Interview with Potluck
By David Friedman
Continued from Murder Dog vol 16 #1

I heard UnderRated is doing some production for Twiztid, and Twiztid has been on both of your Sub Noize releases. Are you producing anything for Twiztid’s next album, "Wickid"?
UnderRated: Yeah, they’ve got a couple from me. I’m not sure if both of them are gonna make the album. But one definitely, Monoxide just told me they did some type of video for it. I’m not sure of the title of the song.
Who else have you produced for since your Suburban Noize debut dropped?
UnderRated: The biggest one was when the Tech N9ne ‘Killer’ CD came out. I have a beat on there with Jeffrey Simmons Jr. I did a bunch of tracks for Sen Dog’s CD that just came out. Definitely the Kottonmouth Kings and the Twiztid from before. I did a bunch of tracks for Blaze’s last CD. Big B and Dirtball.
1 Ton: The biggest one, though was the Tech N9ne, Kottonmouth Kings, (hed) p.e. — that whole track on the ‘Killer’ (called) ‘I Am Everything.’ He also did on (hed) p.e.’s new one, a song called ‘For Smokers Only.’ And we’re on that together, rapping on there too.
Ever since that tour you did with Twiztid, I’ve got the impression that you do a great job of connecting with new fans and making new fans. Is that from meeting them at the merch booth, your performances or both?
1 Ton: I don’t really know if there’s one thing in particular. I just know that when it comes to Potluck, we’re real dudes. We’re not like the backstage-type people who kick it backstage and just do the show and leave. When we come to a town, we want to kick it with everybody there. We want to party. We want to be part of everyone in the town and get to enjoy the experience like they do. We’re on tour with Twiztid and we want to come out in the audience. We want to watch the show, just like the fans. We want to see what they’re gonna do up there. We wanna see how that show is different than in the city before. When we’re on tour with Tech N9ne, it’s the same way. We wanna see how Tech changes up his songs and does his show. We’re there to have fun too. I think that us constantly being there in the audience and constantly kicking it with people and being at the bar and getting drinks or whatever. Hiding from security and going and finding a little spot to go smoke or whatever we do, I think people can just relate to that. We’re just out there. We’re a fan like them of the music. We just happen to rap and be onstage too.
You have a huge nationwide tour kicking off in a few months with the Kottonmouth Kings and La Coka Nostra. What can you tell me about it?
1 Ton: It’s a really big opportunity for us. Although we’ve been on Suburban Noize for a while, we haven’t really done a big tour with Kottonmouth Kings in a long time. This will be our first big tour with Kottonmouth Kings in the three years we’ve been on Suburban Noize. So that’ll be good. At the same time, you bring in La Coka Nostra and they’re gonna put out their new record on Sub Noize and then they bring a different element of hip-hop and a whole new fan base and new people. There’s La Coka Nostra fans who never even heard of Kottonmouth Kings, never heard of Tech N9ne, Twiztid, ICP — never heard of none of those cats. But they’re La Coka Nostra fans, so they’re gonna bring a whole new element to the tour. I think it’s gonna be a good collection of underground fans at the same time. Although La Coka Nostra is new to Suburban Noize, they’re not new to the underground. They’ve got a killer underground following that’s been following them for a long time. Then you have Blaze, then you have Big B, then you have Potluck and we’ve got Short Dawg out there with us too — we’ve got a lot of folks out there. I think the fans are gonna have a really good time.
Where do your ideas come from when you’re writing a song?
1 Ton: We draw on our life experiences. That’s how we make every song we make — based off of experiences we went through in our lives, whether it be in the present or in the past or how we feel it can affect us in the future. Whatever we’re doing, whether we’re on tour going around or we’re kicking it watching a football game or playing videos or smoking or whatever, we just come up with different ideas. Some ideas come to fruition real fast. But sometimes it takes five years — like that song ‘Funeral’ that we did with Twiztid on our last record. That song was five years in the making. We thought about that idea and tried to do it a couple different times, different beats and everything. But this record, it seems like a lot of the ideas that we had, none of them really got put on the back burner. A lot of the ideas we were able to actually get out and make work for this record, which had been different from the past.
