A Conversation with It’s Casual’s Eddie Solis – HuffPost 11.4.13
Mike Ragogna: Hey Eddie, how are you and what’s up?
Eddie Solis: Hey, Mike, I’m good. It’s a day at the grind here. I’ve got my own label now, Stoked Records, and it’s distributed through RED, which is a distribution arm of Sony, so I get up and my day is pretty much like working at any other label–calling stores, sending out POP, doing call ops with reps and working on my radio show and emails.
MR: You’re covering a lot of bases, both on the business and music ends.
ES: Yeah. Actually, you know the message behind my music, it’s all about being car-free, and to me, that’s Los Angeles, and to be able to connect to the people of your city and your community. After last year came and went, I looked back and I had a lot of attention on the band to give media outlets like LA Times and NPR, et cetera. I was really in a mood to challenge myself and say, “Hey, I don’t want to get too comfortable, I want to keep my skills sharpened, so I want to create another platform for myself, to have public transportation and have it be my style.” I created this audiovisual brand called Los Angeles Nista. It’s a talk show where pretty much the format is so wide, I can have someone who maybe owns a bakery, or the mayor of the city. For the first hour, we talk about who the guests are in the community and the city and the second hour talks about their favorite areas and places in LA. I felt compelled to get there by public transportation. So that was the new platform that I created and it’s been going well.
Tonight I produced my seventy-second episode. It’s a weekly thing. It’s been going strong since last November. So yeah, pretty much, when someone asks me what’s going on, for the most part, it’s like I work in an office. Half my day goes to putting together all the components of a record label, working with people like Todd and my distributor and calling stores myself and being in the trenches. Obviously, because I own the label, there are a lot of artists that I’m going to be working with, so the other portion of my day is really booking future guests and solidifying dates and doing the research of the guests and promoting past episodes because I have such a big catalog now and always trying to create a fresh new idea. So yeah, that’s what’s going on.
MR: So you and your buddy have continued the New Los Angeles project, and this falls under the genre of “greencore.” I love that name. However, the topics on this new album don’t stray too far from the first one except this time out, It’s Casual is being less casual and more immediate about the subjects. For example, now you’re like, “Keep the children occupied, man, don’t take away after school funding,” and really, well, hardcore about things.
ES: Exactly.
MR: Were you conscious of that when you were making this project?
ES: Yes. It’s funny you should say that because New Los Angeles I, when I installed the songs on the record, it was like, “Okay, New Los Angeles,” and people would ask questions like, “Why is it “new” Los Angeles?” Well, because in a very car-favored culture, you forget what your city’s like when you actually take a light rail train underground or aboveground or different bus lines. I got really re-inspired by the perspective duty I have as a bus rider. That’s why it became New Los Angeles; it became a new city to me again. It was a rejuvenation. For instance, and just to finish up the cohesiveness from The New Los Angeles I, another component to the rim of the framework was The Red Line. It’s a line that gets you from LA to Hollywood. Going to New Los Angeles II, you’re right, there are more direct targets. “Less Violence More Violins” is the lead track. What that simply means is that there is, unfortunately, less focus in the community for kids to have a platform to do the arts. Everything is such a special event, but why can’t it be consistent? I think when kids are not occupied, it trickles out into different outlets for them and some kids don’t have guidance, so unfortunately, it is violence.
MR: I think this time out, rather than simply introducing the concept of a greener and more educated LA, you’re going, “Okay, look. This is the problem exactly.” You’re getting more to the roots of the problem on this one.
ES: Absolutely. Part two is, on public transportation, and I see different walks of life. It’s no mystery about childhood obesity. In the song “Live Food,” the lyrics promote eating the right food, fruits and vegetables. California even has programs to promote that to lower income families. They make it so easy, it’s part of the food stamp program. In that song, when I link childhood obesity with heart disease, it doesn’t mean to be so harsh, it’s just a fact. If people keep their bad habits, it’s going to trickle down into bad health and possibly death. I use that aggressive hardcore approach that I come from musically. I shouldn’t say musically; the hardcore approach in music is how I choose to express myself. It’s second nature to me, so when I’m screaming that, it’s not about harshness, it’s about concern. It’s urgency.
MR: It’s urgency. That’s exactly what I was about to say, turning hardcore into greencore seems like the most appropriate way to get the message out, because, well, people have a hard time “hearing.”
