we would just be playing music for an hour, hour-and-a-half at a time and he would just be sitting there writing… there was not the intent of writing songs or doing anything like that. We were just all sitting in a room all doing our own thing at the same time.

C: It’s always varied a lot. Sometimes Joe or Makaya will come in with a riff or beat and I’ll write to that. Sometimes I’ll have a bunch of stuff already written and I’ll be looking for a certain kind of mood and they’ll just play. More recently we’ve also done songs where Makaya or I have had sample bass beats that we made on our computers and we’ve based full band songs off that. It’s been sort of all-of-the-above, but that’s sort of always kept it fresh in that way. Our creative process hasn’t gotten stale.

J: The nice thing about this band is everyone in the band is capable of writing full songs by themselves. There are songs on our previous albums where Casey wrote the bass line…just brought in the whole idea for the song by himself. Same thing with Makaya, same thing with me, same thing for Jeff.

What kind of influences do you have? Either individually or as a band? You all seem to have different musical backgrounds.

J: Yeah. Um… yeah we do…

[Laughs]

C: Short answer is yes. As a teenager I was really hardcore into the underground hip-hop scene of the mid- to late-90s.  The New York underground hip-hop scene was really great at the time.  People like Company Flow… I was listened to basically only hip-hop music. Eventually my horizons started to broaden a little bit, but I definitely came from a very strictly hip-hop background. De La Soul was just my… I just played it over and over again. These guys came from totally different backgrounds than that.

J: I started out listening to grunge and classic rock. I got really into jazz later on, in high school. I wasn’t into that much hip-hop, besides like Wu-Tang and Tupac, until I met Casey and then we just listened to a lot. Pretty much all the hip-hop I listen to came from Casey. And then Makaya’s dad has been a professional jazz drummer for…30, 40 years… so he has a really deep background in jazz.

C: So it all worked out. It’s a cool thing. I mean, Jeff really loves Ben Folds

J: Billy Joel…

C: Yes Billy Joel. He brings in that… that softer side.

J: I mean, our band started more because we were friends than because we were going in the same direction as musicians, and the music came out of that.

C: It always adds tensions…but it’s a creative tension. We’ve always been able to resolve that in a positive way.

So you’re all from western Mass, but do you feel any sort of connection to the city?

J: I think we feel a pretty strong connection in Boston because our biggest fanbase is coming out of UMass and so many people from UMass are from Boston. Boston was the first city outside of western Mass where we had big shows.

C: It kind of happened almost all-of-a-sudden. Because first we were just playing at UMass and then at a certain point, maybe a couple years in, all the people who were listening to us graduated and moved to Boston or back to Boston and all of a sudden we had this  built-in fanbase in Boston. So we’d come out here and get good shows going at the Middle East.

J: And we played at Bill’s Bar… I can’t think of where else we played. The Middle East is by far the best. There’s just a good vibe there. The upstairs is just a good size for when you’re new, it’s pretty small. And then when we got to play downstairs it was great. We played at the Paradise a few times when they had the front  room there… That was OK.

Do you feel a connection to the Boston music scene? Are there other artists here that you are following?

C: Back when I was first listening to underground hip-hop I said New York hip-hop but it was more of like and East Coast thing.  There were definitely a lot of Boston acts. I was big into Mr. Lif, for example, early on and then he got a lot bigger. When I was in high school, I would come out the Boston for hip-hop shows, though not necessarily Boston artists.  One of my first hip-hop shows was with you…

J: Yeah we saw Del the Funky Homosapien.

C: Yeah and he was too stoned to perform so he just sat on the side of the stage the whole time but…. But it was fun. It seems like because Boston is a big college town,  it’s always had a good hip-hop scene—a good music scene in general. One of the first hip-hop groups I was into was the Schizophrenics. I never got to see them live because I think they broke up at some point…but that’s a really good Boston group that I was into.

Well what are you guys listening to right now?

J: I’m the wrong person to ask about that… I’ve been working on so much music I haven’t been able to listen to anyone else.

C: I’ve been in a sort of phase for a while where I was listening to so much hip-hop all the time and then I sort of got off hip-hop because I wasn’t really liking that much new hip-hop music but recently I’ve been getting into the new album from this past winter by POS, out of Minnesota. He’s part of the Sol collective in Minneapolis, Doom Tree. So I’ve been really into that and that’s the first new hip-hop in a while that sort of caught my ear and got me really excited about it.

J: I was listening to that new Dirty Projectors album.

C: It’s pretty good.

J: I liked it.

It’s definitely a favorite amongst musicians. And a lot of other people are kind of like…??

J: Well that’s the funny thing. I can see that because I don’t feel like I love listening to it, I feel like I appreciate what they are doing.  It’s really innovative and it’s really interesting…but I don’t feel much when I’m listening to it. I’m just like “Oh! Good for them.”

Photo: Jessie Rogers

Cold Duck Complex will be back in town once again for their show at PA’s Lounge on September 11th.