Squeak E. Clean

Counts Down to NASA Blast Off

By Kyle MacKinnel

08.18.08

What happens when you round up several of the most talented musicians and DJs from two different sides of the world, mix and match them in square-dance-like fashion, and then cram the resulting magic onto one jam-packed LP? According to Sam Spiegel (also known as musical alchemist Squeak E. Clean), you are left with a dream come true. Such an ambitious task is exactly what Spiegel had in mind when he conceived the mega-album super-project, NASA—North America South America—with his friend, the white-hot Brazilian turntablist, DJ Zegon. The duo wanted to synthesize some of the most exciting musical forces from both sides of the Panama Canal, in order to create a compilation that would take the Western Hemisphere by storm. And when it came to enlisting the troops, Spiegel and Zegon were ready and able to put their money where their mouths are, as the list of artists on the NASA LP proves insanely impressive, including the likes of: David Byrne, Tom Waits, John Frusciante, M.I.A., Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, RZA, George Clinton, Seu Jorge, Chuck D, and many, many more. When ground control recently put Antics in contact with the revolutionary Spiegel, the mixmaster was willing to give us an insider’s look at what it’s like all the way up there on cloud nine.

How did you come up with the idea for NASA?

I met DJ Zegon at a party at some mutual friends’ house in 2003, I think. We started talking about music, and how much we love Brazilian music. We were talking about Brazilian funk from the ’60s and ’70s and we just really hit it off. We started hanging out more and more, and began to work on this idea to make a record with a bunch of people collaborating. On the first track we did, we pulled in Karen O, who I, at the time, was working with on her solo album, and Fat Lip from Pharcyde, and then we decided to get ODB on the song too. And as soon as we did that song with that combination of people, the whole idea really clicked in, like, “Oh wow, this is crazy.” This record is about bringing people together from completely different worlds, just like we came together from different worlds through music. That’s why we have all the crazy combinations—people like Tom Waits and Kool Keith, David Byrne and Chuck D, people you never expect together, but somehow make sense. It all fit together in the idea of doing this crazy record with our favorite musicians from all these different genres of music.

Did you write the tracks specifically for artists, or did the featured musicians come about in the aftermath?

We never said, “Let’s make a track for this person.” We’d usually make something we liked, and then as we were starting to write the song, it would tend to go in a direction that we’d be like, “This sounds like George Clinton,” or “This sounds like Method Man.” We would start to feel the song out, and feel the artist through the song as we did it. Basically, we’d sit around as we were making these tracks and say the nuttiest combination of names, like our dream of who we could get on the song. It’s crazy, a lot of times they actually happened.

Is there a common theme on the record? Or is it more of a collage?

You know, it was really important to us that the record had some sort of cohesion to it, because we wanted it to feel like a full record instead of a compilation. One definite common theme is the Brazilian flavor of the record. We sampled all these Brazilian records from the ’60s and the ‘70s we were listening to at the time, and worked with a lot of Brazilian musicians. Also, subject wise, one of the themes is unity and people not being divided by race, genres of music, lifestyle, or money, but coming together through art and music. We definitely explored the way that different cultures interact with each other. We have a Rastafarian on a track with someone from Brazil who’s half-Japanese, and a white girl from Philly. It’s definitely a culture crash, in a sense.

Are there any experiences from recording that stand out in your mind as particularly special?

Going up and recording Tom Waits was an amazing experience, because Tom is such an interesting, intense character. And he lives out in the middle of nowhere in Northern California, with rolling hills and cow farms everywhere. I roll up—I finally find the address—and it just seems like there’s no way this is actually the recording studio. It looks like this weird country house, and I drive down a long, dirt driveway and there are broken down trailers everywhere. And there’s this log cabin in the back, which is actually a weird recording studio. I hang out there a while, and Tom shows up—I had never met him before—and he was just so cool.

Are you planning to take NASA live, and if so, will any of the special guests be involved?

Right now we’re doing DJ shows with some interesting visual stuff going on. At some point, we’re going to start integrating some Brazilian percussion into the show. We’re not going to tour with any of the guest artists, because I feel that it would be not cool to tour with just a couple of them, but I plan on doing one or two gigantic shows with everybody from the record. Maybe it’ll be Pay-Per-View, or televised, or something like that…it would be pretty special.

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