ES: It’s true. That’s a whole other subject. With everyone having a smart phone or iPhone in their hand, there’s access to everything so you can’t even get a message across directly. You’ve got to do it ten times and make it attractive and then these people will chew it and finally figure it out. Let’s be honest, while I take the bus and the subway around and choose to be car free in a city that’s known for having a very bound-to-car lifestyle and packed freeways, to me, it’s very exciting because you see what you can’t on a congested road. You see all walks of life; you see different kinds of people taking public transportation. In a morning when you’re on the bus or the subway and you see obese kids–I don’t want to go overboard but I want to generalize for the sake of creating a simple picture… There are issues in this neighborhood that I go through. There are corner liquor stores and at the front of the door, there are Cheetos and soft drinks positioned. Pure sugar. That’s where that comes from.
MR: One of the major issues is also people losing sight of their own interests, emphasized in your song, “The Gap Is Widening,” I think you’ve really nailed it. In Los Angeles, there are large demographics of people in poverty and the gap is widening.
ES: Exactly. That’s something I see. In the Boyle Heights neighborhood yesterday, I was walking into Food 4 Less. Luckily, I have a bus that takes me right from my house to the market there. I took my skateboard and I got my groceries and I saw in the parking lot a middle-aged male and female couple with three kids holding a sign. The sign caught my attention because it wasn’t just “Hungry, Need Food,” it was an explanation that was written out so they didn’t have to explain themselves to people. But it said, “Looking for work, there’s no luck, we can’t get government aid and we need to feed our kids, please help.” To go back to the song titles, it’s all pretty cohesive. There’s a thread that ties everything together and translates into the last song. I believe if all of these components, if they were turned around for the better, the gap wouldn’t widen. Does that make sense?
MR: Yes, absolutely. But the gap widens because of the disparate proportion between those that have and those that don’t. The middle class is disappearing.
ES: True!
MR: What’s happening is less and less people have a shot at this alleged American Dream. I’m not advocating socialism, but I think we’re kind of screwed up on how we’re looking at the basics right now.
ES: Of course. When you listen to the first track, “Less Violence More Violins,” that’s all the lyrics. That’s me crying out what I want, for the day-to-day SoCal and around the world. I believe the basic needs in life are universal. Anywhere in the world. The statement that I scream out is just that. That comes from a lack of prioritizing children and the funds being gone so that they’re not able to learn art and other things that are considered unconventional. So then immediately, you go into a song called “Keep The Children Occupied.” That’s the sentiment off of “Less Violence More Violins.” It’s all very cohesive. And again, “Live Food,” I think if there’s no after school programs–and it doesn’t have to be at the school, it can be at a YMCA or other community place–you have bad decisions being made. Not everybody’s going to make bad decisions; hopefully, most do make good decisions and keep themselves occupied constructively and are productive with creative output. But there’s always going to be a trickle down effect and I believe that bad habits will develop and that goes into not eating live food. Everything’s effective.
MR: Eddie, do you think in your lifetime, you’ll see greater strides towards making things better with administrations or on the ground level? Do you see progress being made?
ES: I do. I’ll be positive. I’m thirty-eight years old, and when I was growing up in the nineties, there was a huge gang problem in LA. Huge. It was double the problem that anyone recognized or the media talked about. As a Mexican-American teenager growing up, it was hard not to go down the pathways of gang life or tag banging, which was another subculture. That’s what I mean by the double magnitude because nobody really took into consideration that there was another subculture where these taggers were not in gangs, but they were gangs. So that made it double influential, the challenge to stay away from that. Back then, it was so infested throughout SoCal and so many violent crimes happened and I had so many friends die and get hurt. You grow up with them, they quit skateboarding and then the peer pressure kicks in. Now what I see in the youth scene–what’s happening on a street level in music and skateboarding, because I’m involved–I noticed that there’s a huge difference in gang members coming out and causing problems in neighborhoods where there are known gangs that didn’t exist for decades or longer. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I know that the LAPD have really cracked down on the gangs. You don’t see them as much anymore. At all. They did a really good job of stopping that. That subculture is doing whatever they do on an inside level. You don’t see gang members walking down the street anymore like in the eighties or nineties. For whatever reason, the LAPD take them in and they’ll be violating probation. That’s an actual huge improvement, the street gangs of Los Angeles not combing the streets like they used to.
