Crazy Town: Come ‘Fly With Me.

Darkhorse is in stores now.

Without the Red Hot Chili Peppers, rap metallers Crazy Town may not have made it to their second album. When their 1999 release The Gift Of Game hit shelves, it was comprehensively ignored. But… Back in 1987 the Red Hot Chili Peppers released their amazing Mother’s Milk long player. Tucked away on the second side (because records had sides then) was a quirky little instrumental called Pretty Little Ditty. Why should we care? I hear your wondering. Crazy Town took a sample of a guitar line from Pretty Little Ditty and put together Butterfly, which went on to be one of the biggest summer tracks of 2001, and promptly saved them from the record company scrap heap.

After a couple of line up changes, the band has returned with their new album Dark Horse, a far more mature and expansive effort than their debut. Not only have the band forged ahead with their musical vision, but the success Butterfly has brought has allowed them to push ahead developing some newer acts

“We’re in the studio right now,” guitarist Craig ‘Squirrel’ Tyler explains. “We’re working on things outside of Crazy Town. We’ve got some time right now to work with a bunch of artists before we start touring like crazy, and we’re trying to make the most out of our time. There’s an act called the Dirty Unit, which is a hip-hop act. It’s some progressive shit. We have a metal band called Diminished, which are some 16 year old kids. It’s brilliant. It’s like Pantera meets Silverchair. They’re fantastic.”

“For whatever reason, record company now thinks we know what we’re talking about,” he laughs. “We’re going to bring up everybody we can as long as they’re listening.”

Checking the liner notes on your copy of Gift Of Game won’t turn up Craig’s name in the musical credits, having only recently become a full time member of the act. His links with the band however, do go back to before the recording of their debut disc.

“I was working with Orgy and Jay Gordon asked me if I wanted to come and do some production with a band called Crazy Town. I was doing a lot of live sound to keep busy. I worked on B-Boy 2000 and Only When I’m Drunk, and we’ve been working together ever since.”

And of his full time acquisition by the band?

“They had been asking me to join the band, but I didn’t think it was the right time. Live sound is like stripping. The money got so good it was hard to get out of it. But I finally took this last tour with Tommy Lee and Crazy Town. Their old guitar player left to go back to LA, and they were going to cancel the show. I filled in and they were asking me to join. I said ‘look, you guys have a guitar player already, if you change your guitarist that’s on you. You figure it out, and when you’re done come talk to me and I’ll let you know then’. I didn’t want to push someone out of their job, you know what I mean. ‘That’s your boy, you’re in a band together, you figure it out’. It all worked out great for me, and he’s got a new band with a deal with another label, so it all worked out for everyone.”

We’re you involved in the writing of this album from day one, or had work commenced before you joined the fold?

“We started writing in January 2001. We probably wrote half of the record before we came home from touring. We ended up getting out own studio and having our own space, and that’s where I am right now. It was a good move.”

What were you looking for this time around? Did the success of your last record enable you to go in different directions and try things out that the band couldn’t do last time?

“Absolutely. No one was trying to tell us ‘I need Butterfly three more times’. It was more like ‘here’s a studio, you guys go do what you do’. It was our choice to use (producer) Howard Benson. It was our decision to tour for three years and become a really tight band. We wanted to capture that. Howard did a wonderful job of allowing us to make a live sounding record. We didn’t want to do a Pro Tools cut and paste record. We wanted it to sound like you were in the room listening to us play.”

Did you really feel you needed an outside producer considering the experience both yourself and Brett have behind the mixing desk?

“We wanted to take things further than we could. If you listen to the demos, they sound a lot more like The Gift Of Game. Brett started to sing on some shit, and I like Brett’s voice. He doesn’t sound like anyone else. We wanted to take it further. Everyone loved the demos, and we thought we had more work to do. We set pretty high standards for ourselves. We have the opportunity to make whatever kind of record we want to make, and for people to actually hear it. We weren’t going to let anything fly, we’ve been waiting too long for this shot.”