Is "Stoner Bitch" the lead single?
1 Ton: Yeah, it is. We’ve got a video for it and everything. You know how people want to make love songs and talk about some old fantasy bullshit and some shit that’s not reality? We’re true stoners, so we’re gonna write a song about a girl who’s a stoner for real, someone who can feel us on that. Some females get upset when you use the term bitch. It’s definitely not in a degrading way at all. Me and UnderRated both have really good relationships with our mothers and our sisters and all that. So it’s not that type of term at all. It’s a compliment term, more like, you’re my bitch for real. You’re that one who can do anything. You can do the worst of the worst and the best of the best. You’re not a fairweather girl. You’re not a girl who’s only gonna be with me in the good times and then leave me in the bad times. So it was kind of a compliment to that. Put that together — like a girl that can help you sell dub sacks and, at the same time, when you’ve made enough money, can retire and help you take care of your family the right way and do all that good stuff too. That’s kind of the concept. And when we came up with the ‘Stoner Bitch,’ we wanted to get that across. And then, obviously, if we’re gonna talk about stuff like that, it’s cool to get Kottonmouth Kings involved. That was honestly a song that was gonna be on the Kannabis Cartel record, but we ended up doing it with Kottonmouth. They really liked it and they ended up putting it on their bonus disc for ‘The Green Album’. They wanted to start leaking it on different little mixtapes and all the different things they did. So we were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just put it out now because we’ve got CDs coming out now.’ So we did.
Tell me about "Computer Love." I like that song as well.
1 Ton: We had that idea of making ‘Computer Love’ for a minute. Our CD was gonna come out a little bit earlier and when it was gonna come out earlier we hadn’t had time to make that ‘Computer Love’ and make it good enough and make it like we wanted it. When our CD got delayed, we went back in the studio and we got to make a couple more songs. That’s when Pharmacist Chris came up and made a whole bunch of beats. And we heard that beat and we were like, ‘Wow, this is the beat for Computer Love.’
What got you thinking about that subject matter — for "Computer Love?"
UnderRated: It seems like nowadays that’s how people really are doing it. You used to be going to the bar, used to be going to the club. Of course, there’s still that. But I know a lot of people that are meeting people on the Internet and even MySpace and things like that and even getting married off that. It’s a big thing nowadays and people haven’t talked about that that much on songs. We thought it would be cool to do that, to open up a different idea. Plus, a lot of people are gonna relate to that also. It came together cool.
You have another song I like called "STFU (Shut The Fuck Up)." How did that come together?
1 Ton: That was another idea we had and we were actually gonna do that idea on the ‘I Am Everything’ beat that went on the Tech N9ne record. But Tech wanted to use it and Tech had done so much for us in our careers, it’s kind of like if Tech asks us for anything, we feel morally obligated to give him what he wants. He was one of the first to believe in Potluck and the first to take us around touring and the first to do all of that — before we had a deal with Sub Noize, before we knew Twiztid, before we knew any of that. He wanted that beat, so we ended up giving him that beat. And then UnderRated and Jeffrey Simmons got back together and were trying to make some more beats with the heavy guitar and all that. They made it and we wanted to put Jared from (hed) p.e. on there. But he ended up not having time because he was recording his record. So then we were like, ‘Hey, let’s do that Shut The Fuck Up idea on this now that Jared can’t do the song.’ It just ended up working — one of those lucky ones that came through. It seems like everything fell into place with that one.
What are some of your personal favorite songs on the album?
