As was the case with Diamond Rugs’ 2012 self-titled debut record, much of the band’s sophomore album, Cosmetics, formed and grew in the studio. That’s an impressive feat, considering that Diamond Rugs is something of a weekender project for members of no fewer than five bands, all of whom keep moderate-to-ridiculous recording and touring schedules anyway: John McCauley and Robbie Crowell (both Deer Tick), Ian St. Pé (Black Lips), T. Hardy Morris (Dead Confederate), Bryan Dufresne (Six Finger Satellite) and the legendary Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, Blasters and about six dozen other outfits). The boys in the band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent feature on them.
McCauley: Sometimes, when people ask me what my favorite band is, I tell them the California Raisins. People get a kick out of that. I’m not really joking around, though.
My obsession started young. I loved animation, but I never cared much for the kids’ music that accompanied so much of it. Even as a toddler, I knew it was crap. I listened to what my parents listened to, which was stuff like Talking Heads, Dire Straits, Blondie, the Beatles and so on. I also loved ‘50s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll and developed my own obsessions with Ritchie Valens, Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison. I had pretty good taste for a three-year-old. The only important thing that was missing was R&B.
Enter: The California Raisins.
I think it is just absolutely brilliant what director Will Vinton did with his Claymation mockumentary Meet The Raisins! The Raisins brought songs like “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” (Temptations), “Shotgun” (Junior Walker & The All Stars) and, of course, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” (Marvin Gaye) to children, but these rerecorded R&B classics weren’t done in your typical, corny, children’s song fashion. They were recorded just like any other song at the time. It sounds a little dated now, but in 1988, that shit was fresh!
I was getting a short education in real Motown and real rock ‘n’ roll every time I played that VHS, and I didn’t even know it. It helped immensely in my discovery of music. I loved seeking out the original recordings of those songs, or hearing them on the radio. It expanded my palette and introduced me at a very young age to a whole bunch of incredible music that would have taken me years to find otherwise.
These 24 minutes of anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables singing and dancing kicked the shit out of Barney’s 17-year TV career. “I Love You”? Fuck no, the Raisins were singing “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” and I was loving every second of it! There was even some gunplay; A.C. got drunk and sang “Mr. Pitiful” (well, in the 1990 sequel), and their manager Rudy Bagaman (a rutabaga) chain-smoked cigars! You’d never see that in a kids’ program today! Now it’s all a bunch of squeaky-clean computer animated stuff that’s hard on the eyes … which brings me to my next point:
The clay!
My Raisin friends are so expertly animated; they’re such a joy to look at. It makes me sad that, when kids watch cartoons today, there’s nothing indicating any hard work on the other side of the screen. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I love things like film scratches on old Looney Tunes. I love when one of the Ninja Turtles is accidentally animated with the wrong color headband. I love how you can see the animator’s fingerprints on the Raisins. Stuff like that really humanized the cartoon watching experience for me and that made me want to be an artist.
When I found out I was going to be a father, one of the many things that excited me was the fact that I could share this short film with my kid. First, I’m going to try to teach her to use the record player (somehow I had that mastered by the age of three), and then I’m going to sit her down and watch Meet The Raisins! with her. Maybe she’ll understand her daddy’s obsession. I’ve got a lot of Raisin memorabilia—hundreds of figurines, T-shirts, even suspenders … and four Raisin-related tattoos. My biggest hope is that it gets her off to a good start of a long life of discovering music.
Thanks, Will Vinton.
