It’s no stretch to say that Brandon Phillips has spent his entire adult life and a significant part of his boyhood steeped in the Kansas City music community: as a musician, a band leader, a label owner and label manager, among other roles.
In the early 1990s, he and his younger brothers, Zach and Adam, started The Gadjits, a ska-punk band that gained some national traction and signed with a big independent label, Hellcat Records. After The Gadjits broke up in 2003, the Phillips brothers re-emerged as The Architects and turned toward a more raw and aggressive rock-based brand of punk. Since 2004, they have released six-full lengths and two EPs, including the ambitious Border War releases, a series of recordings with accompanying graphic novels.
Phillips recently answered questions from IN Kansas City about The Gadjits, The Architects, his latest music projects, and the rewards and tribulations of 25-plus years spent toiling in the music industry.
You grew up in a family where music and the arts were prevalent. What is your perspective now on how all that shaped you?
I’m certain that it had a huge role in making me who I am, but not in a “took up the family business” kind of way. I probably eavesdropped on 3,000 hours of my mom coaching private drama students, but I can’t act my way out of a paper bag. I probably wasted several hundred pounds of water-based clay at one end of my grandmother’s workbench while she sculpted glorious abstracts in oil base at the other end, but I couldn’t sculpt a credible-looking bunny rabbit if my life depended on it.
One uncle was a hired-gun keyboard player, another was the art director for big-time film and TV projects. Everyone was passionately involved in the arts, but no one was leaving a set of footprints that I felt like I needed to follow.
What was absolutely clear, though, was that art and music were home for me. Dark theaters, rehearsal rooms, studios, workshops that smell like turpentine: They’re not just a comfort zone; they’re blissful.
What bands or albums first influenced and inspired you?
I was exactly the right age to catch metal, punk rock, and early hip-hop all at once, so there’s a lot there to unpack. AC/DC made me want to play guitar for certain, and there was a copy of Ramones’ Mania that was floating around our house that had a pretty big impact on both my brothers and me.
All my friends who played guitar were trying to learn finger-tapping and sweep-picking and the lead part to Sweet Child ‘O Mine, and I felt really weird because I was struggling to make this simple power chord intro to Dead Kennedys’ Government Flu swing as hard as it did on the record.
Then I got hold of the first Rancid album and Operation Ivy’s Energy and suddenly I was no longer adrift in music, I was focused. I found people who played like I wanted to play, and that was huge.
The Gadjits were your breakthrough band, at least the band through which I was introduced to the Phillips brothers. They ended up signing with a legit label, Hellcat Records, and working with Tim Armstrong of Rancid, who produced the excellent At Ease album. What did you learn from that experience and what are you proudest of regarding The Gadjits?
Let’s start with the positive lessons. We toured so much and through so many different situations, from sold-out theaters to clubs and literal chicken coops, that we learned how to be a professional band. We learned how to put the show and the music first, even on our worst days.
Making the records we made for Hellcat and afterward, we learned that we preferred to sound a little bit messy and trashy. The cleaner a recording was, the less representative of us it felt.
The negative lessons are pretty easy to sum up: The music industry is a cesspool. The silver lining there being that the good people tend to hang together, and we’ve been pretty lucky to have good people who’ve lasted quite a while with us. The bad people are pretty well-camouflaged—they buy your dinner and tell you you’re “family.” So, you know—word to the wise.
At that time the attitudes of all the bosses and managers and music industry insiders were very non-interventionist. No one wanted to be seen as “meddling” in an artist’s career by steering them too far in one direction or another.
Looking back, I’d say we definitely could have used some gentle meddling because we tended to make really dumb, reactive decisions, and no one was there saying, “Dudes, cool the (bleep) down and rethink that.”
With The Gadjits, I’m probably proudest of a string of shows we did around the time we were being signed by RCA. I don’t remember all the cities or even all the venues, but I very clearly remember that we would step on stage every night, flip the switch, and be absolutely fierce until I could barely stand up. Regardless of any outside measure of success, there is nothing like knowing you’re crushing it.
You are the eldest of three brothers, both of whom have been with you from the beginning. There are plenty of notorious stories of brothers/siblings not getting along in this business. What’s the Phillips brothers’ secret?
Some immeasurable mixture of dumb luck, genuine brotherly love, and mild-to-moderate co-dependence issues? Honestly, I think we’ve probably had as many nuclear scream-fests as any sibling band; we just keep it in the van. And fortunately, NME was never snooping around to publish the awful shit we’d say to each other.
Talk about the transition from The Gadjits to The Architects, which precipitated a significant change in sound.
After The Gadjits was dropped by RCA, we went ahead and finished the album we would have made for them but before we could finish all the mixes, Ehren (Starks) decided that he’d had enough and needed to quit the band. That was the last straw for The Gadjits.
Once we’d stopped hurling curses at the sky, we decided that this was a pretty good opportunity to start over, and to start over with a really good album and a different sense of what we wanted. The Architects was our slightly cleaner slate. Over several albums and a gillion tours, I really love what The Architects became. The harder we pushed, the more we found this raw, core sound of punk rock and roll.
Since 2004, the Architects have released eight recordings, full-lengths and EPs. You’ve toured with some big bands. What are some of your proudest moments with the Architects?
Maybe this is going to make me sound like a total rube, but I don’t think we’re ever going to top the My Chemical Romance tour.
