The K.G.B.

Toby (vocals, guitar, keyboards)
Johnny Genius (lead guitar, vocals)
Moses (bass, vocals)
Tom (drums, valve trombone, vocals)
Ben (trumpet, organ, vocals, quality fake I.D.)

THE HISTORY
“I’m a pretty content, relatively secure, happy person,” confesses Toby, The K.G.B.’s singer and songwriter. “I don’t feel like writing songs that express my misery; I feel like writing songs like James Brown. When I listen to that stuff, I want to go out and see a band and drink beer and fuck a girl and have fun. I want our music to give people the same feeling. Godsmack makes me wanna die; James Brown makes me wanna live.”
The K.G.B. is a quintet of Bay Area youths devoted to preserving the honest sounds of yesterday and shaking up the sounds of today. The disparate elements of their sonic complexion suggest everything from Sublime-meets-The Beatles, the groove of Booker T. & The MG’s and the stoned Caribbean vibe of Peter Tosh to the songcraft of the young Elvis Costello and a Motown flair for sweet harmony. All this and more can be heard on The K.G.B (released Sept. 18, 2001, on DreamWorks Records), which picks up where 2000’s The Space Cadet EP left off. The band’s full-length debut invites listeners to smile, dance and indulge their God-given love of the hook almighty.
The members of The K.G.B. met as sophomores at The Head-Royce School in Oakland, Calif. Singer-guitarist-keyboardist Toby and bassist-singer Moses quickly formed a musical bond. Says the former: “I found out Moses was playing bass and I was teaching myself guitar. We started jamming Elvis songs, The Stones, whatever had three chords. Somehow we got into discordant space rock – David Bowie lyrics with kind of an Elastica vibe. It was very stupid. We called ourselves The Vermicious Knids.” Moses illuminates, “They’re the evil aliens in [Roald Dahl’s] ‘Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator.’”
The Knids suffered through a handful of sub-par drummers before hooking up with Tom (who also plays valve trombone and sings). The son of a noted choral singer, Tom was then going steady with Toby’s ex-girlfriend. He, Toby and Moses got to talking at a Halloween party at a house with a drum kit in the garage. Tom displayed his chops for his future bandmates, who were sufficiently impressed to recruit him on the spot.
Toby remarks of the band’s early efforts: “It was a very innocent high school thing. Our moms drove us to practice.” The boys jammed a blend of classic rock staples, alternative rock anthems and their first originals. A unique musical identity eluded them, however, until the following year, when Toby and Moses took a school trip to England.
They spent their first nights there perusing the rock-steady/reggae record racks in Brixton, drinking at the pub and growing close to classmate Ben. Turns out Ben blows a mean trumpet (as well as playing organ and singing). According to Moses, Ben – whose flawless fake I.D. (“It even has the hologram,” Toby says breathlessly) made him official beer buyer for the band – began playing trumpet because “he was an avid Dungeons And Dragons player, and he thought the trumpet would be the most medieval instrument, like guys heralding the king’s arrival.”
“When we came back, Ben joined up and we became more of a rock-steady band,” says Toby. “I don’t really know how it happened, but it probably had something to do with Rancid’s ‘Timebomb.’ There was something so spy-ish about it.” With a new sound blossoming, the boys needed a new name. “The K.G.B.” was sufficiently mysterious. It may refer to the Soviet version of the C.I.A., but the three letters actually mean much, much more. “We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you,” Moses insists.
Rechristened, Moses, Toby, Tom and Ben recruited Johnny Genius for his six-string prowess. A music student at the School Of The Arts High School in San Francisco, traveling oboist in the Bay Area Wind Symphony and diehard Aerosmith fan, Genius colored their songs and allowed Toby to pawn off those tough guitar parts and devote his energies to fronting the band. That year – 11th grade – the kids got busy in the East Bay all-ages scene. Donning full rock-steady regalia, they set their peers to jamming at Berkeley Square (now defunct), Ashkanaz and the hallowed 924 Gilman St. Success in these venues led to a purported trip to Japan, apparently sponsored by a package tour showcasing young American rock and pop acts.
“The Japanese loved us,” Toby boasts. “The girls were trying to grab my dick. We had an amazing time, even destroyed some hotel rooms. That’s also where we developed a very serious sushi fetish. In the studio, we had to eat sushi four or five times a week.” Tom alleges: “We opened for The Knack in Osaka – at Budokan.” Toby ups the ante: “And we met Yoko Ono. She was a real bitch. We were playing one night and she jumped onstage, grabbed a mic and just started shrieking. We were playing ‘Goodbye Girl’ and the show suddenly turned into an avant-garde noise jam.”
Back home, The K.G.B. served as test subjects for students at a local engineering college in exchange for free studio time. “It sucked,” Toby declares. “You’d sit there for, like, six hours while some instructor explained what all the buttons did; then you’d get an hour to do as much recording as you could. I’d do all my vocal takes in a row. I wouldn’t even break between songs.”
