“Getting Cheeky: Orgy’s Ryan Shuck Gets to the Bottom of Candyass Song by Song”
By Dennis Walkling
By now it should be clear that the climax of “Blue Monday” as a hit for Korn-discovered Los Angeles rockers is merely the first of what will be many multiple climaxes for this quintet. Orgy is vocalist Jay Gordon, g-synth player Amir Derakh, guitarist Ryan Shuck, bassist Paige Haley, and v drummer Bobby Hewitt. “It happened fast,” says Shuck on the phone from New York, where the group was entertaining journalists from around the world, “but it hasn’t happened fast because we’ve just been sitting around. It’s been a lot of work. And it’s been with a lot of talented…everyone in the band is really talented.”
“Amir was engineering and producing,” he continues. “Jay and Amir did [the Coal Chamber debut album]. Amir engineered the Eels record. Jay was producing. Bobby did a lot of stuff with movies and stuff like that. I was a hairdresser. And we all kind of had our stuff together already. Before the band.”
“But,” he concludes, “we were all in music; we were always in bands. But we had jobs and everything. We didn’t need to get in a band and get signed to fulfill our lives.”
Nevertheless, get signed they did, and with no less then the support of multi-platinum superstars Korn, whose Elementree label inked Orgy as its first group. The world now has a dozen new songs from a group whose fashion sense and attention to visuals shares equal importance with the music they create around that ideal. In order to create that idea record, the band holed themselves up in one of the remotest places they could, drawing on the confinement of “cabin fever” as they came to call it, to get the record out.
“That was just necessary to get away from L.A., because we didn’t want to be influenced and we didn’t want to influence anyone when we wrote our record,” explains Shuck of the decision to record in a cabin in Lake Tahoe. “We didn’t want to hear what any of the other new big bands…’cause we’re friends with everyone. So we didn’t want to be influenced by anyone who was doing, or seemed to be recording, their records at the time. So we needed to get away. Now it’s like we’ve kind of got things pretty established. Now, we know we sound like us. When we’re less worried about that I think we’ll probably be a lot more comfortable when we write this next [record].
So how did the Orgy sound on Candyass come to be then? That’s exactly what we wanted to find out here at Circus Magazine, so we thought it would be fun to give Shuck the third degree about the thirteen songs that make up the phenomenon that is Candyass. Here then, for your reading pleasure, is a song-by-song analysis of Candyass. It’s done in the order the tunes appear in the CD, so we recommend playing it along as you read the stories behind the music.
CIRCUS: You give me the first thing that pops into your mind. I’ll tell you the song title andyou tell me the first thing that pops into your mind.
CIRCUS: “Social Enemies.”
CIRCUS: Was that actually the first Orgy song?
CIRCUS: “Platinum.”
CIRCUS: Either that or the record sales go platinum.
CIRCUS: “Fetisha.”
CIRCUS: So that one was work. Probably the most difficult song on the record?
CIRCUS: And again, the magic hits.
CIRCUS: “Fiend.”
CIRCUS: Now the big one: ‘Blue Monday.’
CIRCUS: “Gender.”
CIRCUS: “All the Same.”
CIRCUS: So less inspiration, more construction.
CIRCUS: “Pantomime.”
CIRCUS: Well, they still gave you credit, so…
CIRCUS: “Revival.”
CIRCUS: Well what are you talking about?
CIRCUS: That’s about as ominous a figure…
CIRCUS: Finally, “Dizzy.”
SHUCK: Okay.
SHUCK: My producer Josh. He had a lot ot do with that song. The beat and everything. The drum loop and everything in it. He’s one of my great friends. I remember being in the garage with Jay and Josh, even before Orgy was Orgy. We were just kind of excited that we wrote, that song was… I just kind of came up, and Jay had the song skeletoned together and he went up there and said ‘go crazy and play guitar on it.’
SHUCK: Yes.
SHUCK: I think of the record being practically done, and being back in the garage – same garage – working on it. With the same people, me, Jay, Josh, and our programmer Chad. Engineer.
SHUCK: Yeah. Well, we’ll see it in a little while. At the rate it’s going now, it might be true. But who knows?
SHUCK: Um… I think I remember being in our studio all together with the whole band trying to think of a chorus for that song. That song went through so many changes. That, and being really happy with what is there.
SHUCK: I don’t think it was the most difficult, but we didn’t have a chorus to the very end, and Jay just came out of fucking nowhere with this great chorus, and we were all thrilled.
SHUCK: As it always does. The song sits until it wakes up.
SHUCK: I remember being excited that after [the first single] ‘Stitches’ I was worried that… I just remember being happy that we had a song that was a little faster and heavier and more upbeat, and that we were capable of that type of thing. It was a turning point. Kind of a discovery that we could still play heavy stuff, but add cool, neat melody and neat guitars in it that weren’t typical. Again, I think of drugs.
SHUCK: Again it makes me think of Tahoe. I remember laying in bed listening to tapes, laying down the bass parts, thinking ‘Is that gonna be ‘Blue Monday?’ I was wasted, and I was in my bed, and I was listening through the walls – you could hear the music from any part in the house. So I remember thinking ‘is that gonna be ‘Blue Monday?’
SHUCK: First getting up to Tahoe. The first really rad part, the intro of that song. I remember running into the room – all of us and Jay – and they were fucking around with it – that song, that sound [makes sound effects of intro]. So that’s what I think of when I hear that. Just being excited. Like ‘Wow, this is dope! We’re gonna make a killer record!’
SHUCK: I remember going back and back over that, layering parts, chopping that song up. A lot of layering parts and mutes and stuff like that. And cutting parts out. A lot of going back over and just laying whole new lines over the whole thing.
SHUCK: Uh huh.
SHUCK: [laughs] I remember giving my guitar to Paige, and getting a suit on and going to a party and coming back and it was done [laughs again]. I was supposed to record this part and I go ‘later.’ So that whole intro – the whole middle part – I just remember coming back [from the party] going ‘Dope. What’d you do there?’ And Dave, our bass player, is showing me the part. That was fun.
SHUCK: Well, we do things collaboratively.
SHUCK: Darth Vader. Dan will laugh at that. He’ll know what I’m talking about.
SHUCK: Before I had a title I was going to call it like the ‘Death March’ or like ‘Darth Vader’s Theme Song,’ because it was so heavy sounding.
SHUCK: Yeah, I thought of Darth Vader immediately.
SHUCK: [long pause] I remember being kind of moved by it when I first heard it. Just like, ‘Wow!’ When I heard the vocals and everything, like when Jay came in and put it in. I was like ‘Wow, he’s pissed off.’