In early August of 2001, the Billboard album chart was topped by Alica Keys’ “Songs in A Minor,” *NSYNC’s “Celebrity” and Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”
Creeping in at No. 32 was “The Tweekend,” the sophomore album by The Crystal Method. The sales figures for the electronic music duo’s release in an era when physical media still ruled the industry would place it in the top half of the top 10 on this week’s chart.
How was a group from a niche genre that had to that point only produced one album that had debuted at a higher slot – The Prodigy’s “The Fat Of The Land,” which topped the charts out of the gate in 1997 – able to break through?
Scott Kirkland, one-half of The Crystal Method and the sole member since the retirement of Ken Jordan, considers the question as he is promoting the 25th anniversary rerelease of the album that took four years to release after their debut, “Vegas.”
“It just shows that we were able to move forward and do something monumentally different than we did in ‘Vegas.’ ‘Vegas’ was such a success and the groundbreaking album for us, and for sort of the scene in a way, because we were such a hard-working, American electronic band at the time, and a lot of people were discovering electronic music coming out of the grunge era with more rock or hip-hop roots,” he says. “And they found their way to Crystal Method.
“I think that for us, we wanted to continue to grow, and we wanted to continue to challenge ourselves. I don’t think that there would have been a third, fourth or fifth album if we didn’t deliver something unique and different on our second album. You know, the sophomore slump is a real thing, and we were dumb and young enough to not spend too much time worrying about that.”
A turning point for TCM came a few years earlier, when they joined the 1999 edition of The Family Values Tour, an alt rock and hip-hop series that featured Korn, Limp Bizkit, Ice Cube, Incubus, Orgy and Rammstein. Tom Morello and Scott Weiland would appear on “The Tweekend” after TCM got a taste of the rock crossover on the road.
“For the most part we would play our show, and we got some middle fingers and we got some crossed arms and we got some people not paying attention,” says Kirkland. “But what I remember most is kids in Korn shirts coming up to us after the show and going, ‘Fuck, that was really cool. I never heard of you guys. That’s fucking awesome.’ We were loud and we were aggressive and we had a fucking really cool light show with lots of strobes. Our sound was big drums and distorted sounds. So we were like, fuck it, let’s go out there and win some people over.”
For Kirkland, it wasn’t a stretch to delve into rock sounds, but rather a reconnection to his roots.
“I grew up a heavy metal kid. I loved Judas Priest and I’d go to every concert when they’d come to town, and Mötley Crüe and Ozzy. I had all the Kerrang! and Circus [magazine] images of like Motley Crue in the fucking dressing room completely wasted and all that, so I was into that world. And then I discovered ‘Black Celebration’ from Depeche Mode and I sort of still wear these two hats.”
The 25th-anniversary of “The Tweekend,” released July 24, is a double-vinyl, sunset orange edition limited to 3,000 copies. It includes a CD version of the album.
“I just got mine in the mail the other day and opened it up. It’s super sexy,” he says. “Each one is different. A couple of years ago, for the 25th anniversary of ‘Vegas,’ the label did a reprint of the vinyl and they did like a leopard print with the vinyl and it was cool. But this is definitely super sexy. This one matches the artwork really well, the original artwork on it, which is orange and reds and different things of that nature. I was blown away. It looks really cool.”
In addition, a bundle of remixes of the “Tweekend” standout track “Name of the Game” will be available on Aug. 21 through Beatport, featuring takes by Paul Oakenfold, Equalateral and Future Funk Squad. A snippet of Oakenfold’s remix can be heard in an XBOX 25th anniversary collection reveal trailer.
Kirkland says he gave minimal guidance to the folks who did the remixes.
“I tend to trust the people that we enlisted to do those things,” he says. “I’ve known Paul for many years and I know that he is someone who’s not into the big tear-down. He wants to just add his elements and bring his sound to a remix. I liked what he did and the big synthy elements. And I really, really love what my friend Glen [Nicholls], who is Future Funk Squad, and Equilateral, did. He sort of rebuilt the song using the vocal and a little bit of the riff to get an uptempo song, which I think is a very challenging thing to do. And then the midtempo thing was kind of a request. I was like, it’d be really cool if we did a midtempo mix, and he’s really good at that. And then he did another mix that’s exclusively for Beatport, which is like more of an uptempo breakbeat, which is also really cool. He delivered big time.”
Since its initial release, “Name of the Game” has been featured in more than 20 movie trailers, TV shows video games and in films. Kirkland’s favorite placement, by far, is its deployment in a crucial scene in “Tropic Thunder,” the 2008 Been Stiller film.
“We were in the studio in North Hollywood, and they were on the studio lot over at Warner Brothers, I think. And they said, ‘Hey, we want you to come down and watch this preview of this movie. It’s got your song in it.’ I think we knew it was a Ben Stiller movie. Maybe we didn’t.
“But we went down and we watched a preview of it. And just when that scene comes in and it’s like the real shit and all of a sudden they’re flying in the helicopter over the jungle, and the riff comes in, and they even added the orchestral score to the end of it to really hype up the dramatic part of it — all of that was just really, really, really, really fucking cool.”
Afterward, Stiller “regaled us with stories of how he used ‘The Name of the Game’ to hype himself up in the ‘Night at the Museum’ movies where he’s being chased by the big dinosaur. Of course, it was all CGI, so they would pump ‘Name of the Game’ through the set and he would get amped up to that. So he was super stoked to be able to use it in [‘Tropic Thunder’], which is fucking epic. Fucking funny. One of the funniest movies I think I’ve ever seen.”
The Mission Underground Tour, featuring TCM and Oakenfold, kicks off in the fall, with a Halloween date at Racket NYC. Kirkland says the two artists have not collaborated at their recent shows, but it might be in the cards.
“I think that that would be a cool element to have him. You know, I come up at the end, he plays, I play something and he’s like, oh yeah, this reminds me of this, I want to play this. I have done that with other artists over the years, specifically when we were on tour together. But I think it would be talked about doing it on the tour going forward.”
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