By: Tom Roth

An interview of Mark Gadajar from Seattle based hip-hop outfit Champagne Champagne.

Apes on Tape: Let’s start off with some introductions. Who is Champagne Champagne and what’re you all about?

Mark Gajadar: Champagne Champagne is made up of 3 fine young gentlemen. One is Pearl Dragon, the MC with the afro. One is Sir Thomas Grey. He is the gentleman that always wears the orange beanie, has a giant beard and dreads. And the other person is me, Mark Gajadar, the gentleman that makes all of the music, beats, and organizes everything with the tunes. We’re a 3-piece, kind of hip-hop, kind of rock outfit. I don’t even really know how to categorize us. Its music that if you didn’t have rapping over it and you had singing, you wouldn’t categorize it as hip-hop in any way. But since we have rapping over it it’s kind of our own little genre of tunes. That’s kind of what we do. We just make music, the three of us, and just kind of do what the fuck we want and it sounds cool.

AOT: Mark, how did your involvement with Seattle’s The Blood Brothers lead you to be part of Champagne Champagne?

MG: Blood Brothers, if you’re familiar with the music, is a little bit more on the harder side. It’s kind of more rock, nappy, weirdness. Ever since the beginning of time when I was writing music, I’ve been always writing hip-hop but never had an outlet for it. I was always storing up beats on my hard drive. The Blood Brothers were a band for what, 10 years? So by the time Blood Brothers ended I just had an arsenal of beats. I’m talking like 200+ beats that I was ready to do something with. Me and Johnny tried a project called Neon Blonde where I was able to use some of the music I was working on – the stuff that was a little bit more on the indie side rather than the hip-hop realm or electronic music. Once the Blood Brothers were done, I just had all of this music and an idea of what I wanted to do, I just didn’t have anybody to rap over what I was doing. I tried out a couple different MC’s. A lot of them didn’t quite work out. One that was pretty cool was Travis from Gym Class Heroes. We were originally working on this and Gym Class had just got off tour with my brother’s band so I went and saw them play in Seattle at Chop Suey. We were hanging out, got him a CD, and he was working on some songs so then, and then later on, on that tour, they ended up rolling their van and he lost the CD so we kind of lost contact for a couple months and then their band just blew up. They were the biggest band for a second. So me and him talked and I was like ‘you know what, you are super busy with this, we haven’t gone too far into this project, I think I’m going to find somebody else’. I ended up running into Pearl randomly at a show and we started talking. From meeting him the first time, we went in my car and listened to some beats and he started rapping over it and it just clicked. “Soda and Poprocks” was the first track we wrote together and that was, I think, our best song that we have. It kind of just happened. I was trying with a lot of different people but nothing really went too far but as soon as me and Pearl started working together, it just clicked.

There were times when I’d have some beats and I’d bring them to Blood Brothers practice like ‘Hey guys, ya wanna do something with this?!’ And they’d be like ‘Nooope’ [laughs]. I never had any of my drum machines on my drum set or anything like that. The closest I ever got was having drum triggers so I could do some 808 kicks during live Blood Brothers sets. That was about as far as I got in the hip-hop world. I did have an upside-down Wu Tang symbol on my bass drum for years [laughs] which was kind of cool.

AOT: You’ve witnessed and even been a part of some unique parts of Seattle hip-hop history. From the Teen Dance Ordinance to consistently playing Bumbershoot and Capitol Hill Block Party, what are some moments that stand out for you?

MG: I wasn’t too knowledgeable about the hip-hop scene in Seattle when I was starting to figure out what Champagne was going to do. I had no idea what hip-hop groups were around or even there were any hip-hop groups. I knew like, Old Dominion was one of the bigger groups, and Cancer Rising and stuff like that but one of my buddies was a liquor rep, and he was putting on a lot of club nights. Me and him actually started this one club night called ‘Fizz’ – it was ‘Champagne Champagne Presents Fizz’. We were going to host hip-hop-meets-electro-meets-rock; whatever we thought was cool. So we had all of the local, Seattle, hip-hop artists that we could think of play it. I mean Macklemore would play it. Mad Rad was one of the first bands that played it. Basically, every hip-hop group you can think of in Seattle. I mean, we didn’t have a fan base. Everyone was just kind of playing the rec centers or opening up shows for any other bigger act that came through but there was no real Seattle community of hip-hop. If you think about the rock stuff, you’d see These Arms Are Snakes, Blood Brothers, Botch, Minus the Bear – all of these bands – always kicking it with each other at bars, playing shows with each other, touring with each other but the Seattle hip-hop scene wasn’t really touring or kicking it with each other. I feel like when we started doing that night, everybody started to hang out with each other and then we started new bands. I feel like Seattle started paying attention to what the hip-hop scene was doing. Not saying that what we did made everybody aware of it, but I feel like everybody in the hip-hop scene started branching out and playing more shows and being aware of touring and being like ‘ya know what, we can actually go around the US in a van!’ Bands like Greysoul were touring massively and even Dark Time Sunshine is one of the only hip-hop groups in Seattle that’s consistently touring. Then there’s Macklemore. I don’t even know where that guy came from. He’s like the biggest artist in Seattle right now. The dude is almost gonna sell out WaMu! It’s crazy! It’s mind-blowing! When we started doing Fizz, he played it and he had like 12 people there and I’ll be honest, those 12 people weren’t really into it. Then he started building his presence and as soon as he was big enough to take bands out, he straight up asked us. He was like “I’m gonna take you guys on tour and I’m gonna take some other groups from Seattle on tour and let’s get Seattle on the map”. I feel like everybody is starting to grow with each other and help each other out. The hip-hop community in Seattle, I feel, is a lot stronger than it’s ever been but at the same time, I didn’t know what the hip-hop community was before I got into it.

