A Minute with the Aggrolites' Roger Rivas (Pt. 2)

RMT: Since you’ve dug out such a specific niche to work in, how does playing at larger festivals like Warped Tour or Riot Fest work out for the band?

RR: Going into those kinds of festivals, we already know that we’re going to play the ska show and we’re going to get the support of that crowd. With Warped Tour and people wearing the Kanye West glasses, we’re still going against the grain and it’s great. There’s just this audience staring at you and it’s hard to really get into playing when they’re just kinda mannequins out there. Those are the shows, though, when you win people over.

RMT: Did touring with larger festivals like that account for the few years between the band’s first and second album?

RR: The first record was done with Axe Records and it was the first thing ever done on that label. Axe was just a couple friends of ours from San Francisco. It was just kinda like, ‘Alright Aggrolites, no one’s heard of your band’ and they just released it.

I guess the big gap was a combination of doing the album with Tim [Armstong] before we did the self titled disc. So there was that project – A Poet’s Life – where we did all the backing music. That in and of itself was an experience, because Tim chose the songs, we sat down with him and just did ‘em in Aggrolites’ fashion. When you’re in the studio you’re kind of in this mode and we could just go immediately back into the studio afterwards and do our own stuff.  It would have been too much back to back.

RMT: After the self titled album, the follow-up, Reggae Hit L.A., sounds a bit detached from the rest of the Aggrolites’ catalog. Was there a concerted effort to change things up?

RR: We don’t do that consciously. We just do what we do. It’s gotta be different, because our lives are different. The first two albums did really well: the self titled album got reviewed in Rolling Stone and everything was happening. So, Reggae Hit L.A. is just us saying, let’s not just go in there and do whatever we want to do.

We had some Lee Perry influenced stuff - it was stuff that we always wanted to do, but weren’t brave enough to record. And then, with IV we’d already done all of that stuff, so we tried other things.

RMT: Have you guys considered working with a single outside producer to arrive at some consistent approach to recordings?

RR: A lot of bands try to get famous producers – but this is such a specific genre. Django and the east coast thing - I respect everything those guys do, but it’s not my cup of tea. We’re peers of all of those bands. We’re in this thing together, trying to promote Jamaican music. The whole band just subscribes to the theory that we’re probably the best producers for our music, since we know and understand it.