You mentioned that Jeff played with Kanye and Jay-Z, which is crazy because they’re two of the biggest names in music at this point and he was the first Lettuce keyboardist?
EK: He was pretty much original. That first summer in ‘92 we didn’t really have a keyboard player, so then when we started gigging in ‘94,’ 95, ‘96, and all the way up to 2002 he played with us. Then he moved to L.A. and Neil was around—Neil really helped a lot with the songwriting stuff—you can hear it on the new record. He’s got such a unique writing style, with a lot of the stuff on Rage and on the new record he brings a whole new different kind of creative vibe to the record. That’s when I think we really took a turn. That was a big turning point. He’s also a great bass player, so when him and Erick get on that vibe together they can go back and forth, it’s a cool dynamic.
Lettuce has an interesting place in the jamband scene. If you poll a lot of readers, I’d bet they say that Lettuce is a super group featuring members of Soulive, Break Science and Dave Matthews instead of your original project.
EK: It’s one of those things where I didn’t know what was going to happen. After Soulive started I always knew I wanted to play with those guys. The thing with that is, we’re such close friends that we all are hanging out, we’re all talking all the time. Like Adam and I write and produce together all the time, so it’s one of those things where it’s like “Ready? Do people have time? We want to do this and we want to do this.” And a lot of it is about demand—I think with the last album it caught a little bit of an underground following, where people heard it and then we get festival or booking offers and all of that reinvigorates the band. We’re like “Let’s get together and do this, and let’s do a few other shows.”
It’s funny man, it’s one of those things where we don’t think about it all that much—it’s a very natural thing. When it’s time to come together, it just happens. [Laughter.] We have a team and a great crew, like my brother Jeff [Krasno] and Morgan [Young]—we all facilitate to make it happen, there’s a lot of guys and a lot of schedules. Some of the guys are used to making a little more money than it is, but we have so much fun. That’s the thing about it that’s so great: it’s really all about the love of the music. No one is out there to make money, we’re all out here to play with each other, hang out with each other and make something we love. We never had a commercial angle—it was never about selling a million records. It was like, this is what we do, let’s set some mics up and press record.
It was literally your high school band.
EK: Really! We would listen to these tapes and steal them from each other. We would set up in the original jam room, which was at Berklee: they had this room in the basement of the dorm we all lived in, and we’d go in there and literally play all night ‘cause no one wanted to book the room after 11 PM. We’d take it over for the whole night and stay up all night and set up a tape recorder and do these crazy jams and then turn them into songs.
You should release some of those early jam sessions for the 20th anniversary celebration.
EK: I’ve been trying to hound Shmeeans—he has some of those old tapes from way back. There’s some floating around for sure. I have a friend who has a full on video of some shows: he used to videotape a lot of shows for us from ‘93 to ’95. That’d be a trip to check out now.
Outside the funk and jam worlds, you have also made a name for yourself as a hip-hop producer. When you are not on the road, do you find yourself in your studio working more of a 9-5 style production job—only with musician hours?
EK: Yeah, pretty much. And there’s a lot of stuff I do on the road as far as planning, and then listening and doing mixes. It was really hard for a while to figure out what to do. Now I try not to think so much, I let it all fall into place, which it generally does. Also, I’m spending a little less time on the road.
I’ve got concepts now as far as Royal Family stuff—we want to do bigger events where we do multiple nights at different places. We’re doing this thing called Snowlive which is just like Bowlive but in Colorado. We’re going to do a few nights there, a few nights in Lake Tahoe and then some Royal Family Ball-like events. Eventually, when it gets to the point where we can do a few nights in each city and have different members and guest artists cycle in and sit-in, kind of like a revue that they used to do back in the day. But it’s cool because I’d rather do that than tour all the time—we plan it all in advance, and it’s kind of like, “Ok, well now maybe it’ll work around that as far as the production stuff.” But yeah, there’s some really exciting projects coming up. It’s amazing, I get to work with so many cool people. At this point now I’m able to work with people that I believe in, people that I want to sign to our label. That’s the real idea: eventually, we can hear bands like the London Souls or Nigel and bring them into our camp and produce their record. I feel that the labels these days are so disjointed. Of course, we’ve got the Daptone label and a few out there. Our thing is probably a little more eclectic, you can be a rock band, you can be a soul singer, you could be a reggae artist for that matter, but if it’s good music then it’s worth it. [laughter] We want to create sort of a channel, whether it’s on the internet, or wherever, people know where to go to get some good quality, kind of soulful music.
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