text by Jorge Hernandez
Let’s be real: most albums featuring everyone and their mothers pretty much suck. Not because of anyone’s moms, per se, but because collaborations tend to over-reach for street cred, moving units, or redemption via some charitable gesture. So one can be forgiven for popping The Spirit of Apollo into the laptop with some trepidation. After all, how the hell are a dozen plus artists (including David Byrne, Santogold, Kool Keith, Tom Waits, RZA, M.I.A., Chuck D, Method Man) over as many tracks going to produce anything solid, let alone righteously funky? Well, shut my mouth.
The debut by NASA (North America South America) is a musical labor of love that seamlessly rolls from intro to outro, one head-scratching, head-nodding track at a time. The magic behind Sam “Squeaky E Clean” Spiegel and Ze “DJ Zegon” Gonzales’s project reveals itself within the first few moments of conversation with Spiegel. That is, once you can manage to make either of your phones work properly.
Calling back for a third time, after a day’s worth of press, he jokes, “Man, I was deep in my spiel, too. I was totally rolling. Anyway, we’d be in the studio making tracks, thinking ‘Wouldn’t so and so be great for this, or that track.’ It was basically us writing letters to people. We didn’t publicize the record, pretty much until it was done. It took about 5 and a half years to make it.”
All of the funding for Apollo came from money earned through Squeak E Clean Productions, his commercial production company. “We did enough work that we could go do whatever we wanted.” That work included “Hello Tomorrow”, a track with Karen O. that started out as music for an Adidas commercial, but wound up becoming so popular, it was eventually released as single. He’s also scored “I Heart Huckabees” director David O. Russell’s political satire, “Nailed” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel, though he’s uncertain when the film (plagued by repeated shut downs) will be released. The range of work, he says, “Helps to work out different parts of your brain. You end up working on a variety of things that require different styles of music.”
Another ambitious investment they made was to the recording process itself. “We tried to be in the room with everyone when they recorded. And whenever possible, we recorded with everyone in the same room. So there was no emailing files, really.” In the case of “Strange Enough” featuring Karen O., Fatlip and Old Dirty Bastard, the approach was especially poignant. “We ended up recording with him a couple weeks before he passed away. Those are not pulled vocals from anywhere; they’re real, originals.”
The all-for-one spirit extends beyond the studio. There are 4 different covers for the CD, including one by the artist who created the iconic blue/red “Hope” Obama poster, Shepard Fairey. And they often recruit local artists and performers while on tour. “Since we can’t have all these people with us, we like to use locals, to keep the vibe going. It makes each show a unique experience. We always meet really cool people that way.”
In case you can’t make it to one of their upcoming gigs, including a stop at Coachella, there’s a documentary about the whole experience. Predictably, it features multiple directors. “Honestly, man, it’s always a different homeboy of mine behind the camera. We’ll just call someone and say, ‘You wanna go to Sweden and record with Lykke Li?’ There’s footage of us recording with George Clinton, chemically enhanced. There’s some animation in it, from some of our favorite visual artists that we work with. It doesn’t have any tour footage now, but you never know. We’re off to Europe to do a few dates, kind of a warm up. Maybe something will make it on there.”
Somehow, Spiegel still finds the time to interact with fans directly through a hype blog, which he updates frequently. Considering how hectic his 2009 calendar is looking, it may be the best way to keep up with him and NASA’s far-reaching mission. It promises to be one long, strange trip.
