Don’t let the name fool you — Orgy’s futuristic glamsters aren’t totally debauched. Not yet anyway.
Group Grope
In just a few days, the members of Orgy are scheduled to play Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they’re not really looking forward to it. Not that they’re worried they’ll bomb. Despite their galactic glam appearance and futuristic music, they’ve fared pretty well in the Bible Belt. In fact, last time they came through town, they might have fared a little too well, and they’re wondering if there’ll be a police procession waiting for them outside Cain’s Ballroom when they step offstage.
“When we were pulling away from Tulsa last time, there was a girl on the side of the road and she was wasted,” recalls drummer Bobby Hewitt from his home in Los Angeles. “She didn’t look like she belonged at in Orgy show, but she was hot and she wanted to get on the bus. Somehow we talked her into taking all her clothes off. I was wearing her underwear, [guitarist] Ryan [Shuck] was wearing her bra, and [singer] Jay [Gordon] put on her dress. We went into our hotel like. that and caused quite a scene. Unfortunately, she ended up being a local politician’s daughter.”
As its name suggests, Orgy lives for excitement and trouble, and it usually finds both. No, the band’s members have never actually taken part in a Backstage Sluts-style group gang bang like their pornographer/rocker pal Matt Zane, but they’ve done nearly everything else. They’re regulars at the Los Angeles strip club Crazy Girls, and they’ve developed a reputation for livin’ and lovin’ like rock stars–even if they’re reluctant to detail their more outrageous sexploits.
“Man, I would expect that people would want me to say, ‘Oh, yeah, this one time I fucked three pairs of twin sisters and their brothers.’ That’s so predictable,” says the towering Gordon, the most intense and neurotic member of the group. “Well, shit happens out there on the road, and, hey, if you trip over something and fall right into 14 girls, you can’t help that.”
“I think AIDS put a damper on people’s sexuality for a while,” says band chick-magnet, guitarist Amir Derakh. “But now everyone’s realizing that we can still enjoy our bodies, we just have to be careful”
Drummer Bobby Hewitt is the only member of Orgy who doesn’t whore it up, and that’s because he’s happily married to ex-porn vixen Shane. “My wife has been out on the road and she understands what goes on there, so she lets me do whatever,” says Hewitt. “But her being so fine with that makes me not want to fuck around. I can’t speak for the rest of the guys, though.”
When they’re not getting their rocks off, the Orgies tend to fuck shit up or at least act like fuck-ups — especially Shuck, who’s earned the nickname Liquid Idiot. because he often gets drunk and stupid. For example, on the band’s tour bus, when all the lights are off late at night, Shuck likes to get naked and balance between two bunks on either side of the aisle, so whoever walks by bumps into his dangling privates. And try not to catch him on one of his more destructive days. “We were driving down the freeway one time, and I threw a bottle from the back of the bus and broke the front window,” he admits sheepishly. “Another time, I fucking jumped on the bus driver naked while he was driving and we nearly got into an accident. I’ve done a lot of stupid shit.”
Of course, stupid shit sometimes has its cost. The media and fans might be thrilled by Orgy’s antics, but parents usually don’t feel the same. The band’s second and most recent album, Vapor Transmission, debuted at No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 200, selling to established fans and quickly going gold. But it lacked staying power, dropping to No. 183 less than two months after its release. Needless to say, yuppies weren’t stuffing their kids’ Christmas stockings with Orgy product this past holiday season. In part, Gordon blames post-Columbine conservatism for the record’s lower-than-expected sales.
“I don’t want moms to hate our band,” exclaims Gordon, who in conversation switches topics almost as rapidly as a Jeopardy contestant. “I understand that they’re threatened by the name ‘Orgy’ and they want to protect their kids. But my lyrics have some mystery behind them, and they’re open to interpretation. I don’t write songs that go, ‘I’m at a party. I think you should do it too. I’m gonna go shoot dope and be gay.’ I love to go to titty bars, but I’m not going out terrorizing people or robbing banks. People judge us just because we’re real. Isn’t one of the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou Shalt Not Judge?’”
Biblical doctrines aside, there’s another reason why Orgy isn’t penetrating the mass market as deeply as it did when its platinum album, Candyass, hit in 1998. In an era of Ricky Martin, ’N Sync, and Christina Aguilera, Orgy is a bit too, well, weird for the mainstream. Looking like extras from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the band members sport spiked hair; shiny, multicolored clothes that seem like military outfits for an Ecstacy rave; gravity boots; and enough eye makeup and lipstick to paint a cheerleading squad. It’s all part of their philosophy that predictability is a crime against creativity.
