Immersed in L.A.'s rave scene, the two would spend endless hours in their studio making music. When not trying to tweak their analogue machines' knobs into something special, they did whatever they could to keep their studio afloat. They worked with mostly with local singers and rappers to pay the rent on their lofty Melrose Place address. Once they rendered their first track "Now Is The Time" to tape, they decided to give themselves a name and concentrate solely on their music. One day the two were reading through a copy of Urb magazine which had a request for demos by a fledgling L.A. label which eventually would become City of Angels, and they obliged by sending in their tape. By the time their second song came out, the buzz was on about the Method, and seemingly every Trip Hop compilation this side of the sun had the Jesse Jackson-sampling "Keep Hope Alive" on it. "That ended up being a big song for us -- it never seemed to want to die," Kirkland says, noting that it got signed overseas to Sony's S2 imprint just because so many DJs were banging it for so long. "One night, our A+R man would hear [Underworld's] Darren Emmerson playing it, then he'd hear [Radio 1 DJ] Pete Tong playing it, then the Chemical Brothers playing it too. He fell in love with it by hearing it so much." With a major deal signed overseas, the focus shifted to getting signed to a domestic major, as their contract with City of Angels was soon to be up. All of the sudden, offers began piling up. "Our lawyer suggested to us that rather than get into a bidding war, that we choose the label we wanted to go with and then she'd make the best deal with them," Jordan said, continuing, "she explained that when there's a bidding war, the label ends up hating you in the end, and we wanted to go with Outpost anyways because when we did a walk-through up there, they seemed to be most interested in the music, with most people on the staff admitting that they were sick of guitar bands." In fact, the boys seem rather proud of the people at Outpost, "they signed us last September, before this whole 'next big thing' stuff. They gave us a deal because they thought we were a cool band that had actual songs who could deliver an album."
When the duo signed the dotted line at Outpost, they had fifteen tracks completed. Only one made the cut on Vegas, the aforementioned "Keep Hope Alive." Kirkland knows why: "It's our first album, we saw that Outpost was really going to get behind us, so we wanted to give them something that was going to work for them." When they turned the album in, the label knew they got more than they had bargained for, which for Jordan, gave the band even more a vote of confidence than it already had. "They were like 'Wow! A couple of tracks with a singer -- cool!' Never at anytime during the recording process did the label have any input into the making of the record other than 'make the album like you would have made it for City of Angels.'" Basically, any of the rumors you hear about labels trying to change the indie mentality did not apply to the Crystal Method.
Written 8/15/97
Originally posted by Jennifer Warner, reposted with permission.
