Rise Robots Rise: Ready for the ‘90s Steely Dan?

The group isn’t a conventional band, but the brainchild of two smart college grads--jazz-loving perfectionists who like nothing better than writing and arranging in the recording studio, where they let a shifting roster of musicians execute their ideas. The music is an eclectic blend informed by sophistication, intelligence, cryptic humor and surprising twists.

Steely Dan? Good guess, but this is 1992, sampling and rap have entered the picture, and the name of the group is Rise Robots Rise. In the roles of Steely Dan’s Fagen and Becker are Joe Mendelson and Ben Nitze, whose debut album, “Rise Robots Rise,” has earned an unusual degree of critical attention, though little sales action.

Steely Dan isn’t the only influence cited in the reams of press clips on file at TVT Records. Sly & the Family Stone, George Clinton, James Brown, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Public Enemy, Soul II Soul and early Genesis are a just a few of the other sources spotted by writers.

“I can understand just about all of them,” says Mendelson, 25. “It depends on how you listen to it. It’s definitely a mixture, we know that it’s a mixture, we did that on purpose. So it’s not surprising to us that everybody hears their own favorite thing in it. Because that’s sort of what we did--we put lots of different favorite things into it.”

Some critics have suggested that this approach amounts to a lack of originality.

“I guess that’s probably true,” says Mendelson. “But all music is like that. It’s just repackaging something that’s already been said. Our stuff does blatantly refer to things in the past. We even have lots of quotations in our songs that refer to other songs. . . . I think it’s a dangerous area, this thing of, ‘Oh, I’m original, look at what I’ve created, aren’t I special?’ We try to stay away from that.”

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Mendelson and Nitze share a reverence for John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, and they admire pop figures who have maintained an artistic and operational independence, from Zappa to Peter Gabriel to Kate Bush.

The two met as students in New York University’s “music business technology” program and eventually established a studio, dubbed Fibre, in Brooklyn.

“After a certain point there was a certain amount of equipment and this is the first thing that came out of it,” says guitarist Mendelson. “We went in there and got creative using the tools that we had and we winged it.”

Adds Nitze, whose specialty as a student was jazz drumming: “After four tunes, it sounded like a band. That’s what gave us the impetus to go forward and try to make it into a real band.”

The partners, who have formed a nine-piece group to play RRR’s music live, concede that their rampant eclecticism tends to confuse some listeners. Too bad.

“That’s what we like about it,” says Mendelson. “We like stuff that challenges us, that has lots of elements in it, that is maybe a little more difficult to follow than your average pop music. That’s what we’re gonna do, and hopefully people like us will like the same things as us.”

While that makes for admiring press, it also shuts RRR out of radio’s rigid formats, and they’ve been unable to break through with any airplay, nor have they gained much video visibility on MTV. Consequently, the concert tour that might generate some album sales hasn’t materialized.

The duo might be fundamentally idealistic, but Mendelson is pragmatic enough to know that commercial returns are important.

“It’s a question of freedom. The more records we sell the more freedom we have to do more interesting things without having to worry about other people’s opinions.

“It’s like, why would we participate in this business at all if we didn’t have some part of us that simply wanted to sell a lot of stuff to people?

“We can both go play any time we want and get satisfaction out of that, we don’t need to participate in the business to get musical satisfaction. So I think just to play the game at all is sort of saying, ‘Well, I want to do this for some money.’ So I guess it would be great if we could sell a bunch of stuff.”