“I’m all about doing things differently, but there are a lot of people who can’t handle change of any kind,” says Gordon. “Progress is a good thing. Hey, we could all be cavemen with clubs and scummy fingernails trying to hunt down a woolly mammoth. And then what do you do, eat the fucker raw? That’s fucked up. Society has come … this far, and when people get conservative, it pisses me off.”“Shit happens out there on the road. And if you trip over something and fall into 14 girls, you can’t help that”
In that case, Gordon must be particularly miffed by today’s hard-rock scene, which has become overgrown with acts that refuse to push boundaries and merely ape whatever’s popular at the moment, be it rap-rock or neogrunge. These groups may scream like their balls are being chewed by rats, but afterward many cash their royalty checks and return to their well-adjusted lives. By contrast, Orgy’s music is its message, and the members’ art imitates their lives. When Gordon sings, “Living in a big-top dimension / You’re the stalker of the miniworld / Trapped in wonderland suspension / Transmissions from the micronautgirl” on the album’s closer “Where’s Gerrold,” you can bet your photon torpedoes that those lines stem from endless hours watching the Sci-Fi Channel, listening to David Bowie, and getting high.
Appropriately, the rented dwelling in Encino, California, where Orgy recorded Vapor Transmission was as much a party crash pad as an artistic center — so much so that sessions often began with band members stepping over the bodies of their passed-out or hungover friends in order to get to their musical equipment. “We have one friend who we called our drug pet,” says Shuck. “We had a chain leash on him, and we would give him drugs and he would answer the door.”
“We had all these chicks running around the studio and these people we call lurkers, which is our loving name for our friends and people who hang out when we’re doing this thing we call Orgy,” adds Derakh. “But instead of having them there taking up space, we would give them things to do. We would say, ‘Okay, you’re here and you’re partying. How about coming up with a drumbeat for this part, because our drummer’s at home with his baby.’”
Such creative chaos rarely results in art, let alone music, but Orgy was focused enough to be able to stumble through the rubble and construct something that’s both innovative and alluring. Vapor Transmission is a cryptic interplanetary treatise on self-reliance, self-indulgence, and nonconformity that speeds by like a levitating skateboarder cruising through a neon-lit city from Blade Runner. The disc was written largely with unconventional instruments, including down-tuned seven-string guitars, new-wave guitar synthesizers, dissonant keyboard samples, and compressed vocals that make Gordon sound like a nasal Katharine Hepburn impersonator.
Despite the unconventional approach, Orgy’s songs are melodic and propulsive, something of a cross between Gary Numan, Bowie, New Order, and Korn. They might not convert the establishment, but songs like the first single “Fiction (Dreams in Digital),” “Opticon,” and “Suckerface” seem likely to further unite those looking for that mysterious missing link between the sterile computer-pop of Depeche Mode and the aural apocalypse of Marilyn Manson.
As visionary as Orgy is today, the group wasn’t always so forward-thinking. Gordon started out as a glam rocker, Derakh played in the cheesy 1980s hair-metal band Rough Cutt, Shuck was a hairdresser, Hewitt was in a Red Hot Chili Peppers — style punk-funk band called Electric Love Hogs, and bassist Paige Haley was a house painter. The first dose of future shock came in 1992 when Shuck played with Korn front man Jonathan Davis in a local metal band called Sex Art. One of the group’s songs, “Blind,” became a huge hit for Korn, and Davis would later be an important factor in launching Orgy’s course.
The seeds of Orgy were planted in 1996 after Shuck asked Gordon to produce his band Supermodel. “I didn’t really dig them,” says Gordon. “I just wanted to jam with him so we could form our own band.”
Gordon recruited his buddy and future roommate Haley as well as Hewitt and Derakh, whom Gordon knew from the L.A. music scene, and in 1997 Orgy was born. Six months later the group cobbled together a four-song demo, and was immediately signed by partymates Korn to their new label Elementree. In 1998, Orgy was booked as the opening act on the first Family Values Tour, and though it was its first-ever tour as a band, the guys rose to the occasion, attracting a legion of Korn aficionados who later became Orgy fans as well. However, Orgy’s real brush with greatness came when it released a cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday” as the second single off the promising, but uneven, debut album Candyass. Of course pop-music fans may forever remember Orgy as the band that aped New Order, but Gordon has no regrets.
“How could I regret something that actually worked?” he says, then insists that the song choice wasn’t premeditated. “It was so funny because we were actually gonna do a Frida Lyngstad song [remember ‘I Know There’s Something Going On’?]. Then we were in a used-record store in Lake Tahoe and I saw New Order’s Substance sitting on a shelf, and I thought it was pathetic that somebody could put down a record like that. So I bought it just to keep it out of there. We listened to it on the drive home, and just decided to do that instead. We recorded it in like 30 minutes that night.”
“Blue Monday” was more than just a launchpad for Orgy. It gave the musicians the leverage to receive major funding from their label for the recording of Vapor Transmission and the creation of high-tech videos, including the recently released “Fiction (Dreams in Digital).” The video starts Matrix-style with a woman breaking out of a mechanical embryo. She descends from a spaceship and floats down to earth, where she lands in the middle of an Orgy concert. After dancing around seductively, she reaches behind her head, unhinges the back of her skull, and metamorphoses into a metallic robot.
“I would say we’re as influenced by science fiction as we are by music,” says Shuck, “everything from Dune to Star Wars. It’s certainly more interesting to us than a lot of the boring politics that’s going on in the world.”
“In a lot of ways, we’re like crazy politicians,” interjects Gordon. “There’s a lot going on inside us that people haven’t even dreamed of. At this point, I don’t want to unleash everything I know. People in general are stumped by what we can really do.”