Not surprisingly, he describes their first demos as “total crap,” pointing out, “I sound like a castrated ten-year-old girl.” Still, these tapes piqued the curiosity of the local music industry. Folks at San Francisco’s influential Live 105 caught on, as did a handful of managers, including EGM’s Eric Godtland and Dusty Sorenson, who also handle Third Eye Blind (with whom The K.G.B. have since toured) Comments Godtland: “Their songs were brilliant, but the guys were still finding their vocabulary. They were devouring music: The Police, Led Zeppelin, Squeeze, Stax. They ransacked my huge vinyl collection. For two years, it was like a music school – they absorbed everything, practiced for eight hours a day and wrote like crazy.”
EGM connected the band with producer Michael Urbano (who has played drums for Cracker, served as a sideman for John Hiatt and produced music by Trinket). He also helped foster The K.G.B.’s development from high school garage bashers to eclectic, melodic musicians. Urbano schooled them in the work of James Brown and the classic Motown artists, significantly augmenting their understanding of grooveology.
Toby says of the experience: “Michael taught the horns to listen to the vocals and the bass to listen to the kick drum – all the little shit you naturally pick up from playing in bands for ten years. We learned more in three months with Michael than we had the entire time we’d been a band. We started listening to more soul music and straight-up rock and realized we could apply all that to our sound, which was great because playing reggae-influenced stuff had just gotten old. Our songs became more fluid and expansive; you could play them a lot of different ways and they still sounded cool.”
The K.G.B. then headed to San Francisco’s Toast Studios, where the allure of a big facility with seemingly unlimited tracks proved more a stumbling block than a blessing. “Those demos were totally bloated,” Toby admits. “We were romanced by all the gizmos at our disposal. We used every track on the board and then some. We hadn’t figured out yet that we didn’t need to do so much.”
The Toast tapes were nonetheless adequate for a major-label shopping trip. Toby and Moses packed up their acoustics and made the rounds, playing stripped-down K.G.B. numbers for prospective A&R reps. But their activity proved fruitless.
The trip wasn’t a complete wash, however. In New York, Toby and Tom (who’d flown out when Moses had to return to the Bay Area), found time to practice the rock star moves they’d flirted with in Japan and acquire fake I.D.s of their own – in a porn shop. “We got sent to this really fancy Japanese place by one of the labels,” Toby recalls. “We were eating Kobe beef and hammering sake. By the end of the meal we were just tanked. We went back to our hotel and spent hours tossing beer bottles and glasses and pillows and CDs the labels had given us out our 19th-story window. We broke so much fucking shit. But then we heard a knock at the door, so we threw all our clothes off and got into our beds to pretend we were sleeping. The hotel manager just yelled, ‘You’re outta here!’ So at 2:00 a.m. we were on the street in our underwear with all the stuff we’d thrown out the window.”
Returning west, The K.G.B. went back in with Urbano, recording at Oakland’s Sharkbite Studios. This time, they churned out a bunch of much more economical and light-hearted songs. DreamWorks Records principal Michael Ostin loved what he heard and signed the band. Says Toby: “This was a perfect situation and an ideal time to put college on hold. We could live at home and practice every fucking day – you just can’t do that when you have a day job or classes.”
Indeed, The K.G.B. continued to practice tirelessly and further immersed themselves in musical history, learning more and more from the greats of soul, rock, pop and funk. They sorted through a sprawling stock of songs, reinventing early K.G.B. material and infusing newer compositions with what they’d gleaned from their ongoing survey. After months of pre-production, the boys joined Urbano and co-producer David Bianco (Tom Petty, AC/DC, U2, L.L. Cool J.) at Oakland’s Studio 880.
Mixing went down at Universal City, Calif.-based Larrabee North. “We stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn, a horrible piece of shit with no hot tub, no room service and only old people staying there,” Toby states. “We were in the Portola wing of the hotel. The building across the way was the El Dorado wing. We were so fried after two weeks of mixing that we somehow got it into out heads that the El Dorado was the enemy. We decided to wage war – ‘El Dorado must die!’”
“In the elevators they have the little daily itinerary display window – you know, ‘Goldman bar mitzvah in the Grand Ballroom’-type stuff,” Toby continues. “So we took these hardcore shots from Barely Legal and glued them inside the window so everyone who got in the elevator would have no choice but to examine some truly graphic porn. So we get home and Tom’s playing the vintage drum kit he’d bought way before we ever went to L.A. He looks down at the bass drum and scratched on there is, ‘El Dorado.’ I swear to God, none of us did it. It had been there the whole time. It was the curse of El Dorado!”
The curse does not, however, seem to have affected The K.G.B., which bears a warm, organic sound that amply reflects the band members’ various influences. Sequencing and programming are co-credited to Urbano and enigmatic, unofficial sixth K.G.B. member y-bot, a shadowy figure the band is reluctant to discuss. “He’s a communist,” Tom offers. “Shut up – he is not!” Toby retorts, clarifying: “y-bot is a close personal friend of mine. He’s from Kazakhstan. He’s very pale. We speak with him through a translator. We send him MP3 files.”
With that issue settled for the moment, The K.G.B. are once again anxious to leave the serene confines of their current location, Berkeley, for the road and all its attendant hijinks. They’re anxious to turn 21. They’re anxious to meet your daughter. Above all, they’re anxious to flood the airwaves with the kind of summer songs that have not been heard for a long, long time.