Luscious Jackson

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Luscious Jackson

Rock band

Jill Cunniff told the Detroit Free Press of her band, Luscious Jackson, “People are always telling us, ‘I don’t know how to describe it and where to put it,… We’re just making this music, y’know—it’s just about liking music and being able to dance to it and having a great time.” The group, which began when bassist-singer Cunniff and guitarist-singer Gabby Glaser created some homemade recordings, has evolved into a foursome that melds alternative rock, hip hop, soul and virtually every other genre into an unclassifiable stew. “I like the fact that people can’t really label us,” Glaser confirmed in the online magazine Intune.

Glaser, Cunniff and drummer Kate Schellenbach grew up in New York City, absorbing everything from punk rock to rap with equal voraciousness. Glaser and Cunniff were pals from adolescence on. “We wanted to attract attention,” Cunniff told Chris Heath of Details. “We made a spectacle of ourselves—the way we dressed, the way we danced, the music we liked.” Eventually they met Schellenbach, and the three got more and more involved in the developing punk rock scene. “We saw a lot of great bands [together], but we also dug early hip hop,” Schellenbach said in a Grand Royal records publicity interview. “It was very connected to growing up in the public school system; party music without a lot of meaning, that played with words and breakbeats. The cool kids in high school were into hip hop, and we’d learn all the rhymes. There was great dancing, and graffiti art. It was very New York.”

Beastie Girls and New Ventures

By her teens, Schellenbach was playing drums for a punkish New York rap/rock band called The Beastie Boys. Yet when the group hooked up with rising record maven Rick Rubin, they fired her; Rubin disliked the idea of a female rapper. “I was mad but I really repressed it,” she recalled. Glaser and Cunniff knew members of the band, too, from the New York scene, and had played with Beastie Mike D. in a group called the Young Aboriginies; relations with the Beastie Boys would be patched up later on—in grand style.

Cunniff went to school in California, while Glaser went abroad. When they returned to New York, they began playing music together. Their mutual love of sampled instruments, funky grooves and underground rock led to the EP In Search of Manny, which was released on the Grand Royal label, run by Beastie Boy Mike D. Schellenbach and Cunniff’s keyboardist friend Vivian Trimble joined up just before the disc was completed. Billboard compared the EP to “a radio tuned to several stations at once.” A substantial buzz was generated by Manny—

For the Record…

Members include Jill Cunniff , bass, vocals; Gabby Glascr , guitar, vocals; Kate Schellenbach , drums; Vivian Trimble , keyboards.

Band formed early 1990s in New York, NY. Released debut EP, In Search of Manny, on Grand Royal/Capitol label, 1992; released full-length debut, Natural Ingredients, 1994; played Lollapalooza rock festival, 1994; contributed songs to soundtracks of films Clueles. (1995) and Girlstow. (1996); contributed tracks to compilations Ain’t Nuthin’ but a She Thing (1995) and O Come All Ye Faithful: Rock for Choice (1996); Cunniff and Trimble released album as the Kostars, 1996; Schellenbach performed in duo Ladies Who Lunch.

Addresses: Record company —Grand Royal, P.O. Box 26689, Los Angeles, CA 90026. E-mail— [email protected]. Website —http://www.grandroyal.com/Bands/LusciousJackson/.

including a good spot on the prestigious Jazz& pop poll of Village Voice critics —and the group set to work on their first full-length album, Natural Ingredients. Released in 1994, that album made good on the promise of the debut EP and showed an expanded range. Enthused Spin’s Terri Sutton, “Natural Ingredients is defiantly catchy, the sensual soup of pop and soul, musicianship and sampling, that LJ’s debut EP, In Search of Manny, struggled to stir up.”

High-Profile Tours

One track from the album, “City Song,” appeared on the soundtrack of the hit film Clueless, and soon Luscious Jackson was on tour with the Beastie Boys and megastars R.E.M. Perhaps more exciting, however, was their spot on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour, alternative rock’s high-profile traveling festival. “Oh, it was great exposure —and a lot of fun,” Cunniff recalled in the Detroit Free Press. “We’d play to so many kids every day, huge crowds of people. I don’t know if they all knew who we were or not, but it certainly helped us on the tour we’re doing now [fall of 1994]; we’re selling lots of tickets in the cities we played during Lollapalooza.” 1994 also saw the band performing original music to accompany Easy, a Dance Theater Workshop production choreographed by Vivian Trimble, the group’s keyboard player.

Luscious Jackson returned to the studio in 1996 with producer Daniel Lanois, best known for his work with U2, Peter Gabriel and other rock luminaries. Lanois’ gift for finding the emotional core of groove-based music had made him a hot property, and he told Rolling Stone what drew him to Luscious Jackson. “What attracted me was that I thought they were smart lyricists,” he explained to the magazine’s Keith Spera. “And secondly, I thought they had a fresh angle, and selfish me would like to be associated with something new.” Cunniff, meanwhile, compared Lanois to “a long-lost brother,” and gave her impressions of the producer’s New Orleans studio/home: “It’s like your rich aunt’s house that you never had.”

“From a Completely Different Place”

Lanois and the band placed the emphasis this time on a more live feel. “We really wanted to look at arrangements and think about arrangements from a completely different place,” Trimble explained in Gavin. “Starting with a simple song and then building from there as opposed to the kind of building process that had happened more often in the past, which was in the studio with looping.” The result of this collaboration was the album Fever in, Fever Out, a more expansive collection of material that showed a newfound maturity and confidence. The single “Naked Eye” enjoyed substantial rotation on radio and MTV.

Fever in, Fever Out didn’. bowl over the critics, however. “Unfortunately, the group seems to have lost some of its bounce,” ventured People reviewer Peter Castro, who bemoaned the presence on Fever of “slow, edgeless departures from the funky formula that made [the band] so entertaining in the past.” Sara Scribner of the Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, found the album little more than “palatable,” placing much of the blame on Lanois. “He layers and layers their sounds,” she wrote, “until each beat, every loop, feels muffled and twice removed.” The San Francisco Bay Guardia. disagreed, crediting Lanois with “drawing the band out of their creative shell and lending a luxuriant denseness to the barest of dance loops.” The members of Luscious Jackson, meanwhile, paid little heed to reviews. Cunniff explained in Gavin that Fever “is not about abrasive sounds. It’s about appealing, inviting sounds. We tried to make an effort to keep it smooth and nice to listen to.” She elaborated on the issues informing this decision: “A lot of it is our time,” she reflected. “People in the 70s were living fast and dying young, and most of those lyrics came from rockers who were hanging out in the studios doing coke all night. I think times now are really rough, and death is so around us with AIDS and violence. It seems like life is so precious, you know?”