Straight reports: For reasons no one has ever been able to quite figure out, bands featuring movie stars tend to fare about as well as movies featuring rock stars. Or, to put things in simpler terms, for every Dead Man’s Bones, there are a dozen Dogstars. Source Via @lolamisweetlove.
Los Angeles–based 100 Monkeys has proven one of those rare exceptions to the rule, the quintet somehow selling out almost every show it plays and yet remaining largely underground. That the band has managed to establish itself as a legitimate act—as opposed to the group with that guy from the Twilight movies—is somehow fitting. After all, 100 Monkeys, which is scheduled to release a new album this spring, was already a going concern when Hollywood embraced guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jackson Rathbone, better known to teenage vampire fans as Jasper Hale. Reached in Tinseltown, singer Ben Graupner traces the origin of the group back to drummer Ben Johnson flying in from Philadelphia right around the time that Rathbone was scheduled to join the Twilight franchise in Vancouver.
“Ben was going to stay in Jackson and I’s apartment for a month when Jackson was going to film the first Twilight,” Graupner recalls. “The two of us were planning on doing a recording project together. The day Ben flew into the airport, by the time I’d picked him up and brought him back to the house, Jackson had found out they’d pushed back shooting for a month. So the three of us ended up in the studio together, which is where we wrote the album Monster de Lux. It was right when the band was turning out its first presentable work that the movies were starting.”
Monster de Lux hit the streets in 2009, a year that would also see the release of a follow-up record, Grape, both discs establishing 100 Monkeys as a group determined to be all things to all music fans. The band often gets tagged as a independent funk-rock unit, suggesting the Red Hot Chili Peppers during the freak-flag years. As Grape proves, though, the Monkeys have more in common with genre-jumpers like Ween, the group cruising effortlessly from hayride country (“Clippity Clop”) to sweaty soul-man blues (“Arizona”) to gothic disco punk (“Orson Brawl”).
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“The genre-jumping started because this band started out, live on-stage, at this bar in Hollywood,” Graupner says. “Originally, we didn’t have a single prepared song. We would just go in, show up, and play music all night, trying to keep the rhythm going so people could dance and have a good time. Out of that, you never really wanted to play the same kind of stuff.”
Even today, on-stage is where 100 Monkeys remains most comfortable, with its buzzed-about performances helping earn the group band-you-need-to-know honours in publications like Spin. Aside from the fact that the Monkeys switch up instruments every second song, show highlights inevitably include Graupner and company canvassing the crowd for song ideas, and then creating improv-based tunes on the spot. Yes, there’s more to 100 Monkeys than a chance to see a Twilight star in the flesh.
“There’s a lot of outside publicity and press that comes to us from Jackson’s acting career,” the singer acknowledges. “But, on top of that, there’s almost like an alt following that’s been built around our live shows. There are people who are addicted to the live 100 Monkeys shows. I love our albums and our recorded music, but there’s something magical that happens when the five of us get on-stage together in front of a crowd.”
100 Monkeys plays Venue on Friday (March 4).
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