UnderRated: For me, that very last one on there where it’s just rapping fast — that one track called ‘2 Minute Drill’ — to me that was just such an accomplishment for me as a rapper. Usually I’ll be the one producing most of the beats and doing most of the engineering and just making sure the overall sound sounds good. But for me, that song, the main thing was actually getting a rap down like that. To write a 40-bar, fast-rapping song, I didn’t even know if I could get it done. We wrote it a couple days before the album had to be turned in. And when I went in there and did it, I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I can do it.’ And it came out so good. I was just happy. It was like the best feeling at that time. I was like, ‘Man, I’ve worked this hard to get to this point.’ So for me, that song is a big step. I mean, there’s a lot of other songs on there that I like, but that song in particular.
1 Ton: For UnderRated to say that was one of his favorites on there just because it was an accomplishment — me being in there, man, I could just second that. Our whole entire rap career as emcees, we’ve pretty much been making songs together. So for 10 years, it’s like I’ve been seeing this man work so hard and become a great emcee. To be there and see him be able to do that at that time, that’s a really hard thing to do. To understand what he had to put into it to make it happen, I could see that and see why that’s his favorite song on the CD. And I’m happy for him because I’ve been there this whole time. And I got to see that.
UnderRated: I’m gonna start crying!
1 Ton: But for me, personally, on a whole other tip, the song we did for our fathers (‘My Dad’). My father is really sick right now and he is a good man and he taught me how to be a man for real. There were a lot of times growing up where I feuded with my father and I wouldn’t really understand why he would make me go to school. No matter what I’d do, he would be like, ‘You’ve gotta go to school, you’ve gotta study, you’ve gotta do certain things’ that I never thought were important. The more I matured, I realized my father was right with a lot of the things he was trying to teach me. And the fact that he’s sick now, I wanted to just use where we were at in this career to do a song and let him know that I love him and that I really appreciate everything that he’s taught me. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, I feel like I understand it way more now. And then to see UnderRated, he has a good relationship with his father and his father comes over here and kicks it with us with barbecues and watching football and all those different things too. So for us to get together and make a song that we can play for our fathers and we can make them proud of the sons that they’ve raised, I think was a good thing for the CD.
You’ve toured with Twiztid and worked together on many projects. What’s your relationship like with them?
UnderRated: Twiztid are real cool. When we first got on Sub Noize, we didn’t really know about the whole Psychopathic movement and Twiztid and ICP. Of course we heard of them, but we didn’t really know what it was like. And when we got on Sub Noize, we got put on a tour with Twiztid and we went around the nation with them and we kicked it with them like they were our brothers almost. When we first met, we just really clicked. They did the same kind of things as we did. We got on their bus, I think it was during the basketball playoffs a couple years ago. And every day we’d watch the playoffs together. They’re from Detroit, so they’d cheer for the Pistons. Everything that we did, we just kind of clicked.
1 Ton: They smoked like us. It was like we grew up together, although we didn’t and we had just met.
UnderRated: One day they were asking about who made the beats for us. We told them I made most of the beats. So I just got some beats together for them, they listened to them. The next day they came to the next show and they were like, ‘Man, you’re doing it on those beats. Let me get some of these beats.’ So we figured it out from there and we’ve been cool ever since. We’re in fantasy football leagues with Monoxide. We talk shit to him every day because he’s horrible. And Blaze too.
What happened to the Kannabis Cartel CD that you were working on with Cypress Hill and Kottonmouth Kings? Is that still happening?
1 Ton: Yeah, that’s what everybody’s been asking. That’s the same question we were asking when we were down there for meetings on our new record. It’s just one of those things when you’ve got so many people doing so many things and so many albums that, at one point, it was a really good idea when we all decided we should do it. But then when we tried to put it into the reality of actually making the record, we realized how hard it was to get everybody together. It’s just coming on a lot slower than we anticipated. But we talked about it again and we got rejuvenated. We’re all not gonna give up on the idea, but it’s just one of those things where it’s probably gonna take long to come out — like the next Dr. Dre record or something like that.