INTERVIEW WITH THE BREDRIN DADDYS
When You Come to Long Beach (LBC Reggae Special)
Long Beach in California has been a fertile breeding ground for quality reggae and hip hop for years now. Ever heard of Snoop Dog or Sublime? Of course you have. Long Beach’s costal but urban setting has been the successful foundation for irie reggae and hip hop mixed with dangerous and thoughtful lyrics. Long Beach is a city that captures both the struggles and good times that only California can create and right in its heart comes The Bredrin Daddys – a reggae and hardcore band that bleeds Long Beach.
After more than 13 years together The Bredrin Daddys has ridden a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows. In its time the band has gone through 4 drummers, 6 guitar players, 3 bass players, 2 managers and 2 record labels. Yet as 1DaBred (1 of 3 Bredrin Daddy MCs) describes to The Pier there is something fresh in the air and almost a new beginning is emerging for this veteran band. There are certainly some big things brewing down in Long Beach.
The Pier: So what is it that makes Long Beach special and why does reggae feature so heavily in the sound from bands from the area and for you personally? 1DaBred: Well, I moved to Long Beach when I was seven. You get this vibe in Long Beach, there is just this old history vibe. I can’t explain it and you just feel it through the old buildings and near the beach and Times Square. When I was in Junior High I think the biggest influence for me personally was Bob Marley day at Long Beach Arena. Every year they throw this Bob Marley Ragamuffin Festival.
It just always seems Long Beach is just steeped in reggae and punk too. Obviously that grew when Sublime came out well. What’s funny is Sublime use to play backyard parties in high school for free beer. Most of time they were too fucked to play. Honestly, Bradley would be so drunk he would drop his microphone and not be able to find it. On certain occasions he wouldn’t show up and me and Tom (BD MC, The Cracka) would actually get on the microphone with them and ramble off some half-assed lyrics, but at the time we weren’t taking any of this really seriously. Then Sublime blew up on the radio and I was like ‘are you kidding me? Sublime is on the radio?’ It was almost like a joke, these dudes are just a bunch of partiers. If they can do this then we can do this.
I also actually went to Junior High with Snoop and that was another weird experience to see him on TV. As for a Long Beach goes, you can always count on it not changing much as far as the music that comes out of it. You might go to another city and there is this new-age Goth band or something, here you are not going to get that out of Long Beach. It pretty much sticks to the reggae, hip hop and punk.
The Pier: For those that may unfamiliar with the Bredin Daddys. Could you give readers a brief rundown of the band’s long history? 1DaBred: We started back in 1994. I was singing in another band right out of high school called Liquid Ale. We played a kind of psychedelic, funk, blues and a little bit of reggae. I knew even then I wanted to get deeper into hip hop and reggae. So I brought in a friend of mine Tom (Cracka) on a couple of songs with that band. We realized this wasn’t the kind of music we wanted to make. So we contacted a buddy of ours who was in another band and asked him to make us a couple of beats. We ended up with a demo tape that was supposed to be for our own enjoyment. I guess that demo tape got in the hands of Deathrow records and Snoop Dog. They really liked it and ended up paying us a visit and told us we had something going on here.
We didn’t even have a live band, it was just a couple of us and a guy who made beats. So we formed a band and we had a couple of record deals on the table with Motown and Mammoth. We had a buzz going. We made a kind of foolish decision right there in the beginning. Instead of going with Motown or Snoop we signed with an indie label called Kingston Records. That turned out to be a really bad decision. They didn’t really have the money they said they did. It just turned ugly. We spent three years with them until we got out of our contract.At that point all the instrumentalists in the band decided to leave. So we got a whole new band back together with the same three vocalists we have always had. We started doing the whole Hollywood thing there for a while. From 98 to 2001, we were headlining over bands like System of a Down, Linkin Park, Papa Roach and we even headlined over Kid Rock one night. We saw all these guys blowing up. It seemed like we would play with them and 2 months later they were on the radio getting ridiculous airplay. We found out, that the labels didn’t like our manager at the time. They thought he was a greasy little dude. We also got views from different labels saying we play too many styles and we needed to pick one style and just go with that. We always had the point of view though: we like reggae, we like hip hop, really hardcore stuff and punk we are going to keep playing a mixture of that and do what we like to do.
We have had a revolving door of players, but the three singers - me, Tom and Richie have always stuck together and we are kind of on a new plain right now. We are getting a little older, our lyrics are getting a bit more conscious about life. Instead of just singing about partying, we are trying to make songs that have more commercial and marketable value and try to get that one hit song and make this into a career instead of just a fun hobby.
The Pier: Here’s a tough question cause The Bredrin Daddys cover a lot of styles musically, but if you could only play one song to a potential Bredrin Daddy’s fan or someone who visits the Pier and wants to check you guys out, what would it be? 1DaBred: It would have to be something reggae. From a bands pit of view I think we would want to represent ourselves with one of our crossover songs that blends the reggae with the hardcore, so that just shows we are a little different.