AOT: Your record Private Party is brief but intense. Was the process of making the album the same way?

MG: We did our first record with “Soda and Poprocks”, “Molly Ringwald”, and all that stuff. That was me and Pearl, just by ourselves without Thomas because he wasn’t in the group yet. We didn’t really know what our sound was. We were just pulling songs from that huge database of songs that I had. When it came to Private Party, we were intentionally writing songs for our band. I think we knew we wanted to do some rock-ish stuff and some more deliberate hip-hop stuff. We just write and then we choose the best and what fits together. We had, I think, 20 songs for that record. We just decided to whittle it down to seven. We actually have a new EP that’s done, which is crazy because Private Party isn’t even out in the states yet. Our new record is even crazier. The first song is basically like a Blood Brothers song where I’m just fucking thrashing on the drums with this TV On The Radio, drony bass line going. It’s just super thrashed-out. Like, punk. And Pearl’s just rapping over it, but heavily distorted. The new record is even crazier. There’s no intention behind what we’re doing besides just to write cool shit. Even if we sit down and write the most mellow record, we still think it’s the most punk thing ever. It’s not intentional to write agro music, we just do what we do. We tend to pick the songs that are a little more crazy, to release. You should see our catalog of slow songs. We have more slow songs than up-songs. We’ve got like songs that are acoustic with Pearl rapping. It’s kind of hilarious. Songs that people will probably never hear. We spend nights at the house just writing music. There’s tons of unreleased material. It’s been crazy. We just write massive amounts of music.

AOT: Do you think that you’ll sit on that for a while and maybe someday, it’ll be a good time to release it or do you think it’ll stay there as inspiration?

MG: The mellow stuff? I’ve been trying to find a way to release it. I might just clean up the songs and release them for free or something like that. In between records maybe, or B-sides. I dunno. We really have this second EP ready to go. It should be released in Europe in October when we go over there, meaning we’ll have Private Party and this EP unreleased in the States. I don’t really know what we’re gonna do. We might combine the two EPs and release them as a full-length in the States. Yeah, but with that other material, I don’t even know. What we’ve been doing, actually, is putting one of the more mellow songs on each record. Like “Jennifer’s Body”. The beat to it was something that was a little bit older. Some of the things, I dunno if people are going to listen to it and be like “what the fuck are these guys on?” But at the same time, if you listen to our music, we don’t really care [laughs]. We release it anyway.

AOT: In the past, you’ve called yourself “80’s babies”. Is that in some way related to how “Black Bart Simpson” made its way onto Private Party?

MG: Dude, I don’t even know where “Black Bart Simpson” came from. I’m familiar with “Black Bart Simpson” and the bootleg shirts that were around back in like, the ‘90s but that was a little bit more of Thomas’ and Pearl’s worlds. I became more familiar with “Black Bart Simpson” after we did the song. But if you listen to all of our songs, they’re all full of references to the ‘80s or whatever. Like “Molly Ringwald” all the way to… “Teen Wolf Surfing Van”, just a whole bunch of stupid shit that we think is hilarious. I mean, have you sat there and stoned out to “Jennifer’s Body?” at all? That song is probably the dumbest but best song ever made. That song is literally about the movie, Jennifer’s Body [laughs]. Me and Thomas were driving in the van, listening to the beat and we were just cracking up. Talking about Jennifer’s Body and Seth Cohen from the OC and how in the movie Megan Fox’s character wants to give the dude, Seth Cohen, a blowjob so she’s an “OC blower” but kind of relating it to her smoking Oxycotin. If you listen to it, it’s so dumb but it’s hilarious. Like the song “STRFKRS”. That was us driving in the van, and we were going to meet up with the band STRFKR and I was like “hey guys, it would be really cool if we wrote a song for the band STRFKR so when we get to the first show, we can be like ‘hey guys! We wrote you guys a song!’” So we’re just sitting there and we’re like “I’m looking for a starfucker/to fuck me and my star brothas”. We were like “this is so dumb… but hilarious” [laughs]. We just kept it going. There’s a song that’s not out yet, but we have a song called “Swine, My Brother” It’s the dumbest song about black culture and just being really ridiculous. There’s so many funny songs that we just come up with that we think are hilarious that I’ll show my girlfriend and she’ll be like “I don’t get it….” [laughs].

AOT: Thomas has got a great sense of humor. In an interview with MTV, Thomas Grey said he was “thwarting the myth that brothas cannot swim because I’m actually an Olympic athlete myself”.

MG: Yeah that was some weird MTV thing. Dude, we would do interviews every day on Warped Tour and we’d always have Thomas go do them and there were moments where he was being filmed and you’d just see the person interviewing him lose control of the entire interview and Thomas would grab the mic and the camera guy would be like “what do I do!?” and someone would be like “Follow him!” [laughs]. We just looked like a bunch of crazy motherfuckers. But it’s hilarious! And you can’t understand half the shit he’s saying because it’s like random references and the most hilarious fucking analogies. And you’ll just be like “What are you talking about? How did you come up with that analogy?” But it’s fucking genius.