I say this because I live in Boyle Heights. I’ve got two of the biggest East LA gangs, one in front of me and one behind me, one called White Fence and one called VNE [Varrio Nuevo Estrada]. I can walk outside any time and it’s not like it was growing up in the suburbs, where people in cars were passing by and they would stop and ask you, “What gang are you from?” Now, it’s more that they’re operating indoors and doing what they do and staying out of the way of the police. That is a huge thing because I could bring my nephews to Boyle Heights, which used to be infested and we can wait at the bus stop to go and see an NBA game at the Staples Center. It was once known as a dangerous area, but it’s gotten a lot better all over the place. That whole aggressive approach from gang member to civilian does not exist anymore. I haven’t seen it. I’ve been on foot a lot lately and I haven’t seen any kind of red flags go up. This has been for the last four years. I’ve chewed on this new information that I’ve come up with and it’s different. It’s all due to the way the police are operating, and that’s a big improvement and that gives kids a little more wiggle room to do things a bit more comfortably without looking over their shoulders. Does that make sense?
MR: For people who want to jump on board, and let’s say they’re only minimally educated in doing something to help with green causes and participating in social activism, what things can they do? Are there two or three things that everybody could be doing right now?
ES: Right now, there’s a family planning a weekend. Say they live in Pasadena or Sierra Madre and they want to go downtown and culture the kids and go to museums and the Grand Central Market and the new Grand Park and everything else there is to offer, watch a movie screening or walk in the fountain, you could plan and take ten minutes or even less to enjoy the weekend without a car. If you are coming from an area which is a suburban sprawl like Sierra Madre, you could get day passes for five dollars each and take The Gold Line to the mecca of downtown and from there, you could go across the street, cross Alameda and immerse yourselves in Mexican culture, Californian culture, and on those premises is where the Chinese-American museum is. You could enjoy that just by coming into Union Station. Then when you’re done, there you could jump on the red line and go to Hollywood and do all the tourist things. LA’s so gigantic that people that live in the suburbs kind of walk like tourists. One thing that people could do is plan a weekend with their family without a car. It’s cheap, it can be done, and it’s efficient. The rail lines run so quickly that you don’t even need a schedule. You’ve just got to know where to show up. There’s a train every seven to twelve minutes depending on the time of day and the day of the week. That’s one thing. One thing I believe is that when preparing a meal for your child, you can look where this is coming from.
Last month, Walmart had a huge core campaign promoting their frozen dinners. It was the most absurd and disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, let me tell you. Keep in mind that this was along the freeways. I don’t know if I missed anything here, but I was coding the research and said, “Wow, everyone is in their gigantic SUVs, one person per SUV, stuck in traffic, costing eighty-eight dollars per gas tank, not connecting to the city or feeling their feet on the ground walking and breathing. They’re looking up in that situation and reading a billboard that says, “Effortless Dinner” and has a microwave pizza and a two-liter Pepsi. Exactly, it’s effortless. That is cohesive to the live food track. That’s what being promoted. I think that people are so clouded and disruptive with their habits that they think that’s normal. The thing that would be in reaction to that is just try to add fruits or vegetables to your diet. It’s simple. People don’t realize that you’re on a bad diet and you’re all over the place with pain in your body. Live food is the best cure for anything. It’s all there, it’s all you need. Not to hone in on a whole other topic, but it’s one of the simple things that can quickly become a good habit. So number one was plan a weekend with your family car-free, number two is take away the carbs and put the live food in. If you eat dead food you’re going to feel like death. If you eat live food you’re going to feel alive.
MR: It’s an interesting period because there are so many years of miseducation to undo.
ES: Yeah, and the first thing that people could change right away is to look at taking public transportation in Los Angeles as a pro and not a con. I see a lot of people with their heads down. I’ve got to tell you, one time, I was on the bus coming downtown from the East Side. You see the same faces to and from sometimes, and this one guy was kind of eyeballing me and then he picked me out and asked a question. His question was, “Why are you on the bus?” This was someone that I would profile and say, “Hey, this guy is maybe a former gang member, he’d never get out of the East Side and he’s on the bus because maybe he got a DUI.” But he asked me, “Did you get a DUI?” I said, “No.” “Well why are you on the bus? You can’t afford a car?” He was just really blown away with how I was sitting on the bus over there with my Apple laptop cracked open writing an email. This was probably about four years ago. I go, “No, I take one bus from my home straight to downtown and then a subway and I buy an EZ Pass, which is good for all Southern California agencies. It’s eighty-four dollars a month, that’s 2.85 a day. So for 2.85 a day, I can travel unlimited. It’s so funny because when I’m having a conversation with someone in a more progressive area like Silver Lake or Echo Park–places where different professional people are moving in and are very open minded and very progressive in their diet and their spirituality and their profession and business–and if I’m introduced to someone and say I travel mostly by public transportation, which is so rare in LA these days, they say, “Oh, really, tell me about it.” I just think LA’s so gigantic that there are different mentalities in different areas. I think the third thing people need to do is be open. Get out of your SUV, stop looking at the Walmart ads, get a Metro day pass and go connect with you city and connect with people. Put the phone down.
