Show & Tell - an interview with Jay Gordon of Orgy

JAY GORDON of ORGY
02.05.04

He owns his own record label, he produces, he sings, he writes, he's even done some modeling. More than that, though, he's actually been successful at each of these endeavors; rock's own renaissance man?

Next up for Orgy front man Jay Gordon? His band's third release, Punk-Statik-Paranoia [ed.'s note: PSP was released February 24th].

It's been several years since Orgy's last release (2000's Vapor Transmission) and, in today's climate of fickle, short attention span fans, it will be interesting to see how the lengthy break affects the band's platinum status.

We caught up with Jay just a few weeks before the album's release.

Jay Gordon: This is Jay Gordon of Orgy.

Show & Tell: Hello, Jay Gordon of Orgy.

JG: How you doing?

S&T: I’m doing pretty good, how about you?

JG: I’m just on my way (to the) Staples Center to do a bunch of press.

S&T: Okay. Do you have time for me?

JG: Sure. I’m on a cell so if it cuts out I’ll call you back.

S&T: That’s fine. So what time are you supposed to be at the Staples Center?

JG: We’re on our way there now. We are driving on the freeway now and are supposed to be there in 30 minutes or something.

S&T: What’s going on over there? They have a bunch of press already there?

JG: Yeah, for the Grammy’s and all that stuff. You kind of just go around and talk to everybody there. I don’t know, I’ve never done it this way but (Orgy PR guru Ken Phillips) is a good publicist so I’m sure he has it all figured out. He’ll steer me in the right direction and we’ll take it from there.

S&T: Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I appreciate it.

JG: Hey man, no problem.

S&T: So a couple years between albums?

JG: Yep.

S&T: Why so long?

JG: Well a lot's really gone on actually. We parted ways with Warner Bros. Not because they were treating us bad or anything like that. They changed their staff around and there was nobody there to kind of look after us so we were like we need to do something about this. I had wanted to put my label together for some time and we finally got it together to do that and they gave us the record back. We asked for it back and they were really cool so we ended on good terms.

S&T: When you started working on this album you were still under contract with them?

JG: Yeah. We did a few songs while we were still on Warner Bros. and then we wrote and finished the rest of songs after that period.

S&T: It was actually just a great excuse to go ahead and do something that you’d been wanting to do for a while [ed.'s note: our cryptic interviewer is not-so-obviously referring to Jay Gordon starting his own label, D1 Music].

JG: I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out but it all worked out pretty good in the end. It took a long time to get everything going. It's like I had already started to do some things but the finalizing took quite a bit of time so you know... but so we are running smooth and we've learned a lot in a short period of time.

S&T: Tell me a little about D1.

JG: D1 really stands for Division One. Oddly enough Warner has their central agency that runs the inner working of their structure and it's called Division 1 so I really couldn’t use that name so I narrowed it down to D1.

S&T: Now your father and you are equal partners?

JG: Yes. He is running the label and he does most of the day-to-day stuff at the label and all the early morning phone calls and all that stuff so I can still play my guitar and do whatever I need to do.

S&T: Right. And it was your idea and you approached him?

JG: It was one of those things where he knew I was doing it and he has been in the business for years [ed.'s note: Jay's father Lou Gordon managed such acts as Sly and the Family Stone and Tower of Power] and he took a really long break from it all. He knew I was already starting to get things going so I kind of put him to work. He was kind of bored. He had a couple of businesses going up there and they were running smooth enough so he could take his attention off of that a little bit and kinda help me out. So it worked out really nicely.

S&T: Yeah… is that working out good? I’m not really sure I could work with my father.

JG: It's very strange in that area but I try and keep it as interesting and fun for both of us as possible. Yeah, there is still the dad issue there and you have to deal with that. So we don’t bring our personal stuff into the game here.

S&T: As best you can.

JG: Yep.

S&T: When is it that you started working on Punk-Statik-Paranoia?

JG: We started working on it when we were still on Warner Bros a couple of years back and we had some general ideas on the music and started recording and stuff and then we took about a year to ourselves and everybody kind of did there own thing. Me and Ryan have a little side project, Page produced and did a side project. Everybody really kept themselves occupied doing other things. Bobby my drummer got really good at his video thing he wants to do and he’ll be directing videos. He’s already done a couple and they are really good. Maybe he’ll be doing one for us coming up here.

