Features

The New Souligarchy: Royal Family Records

Lettuce

Eric Krasno was 16 years old when he enrolled at the Berklee College of Music Summer Program in the summer of 1992 between his sophomore and junior years of high school. There, he met drummer Adam Deitch, guitarist Adam “Shmeans” Smirnoff, bassist Erick “E.D.” Coomes and saxophonists Sam Kininger and Ryan Zoidis, the musicians who still perform together as Lettuce (even as they balance gigs with Robert Randolph, Rustic Overtones, The Game, DJ Quik and many others).

“All of us came from different, mostly suburban towns with kids who knew nothing about what we were into,” says Kranso. “We were the outcasts and we literally met each other within the first few days of this summer program and started playing together. We said, ‘We’re going to come back and go to school here when we graduate’ and we all actually did. So we started the band and then everyone all went different ways but we’re all still best friends. I talk to every one of them at least every other day. It’s crazy that we’re still this close but we can’t shake each other.” He laughs at the thought.

Deitch, whose post-Berklee career has included stints with the Average White Band, John Scofield, and most recently with Pretty Lights, as well as his own Break Science project, recalls, “In the beginning, we were kids trying to learn to play our instruments and because we were so honest, we kicked each others’ asses and brought everybody else up. You have a choice in music: either you can go on your own and do your own thing or you can say, ‘I’m going to align myself not only with the best musicians but also the coolest ones.’ It’s a decision you can make either way. I’m thankful that all of my best friends share my musical aspirations.”

They share a number of inspirations as well. Deitch is quick to name Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, Tower of Power, Earth Wind and Fire and Herbie Hancock as the artists that first animated the young high school students and continue to energize them today. He is almost giddy as he describes a future Lettuce performance where it appears that the group will be joined by two members of James Brown’s original JB Horns—Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley.

This deep affection for the funk and soul icons of the ‘60s and ‘70s also informs the Royal Family sensibility. Krasno initially contemplated using the name for his new group that would eventually become Chapter 2 but ultimately concluded that it would be better suited for the label that he and the Evans brothers decided to form around the ambit of Soulive.

“It just made sense because the whole concept is having the same large group of people in different configurations. Sometimes one person’s the leader and the next time, he might play a support role. It’s kind of an umbrella for all the different projects we do. We’re not going to be out there signing hundreds of acts. We’re heavily involved in each project, which will be created by us, produced by us, engineered by us, mixed by us—the musicians are us. Everything, even down to the design work, is our camp.”

That camp includes Soulive’s managers, Jeff Krasno (Eric’s brother) and Morgan Young, who also run the Velour label, which has re-issued the early Soulive records along with a remix disc and is home to artists such as The Cat Empire, Kaki King and Sonya Kitchell. But while the two help out on the administrative side, the Soulive trio opted to create Royal Family Records to establish their own identity with the creative license to focus exclusively on their hand-picked acts.

Krasno comments, “We really wanted to do our thing, produced out of our studios—kind of like how Stax and Motown always did it. Same musicians, a lot of the same writers, and it was just a community.”