ON CLOUD 9...
Rochester's THE LOOP
By Amanda Hartman
Nov. 2, 2007

Band with Brockport origins returns to the ROC this weekend

Cloud 9, a "rap & roll" band that originally formed in the dorms at SUNY Brockport, is performing this Saturday, Nov. 3, at the Dub Land Underground on Alexander Street.
In honor of their return to Rochester, we sat down with vocalists Mike Tangney and Doug Fredricks to see what makes Cloud 9 really tick.

How did you guys get started?
DOUG: I was actually out one night free styling and I bumped into Mike Tangney, and I guess he's from the sticks, so he never heard of people free styling before and from there he was kind of intrigued, and he started getting a little more into it. We started free styling more and more and eventually we wrote our first songs under the name of "The Good Fellas."

DOUG: There were some really horrible songs and we thought they were great. And from there it just kind of went on. We started getting people that actually appreciated it, and it grew from there.

What were some of the first venues you played at?
DOUG: Open mics

MIKE: When we really first started, we knew nothing as far as trying to go out a play. So it was a lot of sitting in the dorms at Brockport writing stuff and when we got the opportunity to jump up on stage somewhere, we'd jump on it.

How did you get around being broke in college and trying to start a band?
MIKE: If you listen to the album, we definitely have plenty of tracks that address the idea of being broke in college and making it work. Doug and I have joked around that we want to write a book that would tell people how to make music on no money and it would include learning how to make really good dinners with bottle deposit money and things like that.

MIKE: Doug and I roomed together. We moved off campus right above Jimmy Z's for our senior year, I guess it was a super senior year. It basically turned into us putting everything we had into music, and we let other parts of our lives slack off a little bit, which some people thought was crazy but now we're looking back and laughing at them for it

MIKE: We built our own recording studio. Anything that we've ever done has been totally independent, meaning we've never gone out and paid somebody to record our music for us or to write music for us. That's something we really took a lot of pride in, especially when we were in Brockport because we had no money. That's what really came out of staying in on Friday nights instead of going out and getting drunk at Canalside. We'd stay in and just write music. We really just funneled everything that we had into the music

How would you describe your music?
MIKE: Now or then?

Then, in college, and now. How did it change?
DOUG: Half the songs that we do now were written then. The lyrics haven't changed but the whole vibe, the essence of the songs have kind of changed with the on put of the new band. You can definitely tell we were green then, we were just doing it over beats. I just feel that along with the band that the maturity level of how we take the lyrics, even though they're the same lyrics, the way we say them now, it almost sounds like they're different songs now because they mean more to us.

MIKE: When we were in Brockport, the band was just Doug and me. We had some buddies that would make us instrumental beats and we literally just put our vocals over beats, and that's all that we had. It was literally just the two of us. We'd throw a CD on and do what we did over that.

MIKE: When we left college we realized that two kids rapping over instrumentals just wasn't gonna cut it anymore. So we went out and basically hand picked our band. And the advantage that we have now is that, the music is already there. Doug and I basically have a stock hold of like 150 songs that we've already written and most of them we've recorded, but just over instrumental beats. What we've done now is that we just put together a band where we have two guitar players, a bass player and a drummer and we can really go back and take this song that we already have lyrics to and let the band do their own rendition of it.

Who are your influences?
MIKE: If you listen to our music, you'll hear it — Sublime, Chili Peppers, 311. My guys will make fun of me all the time because I'm a country boy, I grew up on country music. I think that, not necessarily the style of music that we write but the way that I approach writing songs in general, a lot of country songs are about you, it's about the individual that's listening to the music. That's what I try to get across.

DOUG: I'm fueled mainly off of classic rock, one of my first songs was "Brace Yourself," which was about my dad being a long-haired hippie. I've been force fed Creedence Clearwater, Bob Dylan, the list goes on as far as that goes. But then I also went through my crazy stage of heavy metal and Pantera, so the mix is just really weird. I think that the classic rock would be one of my main influences. You can kind of tell because even when I don't mean to write that type of song it kind of creeps in sometimes. But pretty much everything, every music I ever listened to from classical to whatever is definitely going to show up at least in emotion if not in lyrics.
(Mike then eggs Doug on to admit what concert they went to this summer — Kenny Chesney)

How do those influences mesh with the rest of the band?
MIKE: Oh man, that was the hardest part for us, and it still is every single time we play. Everyone thinks that having a band is happy-go-lucky and we just play fun music and you just roll with what you roll with. But it's really been a challenge for me and Doug to get our ideas across to the rest of the band because the other band members are all punk rockers, really hard.

MIKE: The hardest part for us is that our music is so lyrical. If you listen to a CD it comes across and you can understand lyrics, but in our live shows it's really tough to get the guys to understand what we're trying to portray in our music. So it's really molded a lot from when we started.

MIKE: We coined the term "rap & roll" recently because, while we know how important the vocals are and we want to get them across, we just have this unbelievably talented band that we know we need to let loose sometimes. The breakdowns and the solos and the energy of the act, it blows people away sometimes. And that's what we take the most pride in.

Where is your favorite place to perform?
DOUG: I like the mid-size to smaller bars. I feel like when you get to big, especially where we are right now, you kind of lose that almost camaraderie. When we do a lot of our shows, the crowd is practically on stage with us. They feel us and we're feeling them, we draw off each other. … I think when it's smaller you get more of a chance to draw everyone in and everyone seems to have a better time. I love playing big venues … they're definitely awesome. I just feel that when the crowd is small enough to where everybody's into it, it's kind of just like a really crazy house party.

If you could perform with anyone, who would it be?
MIKE: The people I want to work with are people that are totally out of our element of music, like the Lincoln Park kind of clash and stuff. We do hip hop and it's all about vocals, and I'd love to bring in someone that's totally not in the same genre of music, because that's when I feel like the best music comes out.

Besides opening for Gym Class Heroes, is there anyone else famous or noteworthy you have played with?
DOUG: Jim Brewer we've opened for at Brockport.

When was that?
DOUG: 2002, we were still in school.

MIKE: It was one of those "Brock-the-campus" events

DOUG: The guys we are actually on tour with now, Stuedabaker Brown (http://www.myspace.com/stuedabakerbrown), they're awesome. It's really refreshing to hear people playing something that's not just non-sense and doesn't mean anything.

MIKE: They're opening for us at the Dub Land (on Nov. 3)

How do you know them?
MIKE: I know them from high school. They came out and put their band together right out of high school, and I went away to school … [When we came back from school], I said to one of the guys, "We should team up." Now we like to say all the time that were trying to take over the world.

Is that what you would say your future plans are, to try to take over the world?
MIKE: We quoted Pinky and the Brain way too many times. We used to sit down and when we'd finish a song and record it and listen to it, we'd say we were taking over the world.

When is Cloud 9 coming back to Brockport?
MIKE: Let's do Brockport soon! You got to put the word in for us. I've been emailing and making phone calls to Brockport the past month and a half and I get nothing back from anybody, that's why we are playing in Rochester.

What would you say to the college students trying to break into the music scene?
DOUG: Prepare to lose weight and don't quit, because you're going to be starving for a long time.

MIKE: Anybody can sit down and write music, anybody can pick up a guitar and start strumming out. The key is that you got to be hungry enough to go out and put it into the hands of the people that want to hear it because, there are always people that want to hear it, but you just got to go find them. After Doug and I left Brockport, we said that we weren't going to stop doing this. Everybody we met, we'd say, "Hey, check this out." Anyone. Use email, Myspace, anything like this, The Loop. The fact that you want to sit here at talk to us blows us away because four years ago people were making fun of us trying to do this music thing and now its finally starting to come together.