S&T: Was there ever a concern sort of being out of the public’s consciousness. The first band that comes to mind is Powerman 5000. They just took so long between albums that it seemed a lot of people had forgotten about them by the time the album came out.

JG: We kind of kept in the public eye in one form or another the whole time. I had done some stuff with Jonathan Davis.

S&T: Right, I remember when you did The Queen of the Damned soundtrack.

JG: I did a really huge remix for Likin Park which went number one. So nothing really slowed down in that department as sort of keeping out there. I have kept in touch with people over the last couple of years and let them know what was going on from time to time so people have been pretty cool with everything. I was freaking out of course knowing how it can be. You know what I mean? But everybody’s been real supportive this time and people are really hungry to get this record so we’ll see how we do.

S&T: What can they expect on this one as compared to the first two?

JG: It’s definitely a lot heavier; it’s more aggressive. It's something Orgy really needed to do. We’ve kind of grown into our name on this record. You know what I mean? It sounds a little more like the name would remind you of. So I wish we could have used this record as the starting point.

S&T: Maybe you weren’t ready on album one to be here.

JG: Right.

S&T: You had to get through the first two to get to the third one.

JG: Exactly.

S&T: Did you see a difference at the way you guys approached this third one as compared to the other two… as far as the actual construction?

JG: Yeah. Yeah. We actually did a lot more of the whole band jamming together on this record as opposed to the first two which are obviously a lot more electronic and things like that where I programmed a lot of stuff. It's so much of a nightmare sometimes we said, "why don’t we just play?"

I kind of wanted to save a lot of what we can do. I don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket and pray for the best or whatever. I kinda like to save a little bit. There are some songs on this record that are something I wrote so long ago but I knew would… I wanted to wait and hold onto a few things so I didn’t get rid of my best stuff, and I still have tons of material that I wrote years ago that I felt, I don’t know. Maybe I felt personally that it was ahead of its time. For some reason or another there are these really good riffs that will just sit around (and) I felt like it was time to put them out. They kind of marinated a little bit or whatever you want to call it and then we just get together and work on them from time to time and they seem to be working out.

S&T: There are a lot of famous songs that bands didn't wind up using 'til their third or fourth album but it’s a song they had from when they first started out. It just wasn’t time for it or it didn’t fit with what they were doing at the time.

You produced PSP?

JG: Yes, and (guitarist Amir Derakh) produced some of it with me.

S&T: You’ve produced for other bands as well. How difficult is it to produce for your own band? How do you step outside of the context of the band?

JG: It’s a lot harder. But if you look at it like you’re in the studio working and you’re there to do a job you look at it like what can I do to make this music. You take yourself out of the band for a minute and what can I do to make this the best it can be while the other guys are doing their part. That’s the time to help them get it right or they can help me get it right, you know. I’ll ask them from time to time should I go this route or this route and they are pretty good with telling me it either sucks or go with it.

S&T: What kind of producer are you? There is sort of the dictator that knows, the collaborator, there’s the overseer. What kind of producer do you think you are?

JG: I’m kind of the all of the above engineer/producer, you know what I mean. I will put the mics on the cabinet or mic the drums up myself to make sure I am getting the right sounds and things like that and trying not to second guess too much although on your record it's really hard when you are that close so therefore it takes a little more time to make sure what you're doing is appropriate.

S&T: The web site punkstaticparanoia.com... that takes place of the old official site? I think that was orgymusic.com?

JG: Yeah. Its just punkstatic.com now.

S&T: Oh yea, the paranoia is gone?

JG: Yeah, you can put that in and it will still come up. It just makes it easier.

S&T: Was there any mentions of that? The reason I am asking is that I had somebody email me asking, "is Orgy still together? I tried to go to their web site but its down."

JG: You know the orgymusic site we are still going to try and get back up we just need to take ownership of that from Warner Bros. but it really hasn’t been easy getting through to all the people that used... obviously they aren’t there anymore so its kind of like in limbo right now but we are working on getting that back. A lot of people have complained. Punkstatic should just be this record you know what I am saying. So it should take you to a link for our site but instead it ends up becoming like the website which no one ever knew about before so its like a brand new thing and no one would ever know how to put that in a browser. You know if they are looking for Orgy they will look under orgy and then they'll find a bunch of porn.

S&T: Right. (laughing)

JG: I think it’s always been that way even when we had orgymusic.com. Unfortunately with the name you get more porn than you will music.

