A L'Avant-Garde De La Stereo

The soft-core porn film Lady Chatterley was projected onto the stage to open the libido-fest that is Nathaniel Merriweather's (aka Dan "the Automator" Nakamura) Lovage, as lounge-y hip-hop beats and breathy whispers spread like cheap cologne into the orifices of Slim's captive audience. The cinematic curtain rose to reveal the stage lustered by the presence of a temptress in a red-dress, Jennifer Charles of Elysian Fields, and five suave gentlemen wearing Hugh Hefner style evening robes.

"My Name is Mike and I have a temper problem. I wrote this during a focus group. Don't make the same mistakes I've made," jested singer Mike Patton, also of Mr. Bungle, before opening the show with a yearning duet about lost opportunities. "Don't you see we could have had it all?," he lamented in over-the-top schmaltzy counterpoint to Charles' sedative induced seductive croon.

With Patton, Charles, and DJ Kid Koala, Nakamura has formed himself a unique super group, a parody and resurgence of 60's French lounge. But bringing back the true meaning of the love song genre is more important to him than just joking around.

Over a salami sandwich in his new office space in South San Francisco, where he is starting up a new record company, Nakamura explains the love song has been dead for too long. That's what his offering, Nathaniel Merriweather presents . . . Lovage Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By is all about. Merriweather is a persona he created when he put out 1999's So . . . How's Your Girl, under the band name Handsome Boy Modeling School, a comical assortment of offbeat and diverse instrumental tracks.

"It's a love song record. They've been making them forever but they seemed to have stopped in the eighties. Last true love song album I think is possibly Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, and that was in '83. Name a good love song for me. Not the sex, come-do-me R&B songs, but the real thing. The album is a parody but it's not a parody. All the songs in the eighties and nineties . . . "

"The Theme from Titanic, that's a big love song," jokes his assistant.

"All the other love songs aren't really there anymore. They're the let-me-slip-thru your back-door-lover kind of thing. Love is a much more complex subject than all that. So we may be approaching the darker and stranger sides of it, but they are facets of love that truly exist. I don't think people have paid as much of attention to it. This is in line with the whole French thing where it's much more matter of fact," said Nakamura, perhaps referring to the monologue on the album that explains why a married man goes to a prostitute.

Nakamura explains that the whole lyrical content for Lovage, and the concept for the cover, comes from the ideas of 1960's French performer and black sheep celebrity Serge Gainsbourg. He was a man who gloried in promoting himself as the most decadent and immoral sleaze in all of France. One of his biggest hits was "Soixante Neuf Annee Erotique" ("69: The Erotic Year"), a 1969 duet with actress (and later his wife) Jane Birkin, that featured a graphic oral sex simulation.

There were no fake French accents used on stage, but knowing the Gainsbourg reference puts the whole show in perspective. Patton diddled around on stage with a mini-gong, cow bells and even some fuzzy dice, while he, like everyone else, sipped from a cognac glass he got from the stage's fully stocked bar. Dan, as Nathaniel Merriweather, waltzed around stage, counting his cash, smoking a cigarette and not worrying himself about the turntables too much.

An amateur masseur contest was held, and a handsome git with a smooth skull was selected as the winner and allowed to massage Mr. Merriweather through his robe. This all occurred while DJ Koala killed time on the turntables trying to expand an hour long record into a 90-minute show. Koala's jam was a meditation in lounge brought to you from the hood; and the hip-hop collage lazily drifted on in a way that made songs featuring Jennifer Charles's lusty melancholy voice sound a lot like art-rock group Portishead. During these funky tangents, guitar player Astacio went off stage and changed from his white robe to a Spider Man costume, and later changed again to a Tarzan style G-string, while Patton gathered tips for Charles with a champagne bucket, calling the reluctant audience cheapskates.

"It went great. It was a really cool tour. We did a bunch of sold out shows to people who didn't know what they were getting into, but in a good way, I think they had a good time," Nakamura said.

With Lovage, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Dr. Octagon (about the follies of a twisted 'octagonecologyst') and his surprise hit Gorillaz, Nakamura has fashioned himself into almost a concept producer.

"Concepts aren't what I make my record around. Concepts are what I use to tie my records together in the end. So I don't think about that as much, I think about what the music is going to be like."

For those who don't already know, Gorillaz is a cartoon simulation of a band he co-created with Damon Albarn of Blur, Kid Koala, Del the Funky Homosapien and Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, with visual aides by cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, creator of Tank Girl. Gorillaz has been his biggest hit to date selling over a million records, producing an MTV hit with the song Clint Eastwood and another track, 19-2000 has already been used in a TV commercial and a video game. When performing live, the band is silhouetted behind a translucent screen while the animated Gorillaz concert movie plays overhead.

"With Gorillaz the influences were like punk and dub and hip-hop. I was trying to make the most of all those within the context of each other so one doesn't overtake the other one. It's like being a chef and getting the spices right and seeing that everything fits," said Nakamura.

Recently Nakamura has been named the hottest producer around by both Spin and Rolling Stone magazines and is getting more offers than he can take on. He has recently recorded with Beck, and has plans with Nelly Furtado and Zack de la Rocha (formerly of Rage Against the Machine), among many.

"I started out working on my own. I put out my own records all the time. As you go along you keep thinking you're doing better and better, and you are but then you realize there are different things you could be into," he reflected on his success. "You come of age making stuff. I think I've come into my own in the past couple of years making the kinds of records I want to make and doing what I want to do."

The San Francisco native appeals to a crossover alternative rock, hip-hop audience that doesn't necessarily have much to do with hip-hop's dominant sub-genre, gangsta rap. Although Nakamura and much of his fan-base are apart from that world he still finds something to appreciate about the homies.

"I'm not a gangsta-rapper nor am I a gangster rap producer because I'm not an expert and that's not my thing but I have friends going through that kind of stuff and it seems to be a pretty colorful version of what life is like. Gangsta rap is an offshoot of hip-hop. The original hip-hop has nothing to do with gangsters. Hip-hop is the biggest force in the country musically. It dictates fashion and the sound of other kinds of music, and it sells the most records. Its influence is far reaching."

Nakamura has also recently split from home base label 75 Ark to start his own label, Bulk Recordings.

"The record company is starting up right now. I didn't own 75 Ark; I just did some work for them. But in the end it didn't work out too well. Some bills weren't being paid to me. It's better to have your own company, do your own thing and be responsible. I thought it would be better to be doing all that stuff for a company I did own."

His new label won't be taking on mammoth sized bands; instead it intends to focus on developing up and coming groups. "When you do an independent label you can't sell millions of records, it's just not possible. It's better to catch people on the way up and do things on a small level. That's what I want to focus on: bands that can do cool things and make cool impacts. I'm not genre specific myself so I don't expect the bands I deal with to be that way either. I do well with an audience that listens to a lot of different music and I'm hoping that's the way it will work."