There are a lot of bands out there now doing the Sublime-y sound and that’s great and all. I like Sublime and I like a lot of these bands, but they all start sounding kind of the same. We try to set ourselves apart a little bit, so I would choose When Kingdom Comes or My Life. Not many people are mixing reggae with a real heavy metal or hardcore vibe and I think those songs confuses people enough to keep them interested. You don’t know whether to dance or not, at a show there’s a chance all of a sudden some girl is getting crushed in a mosh pit. It’s very confusing and we kind of like that.
(Above: The Bredrin Daddys rocking Float the Boat on the Queen Mary in 07)
The Pier: So your MySpace page says for folks to get ready for the ‘movement’? What exactly is this ‘movement’? 1DaBred: The ‘Movement’ is us and Chapter 11. We have known each other for a long time. Chapter 11 were like the little brothers of my friends. When we started in 1994 Scotty and Stoney would come to our shows. It was kind of how we looked at Sublime. They thought ‘hey if these guys can do it, then we can do it’. Chapter 11 looked at us the same way. They saw these friends of theirs packing out shows ridiculously at the time and so they thought ‘that’s what I want to do too’. So they got together and formed Chapter 11.
What’s funny is we have been friends for so long and whenever we play shows together they are always great. However, we have always had a… I don’t if it’s ego or not just really noticing it, but we never really decided let’s team up and make this into a joint venture.
Dave (Javier Contender) from Chapter 11 actually brought up the idea that we should really join forces and I said ‘yeah we should and we should have done this a long time ago’. Dave and Chapter 11 has its own quasi-record label call Dime City Records and I said ‘look we will represent ourselves as Dime City Records and try to start this label,’ kind of like Suburban Noize or any of those other popular underground labels.
So that’s the ‘movement’ if all goes well I’d like to bring some other bands and friends into it, like Bad Fish and Big Nes. We would like to make this into a family affair and see if we can raise each other up as much as possible.
The next decision was let’s do a double release with two of our songs and two of Chapter 11’s songs and that’s what we did. We ended up putting our song The Sign and a new song called When You Come to Long Beach on there. So we have put together this double single/promo to release this Sunday at the Reggae by the Bay Festival.
The Pier: So tell us about the new song, When You Come to Long Beach. 1DaBred: That song is representing the direction we are moving into right now. We have gone so long without thinking about wanting to make a hit song. We never sat down and write something that will get radio play, we have always written our music and whatever happens after that happens. This time around we are looking to make a full album where every single song has that potential. Hopefully that works out for us. Not that we want to sell out, but you can to certain age in your life where you go what the hell are you doing? I mean I’d like to do this as my career.
The Pier: So is there a new full-length album in the works from the Bredrin Daddys? 1DaBred: Oh yeah. We have When you Come to Long Beach and another song called Morning Sun done. We have four completed instrumentals that we need to sit down and write some lyrics to those. I think we are going to add 5 or 6 to that to complete the new album. We are shooting for a release early next year.
The Pier: You have got a bunch of old Bredrin Daddy songs up on iTunes? The band’s earlier early releases are hard to come by, is that why you put them up there? 1DaBred: Exactly, we had a lot of people calling us and writing to us asking ‘how do we get your old albums’. We had just self-released everything and so when we pressed an album we would get a thousand or 2 made and then we would sell out of them and would have moved onto the next album. When you are indie and doing everything yourself you have to concentrate on what is important at ‘that’ moment and the old albums just seemed like ‘that’s old, people have already heard that. Let’s put our money into a new album.’
We have released 6 to 7 albums over the years and we have none of them left. So I threw together all the old songs I could think of and made up my own album names. Area 562 - 20 From the Vault, on that I threw in all the songs people keep asking for on. The album Better Days (13 Rare Tracks) has the really strange songs that were recorded on a 8 track cassette recorder in a bedroom studio right when we first started out. The quality isn’t the greatest, but some people like that kind of rare stuff.
The Pier: Yeah like me, I like the rare stuff. For our readers outside of California, do you ever see the band touring or hope the band will be in a position to tour in the future? 1DaBred: We would love to tour. It’s always been a kind of thing where we have been looking for a little support. If a good indie label came to us and were willing to give us 'this much' money per show and get us out there. A couple of us have families now and kids, so financially it has got to make sense. So until then we will be the weekend warriors.
The Pier: As with all The Pier interviews I will end it by asking what is your favorite beach or summer destination? Basically just to give everyone sweet summer hang out ideas. Any good places in Long Beach? 1DaBred: Growing up I learnt how to surf at Huntington Cliffs, so that kind of holds a place in my heart as just as a great experience. The problem with Long Beach is we don’t really have any good surf here and the water isn’t that clean. Like Long Beach Clothing’s motto is ‘where the sewer meets the sea’ and that’s kind of the truth. We don’t have the cleanest water or waves here but we have that beach vibe. People from Long Beach know when we go to the beach we don’t go here. We go to Huntington, we go to Sunset, Newport or even Malibu.
There you go, don’t go in the water at Long Beach. Thanks 1DaBred for a great insight into the band and the music haven that is the LBC. Make sure you take a look at the Chapter 11 interview, the other half of this Pier LBC special.
To find out more about The Bredrin Daddys check out: