It's Easy Being Green

As you're wandering around taking in the sights and sounds of this year's Warped Tour, don't be surprised when the high-energy hip hop sounds of RDGLDGRN capture your attention and draw your over to the front of their stage.

Hip hop isn't the usual fare for Warped, but this Washington DC trio are just as well versed in the sounds of Minor Threat and Bad Brains as they are Bob Marley. Besides, as frontman Green explains, hip hop has never been about one type of music.

“I come from a hip hop perspective where musically there is no sound that is hip hop,” Green says. “Hip hop derives from so many things. That's why the music we make I still think of as mostly hip hop more than anything else. Just instead of using a regular soul sample breakbeat we're going to actually use a go-go beat or instead of completely looping that beat we're going to have someone play it. We're going to put guitars on it so that it sounds like any of the music we like or it sounds like Caribbean music 'cause I like that. It's just basically sampling. All three of us are really just hip hop producers who enjoy taking it too far.”

Joining Green are also Gold and Red (natch!), with the live band adding drums and bass to the mix. It's a thrilling dynamic. The band's debut album RDGLDGRN blends hip hop, rock and pop-punk elements to make something highly charged and fun. When he was a kid, Green spent time living in France before his parents settled in DC when he was around the age of 12, so growing up there was a lot of French pop being played at home alongside the Marley and Michael Jackson records. It's given Green an appreciation for world music that is evident in the spirit of the music his band plays, that melting pot of influences that make up a glorious, lively whole. It also made him a musical sponge so when he started watching documentaries about the local DC music scene when he was 18-19, it was inevitable that he'd fall in love with punk music.

“That musical discovery time when you're first getting into playing music yourself, going from that, you just go on a binge, going through all the history. You just start listening to all these things in the past and it's like you're discovering your own shit.”

A part of the Warped juggernaut that this year has traversed the US and is currently making its way across Europe before landing in Australia, RDGLDGRN have been preparing for their first visit Down Under by making friends with the locals. “We have friends in bands like Hands Like Houses and Tonight Alive and The City Shake Up, and they've told us a lot about Australia and we're really excited.”

Green knows his band isn't exactly like most of the other bands on Warped, but believes they share the same punk spirit of his festival mates. “We definitely have a punky vibe to it and we have a perspective of playing our own instruments. We definitely have those little things in our show that makes us try to win over a crowd. We converse with the crowd a lot and try to get the crowd to do a lot of things and the music's fun. You've got to be a jackarse to not want to have fun y'know, but there's a lot of jackarses out there.”

Each adopting the name of the colour they wear constantly, the band makes for a striking looking trio on stage and off. Half ode to one of their heroes Bob Marley and half sesame street sketch. Green says the decision to each turn themselves into a colour has a lot less hidden meaning than most people think. “I think it's been like eight-ten years of wearing the same colour every day.” “It's just what you know you like, and what you know you are. You ask a child at five years old what his favourite colour is and he won't hesitate. There is no metaphor or cool meaning to why exactly the colour is picked other than the fact that you know what the colour is. The focus is I knew what I liked, it's embedded in you. That's the idea we're going with, instead of like, green is the colour of earth or things people say like, 'When someone wears green it makes other people horny'. When you're a colour you hear so many things about your colour. But those other things don't define what your colour is. I actually define what the colour is but I'm the only person that is Green, the only living, breathing person that is Green.”

Already the trio are making famous friends. It's not often a young band can boast a production credit from Pharrell Williams on their album, and a cameo on drums from fellow DC native Dave Grohl. “It doesn't really make any sense,” Green says when asked how the famous cameos came about. “They did it solely on the sound of the music and how they enjoyed it. There was no reason for them to do that at all. And that's the purest form of anything I think.”

As a kid growing up writing raps, Green still sounds shell-shocked that his band was able to spend time with Williams in the studio. “Pharrell gives you advice. You don't need to try and get it out of him. He's like the Dalai Lama or something. He's this way cool, humble guy that lets you know stuff and he leads by example in how he makes the work. He's a genius, just a genius. Even our producer [Kevin Augunas] who's a producer himself saw him work and was just amazed by it, at how he works. He just doesn't second guess himself at all. He just goes with the flow. It was like there was another one of us in the room that was just smarter and cooler and more experienced.”

Though the Williams credit was exciting and unexpected, it was notorious nice guy Grohl who stuck around long enough to record drums on every track on the album, even though he was only asked to record one. In a lucky twist of fate, the group can thank Grohl's movie Sound City for the chance to work with the rock music legend. When RDGLDGRN album producer Kevin Augunus bought Sound City studio in 2011, he sold Grohl the rare Neve console that he was replacing, and which fuelled Grohl's inspiration to make a documentary about all the famous albums and artists to pass through the legendary studio. It was that connection that led Grohl back to Sound City to record drums for these three guys from DC.

“Our producer sent him an email with our song and CCed us and asked him, 'Hey, these guys don't have a drummer in their band and we wanted to know if you'd drum on this song?' and he said, 'Yeah, the song sounds great and because they're from DC, let's do this'. Two months later we go into the studio and we meet him and he takes some shots for his Sound City movie and plays that one song, and [then] he asked for another one and another one and he did the whole half of the album in that one day, like five hours, six-seven songs. Then he left because he had to go – 'cause Dave Grohl has things to do – and he tells us, 'I wanna come back and finish your album. I want to play the rest of the songs on the album', which was great.”

Green is happy to confirm Grohl is the nicest guy in rock music and it's a seal of approval that the young artist says his band are going to commemorate in their latest video. “We're going to do a video for our song Doing The Most, the one we wrote with Pharell that's basically going to answer all questions about how, when and what Dave Grohl said. It's maybe going to be a tiny little documentary on who we are and what we are so the whole world can see us, so it will be there out there so everyone will know and remember forever and we ourselves can remember forever.”