S&T: I think if you put in "Orgy band official site" and you do a search for that it comes up, but otherwise it’s a little tough.

How much do you have to do with site yourself?

JG: Not a lot. I used to be a lot more hands on with that stuff. I wanted to make sure the site is going to be informative and make sure we do the response thing which we didn’t do before where people can actually email the guys in the band from the site and then from time to time we can all check in on it and answer them back.

S&T: So you guys make a point of corresponding with fans?

JG: Yeah. On this site. And we never really sold a lot of merch from the site and we will have a lot to offer on this site. Its definitely going to be the best and most informative Orgy site yet.

S&T: How do you think the Internet affects the whole idea of the Rockstar. There is almost an expectation of accessibility, like we expect you to be on your message board and we expect you to answer our emails.

JG: It's just another level. You have to expect to change with the times and you have to be able to keep up with those things. I was looking for it, more ways to reach out to an audience and more people you know what I am saying.

S&T: How do you think it affects the kids and their desire to go out and see a band?

JG: We’ve been pretty lucky with our live shows and I think hopefully if we are lucky it will continue and if it doesn’t we’re obviously going to have to figure out new ways to make them get out there and come see us. I think that kids still go to shows. A lot of them will resort to the Internet if money is an issue or something like that but I think people still like to see the live show.

S&T: Well I hope you're right.

JG: Me too!

S&T: I hate to admit it but I think Lars was right two years ago. I can see the effect downloading has had on the industry.

JG: Oh yeah. That part of it sucks. That is the hard part but I think there are ways to make it cheap enough and things like that now so that corporate will come up with solutions to make it work out for everybody. Downloading isn’t really a big thing for me. Do what you have to do and what ever and if you are cool about it then you download some stuff to see if you like it and if you like go buy it and if you don’t… don’t.

S&T: Have you talked about that at D1?

JG: Oh yeah. It's obviously a huge issue and of course the record has already gotten out on a bunch of web sites but it's gonna happen, you know. It’s happened before and it’s going to continue to happen so it’s definitely something you have to contend and deal with but we can do it.

S&T: How do you deal with it? What seems to happen is press get advances and then “we” turn around and pump it onto the Internet and that makes all of us look like crap. I’m not a big fan of looking like crap.

JG: I hear yah.

S&T: How do you contend with that? As a label what can you do?

JG: For one thing you have to have people on top of that. My dad and the people that work under him are very sharp about that kind of stuff. There are IFRC Codes and being able to footprint your record and we did that so we really tell where it is going when your code pops up anywhere on anybody’s computer at all. As soon as it's in the air we can catch it and we can generally tell where it is going and stuff and what we will do is put cease and desist orders on people and generally they are really good at taking it down. You've got to get them to realize that what they are doing isn’t the right thing all the time. So basically you do the best you can. It’s going to get out there a little bit and people are going to get it and you have to deal with that.

S&T: Or you go the opposite way. When Metallica’s last record came out they did listening sessions with the publicist. If you wanted to review it you had to go there, sit in a room with the publicist listen to it, walk out and write your review.

JG: Right.

S&T: Now that’s kind of the extreme. I guess hopefully they'll find something in the middle.

JG: I think there are ways. What we did a lot at first is we gave people little clips of stuff but it is kind of hard to get a full take on the record you know what I’m saying?

S&T: Right, you just get the 30-second sort of teasers.

JG: Right, but that’s all I ever needed if I was doing that kind a gig I would listen to 45 sec of the song and be able to tell everything I wanted to out of that you know. But people are different and you have to give everybody what they want.

S&T: So any tour dates at all yet?

JG: First of April we’ll be out somewhere. Wait, I’m sorry. March we’ll be starting a tour I don’t know where. We’ll be starting but we just met with a booking agent yesterday and they are going to put together a tour for us and we’ll be out on the road in March.

S&T: So you don’t know who’s going out with you yet?

JG: Oh no, I have no idea. We are looking to do a bunch of radio festivals too so we’ll see how it goes real soon.

S&T: Well, alright.

JG: Alright man.

S&T: Thanks for your time.

JG: Hey, no problem. Anytime.

S&T: And when you guys are on the right coast I’ll try and catch up with you.

JG: Sounds good, man.

S&T: Is Ken with you?

JG: Yes, he is.

S&T: Tell him Scott from Show and Tell says hi.

JG: You got it man.

S&T: Thanks.

JG: Alright, Scott, bye.

interview by scott sisti