We’ve done some big shows since then, and it’s not as though those weren’t a blast, but I never felt like I fit in anywhere more in my life than stepping on and off those My Chem stages every night. I mean, my heart and mind are open to being proven wrong on this, but if having Ray Toro come out and take the solo on a cover of Sin City by AC/DC and watching a sold out Palladium’s worth of kids lose their (bleeping) minds turns out to have been the best four minutes of my life, then fine. I got what I came for.
You have several other projects going on. What’s the status of the Architects?
The Architects are on pause right now while we do some other things. Truth be told, we kind of invented the other projects so that we’d have an outlet outside The Architects, and The Architects’ style could stay kind of pure.
Let’s talk about those other projects, starting with Brandon Phillips and The Condition. What influences do you plumb when writing music for this group?
Mainly, I think about Elvis Costello and The Supremes and a handful of random bubble-gum singles from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
BP+C should, ideally, be about shamelessly sticky bops that veer a bit soulful. I wouldn’t want anything to be too heavy, sleepy or weepy. I want to awaken the inner-teenager in whomever hears it so the smashy-crashiness of The Kinks and the overblown romanticism of The Ronettes are both totally fair game.
Where does Elvis Costello fit into this? He’s my favorite songwriter ever, and when he does anything in an R&B/Soul style he invariably decimates it.
Other Americans. Significantly different from the Condition. Where does their sound come from?
We wanted to try and do something that was as far outside the Architects’ sphere of influence as we could go. Initially, we were thinking of Morcheeba and Massive Attack and all these really lush trip-hop records we’d been obsessing over for decades.
Clearly, we ended up someplace else, but I don’t think anyone is mad about it. Julie (Behrens) and I are both interested in EDM (electronic dance music), and the more I messed around with synths, the more we seemed to veer in the direction of electro-rock.
More than a few times in my life, the best thing I heard that month/year was a good song remixed by a talented producer in a creative way. In a perfect world, Other Americans would always have that imaginative energy baked into our sound. On the session that we just recorded back in November, we referenced (if I’m not mistaken) Elastica, Gang of Four, Carmine Coppola, Run DMC, Amy Winehouse, and a Bond theme.
Mensa Deathsquad. On its Facebook page you describe it as “dark, electro-alternative.”
Truly, I think I rolled with that description because no one else had a better idea. I’m accepting submissions.
I blasted out four Other Americans remixes in like two weeks last summer and I’d toyed with the idea of doing something really, really electronic, but this was the sign that it was time to make a serious effort at it.
Now, I have a small problem with EDM per se. I love synthesizers and I love throbbing kick drums and squeaky, trippy glitches, white-noise risers and tape-stop downers and a heavy-ass drop that suddenly pulls a ferocious twist on you is as gorgeous to my ear as any symphonic work ever produced.
However, the rote-ness of the festival EDM formula bores me. Also, the lack of any kind of song or story kills my high every time. So I knew I wasn’t that, but that I was going to draw some water—the stuff I liked—from that well. So I started with tempos and bass lines and just started building on it in whatever way felt good, and then I realized how totally over my head I was because there were no band members, no one else in the room to play off of or argue with or high five.
Yeeesh. It had been quite a while since I’d felt even slightly intimidated by music composition or production. So, I played it for some close friends, they liked it, and I got over it. When I felt tired enough, I decided I was done and what was finished was going to be an album.
Any other endeavors you’d like to mention?
At the moment, the thing I’m most engaged with is trying to get over some nasty post-surgical complications. Will return to music directly.
Who would you most like to collaborate with (the person can be dead or alive) and why?
I would love to just be a studio assistant on a Trent Reznor film score. I can’t imagine a cooler place to be a fly on the wall.
You have been a part of the music business for more than a quarter century, as a musician, a band manager, a label owner/administrator. The business has changed radically over that time. What inspires you to stay so immersed in it? What gives you hope?
People show up and see artists perform music. That is really the only hopeful glimmer. That is the only reason to remain involved after you’ve seen the sausage being made. You can and should surround yourself with good people, but it will never be enough. The rot of incompetence and indifference in this industry is like an epidemic, and even if your lawyer and manager are pure-hearted crusaders for you, it will amount to little more than a paper mask and a tube of hand sanitizer.
You’re gonna catch it and if anything motivates you to survive, it’s going to be that people still come out to see artists perform. That’s the main thing. The other thing is that I’ve just never hit that point where I’m thinking, “Well, I guess it’s time to get into roofing supplies.”
What’s your perspective on the Kansas City music community? What are its strengths and what could it use more of?
First off, there are stalwarts here who would carry the whole thing on their backs if we needed them to. They are lovely, sweet people who are in this for all the right reasons, and they have my utmost respect for the metric tons of thankless shit they do for local music and local musicians.
What we are strong on, I think, has been the same for 60 years: local singers and players who come correct; local clubs and halls where they can test themselves in front of an audience; local labels cutting records; and a handful of local music mavens trying to spread the gospel about it all.
Where K.C. is weak, it’s been weak for the same 60 years: No one outside the scene seems to think any of this is worth a damn until it’s been approved by some other cities or outside forces. K.C. is a puzzle: We love local beer and local barbecue and imported entertainment. Go figure.
If a 19-year-old artist asked me how to build more support in K.C., I’d tell them the melancholy truth: Move to Atlanta, New York, Nashville, or L.A. When you’re bubbling everywhere else, come back, and there will be asses in all the seats.
And the local TV morning show will have you come on, and they’ll ask which high school you went to and what day does the album drop and then they’ll stand you up at a kitchen island next to Jasper Mirabile so he can teach everyone how to flip a perfect omelet on TV. And then you’ll go back to L.A.
Call me, though, if you need a band leader for the tour.
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