MR: Absolutely. And Eddie, what advice do you have for new artists?
ES: You have to remember something. If your work is going to be here and you’re actually going to sustain a living off it, you have to be patient and build a foundation. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter are great tools. They’re a great tool for my record label, for my band, and my talk radio show. But you still need to translate things into sales. I think a lot of people get hung up on their numbers on social networking and I believe that that is a huge component in today’s age and you have to pay attention to that, but you also cannot be putting out crap content. You’ve got to put out quality. One thing I’ve learned with collaborating with people, making videos, getting distribution deals, if you really have something that’s great, people will reach out to you. I think that artists really, really have to back track on where certain sounds come from and certain artists who are their influence. I see a lot of hollow art being created these days. There are a lot of shells floating around with no substance and no roots inside. I think that is all connected to people waking up and saying, “Hey, I want to start a band of this genre,” and they just learn about that genre and they see how bands dress immediately because they have that on YouTube and then they let that resonate and be that instead of living and becoming who you are through real life connection with people and places.
Back in the day, when punk rockers had tattoos, that was a heavy thing. “Whoa, that guy’s got his whole arm tattooed.” Now you walk in a guitar center and you’ve got a 21-year-old trying to sell you something, and it’s great that he’s got a job, but you talk to him about music and he doesn’t know anything and he’s got this huge tattoo across his chest. He asks, “Oh yeah, you got ink?” cause he’s trying to make small talk with you. But no, I’m proud to say that I don’t have one tattoo. That’s never been my style. Not everybody’s tatted up. “Well here’s my first tattoo.” He shows me his first tattoo, it’s his whole arm. What happened to the life story? You get one here, you get one there, then finally your arm is fully tattooed. I think that artists, just being a part of society, are not living enough. I think people are trying to just be what they see. If a certain sound connects with you, that’s great, but try to translate your real life experiences to your art and see what comes out the other end.
MR: So the band name is “It’s Casual,” but it’s really not all that casual at all.
ES: [laughs] That’s true. Growing up in Southern California, I was always in the middle of all these different cultures. I totally grasped onto the Fast Times At Ridgemont High culture–music, skateboarding and vans, you know what I mean? As someone who was always trying to one-up everyone with movie knowledge and stuff, I discovered this movie that was like the unofficial sequel to Fast Times At Ridgemont High, it was called The Wild Life. It was put out by Cameron Crowe, who did Fast Times…, and it was also put out by Universal. The main character was Christopher Penn and whenever someone asked him a question, he’d answer, “It’s casual.” I thought that was so great because it’s just the ultimate even-keel response. I think that by having a band name like that, unless you have heard it, you don’t know what it’s going to be, and I don’t want to alienate or scare anyone off. I want it to be approachable. When you hear a name like “Ramones” what is it?
MR: What’s up in the band’s future?
ES: As far as the future goes, we’ve got The New Los Angeles II coming out. That’s going to be out digitally and on vinyl and CD, so I’ve got to hold up my end of the deal and promote it. I’m going to be looking to book tour dates worldwide and that’s going to be happening all next year, so we’re really excited about that. That’s all being worked on now, and there’ll be some music videos made for the new record this year in November and December, so all of that will be coming out before the new year. In addition to that, my audiovisual brand Los Angeles Nista, we do the seventy-second episode, but what we’re going to do different in 2014 is that I’m going to be actually facilitating Los Angeles Vista walking tours. On the shows, we get very geographically specific of LA County per episode. So what I want to do is every three months, I’ll put together the Los Angeles Visa tours where you’re going to meet me at a designated subway stop and I’m going to take everyone on a day-long voyage across Los Angeles without a car. When we get off at all these stops, I’m going to be able to explain to you what certain landmarks are, kind of like a tour guide but more of a “life guide” because this is where you live.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne