BRAD ROBERTS MAY be the main man behind the Crash Test Dummies, but he’s no blockhead. When the Grammy-nominated group started to fade away in 2004, after selling millions of albums over the past decade, and money slowed to a trickle, he pulled the plug. He thought, for good.
But thanks to a children’s toy called an Optigan and a new songwriting partner, Roberts and his booming baritone are back with a new album and a new Canadian tour that checks into Toronto this fall.
“What brought me down six years ago, when I stopped making records,was that it was simply not profitable in any way,” says Roberts, from his home in New York City.
“The only way to really make any money is to tour for years, endlessly, and I didn’t really want to do that. So, I swore off songwriting.”
It was only recently that Roberts had a serendipitous turn of events when he met Stewart Lerman, a New York–based music producer doing a lot of soundtrack work in recent years. That collaboration, combined with Roberts’s new found love of vintage instruments, and the Optigan in particular, resulted in a surge of creative energy.
“As we wrote songs, we’d come together, do overdubs, but we had no intention of releasing it. It was more a fun thing we did, and we didn’t even do it very often,” says Roberts.
“But it turned into a monster, and we became quite prolific, and the music turned out so well, and we both said, we gotta try and release this somehow.”
The album Oooh La La! (www.crashtestdummies.com) was released last spring, 11 tracks with a genre range heretofore unheard of in the Dummies canon. Thanks in large part, says Roberts, to the Optigan.
A toy from the ’60s, the Optigan used optical film technology to generate audio. Roberts compares it to a very low-fi, analog sampler. Kids would select any number of genre discs, sold separately of course, such as Big Band, Guitar Boogie or Polynesian Village and play along.
“It was all meant for people who didn’t know how to play music,” Roberts explains. “It was not considered in any way a professional recording instrument. You’d have been laughed out of the studio at that time. But now, in retrospect, it has this very eery, evocative quality.”
And thanks to the variety of discs Roberts was able to secure (thank you, eBay), he was soon exploring new musical styles.
“For example, we are not in the big band genre, but they had a big band disc, so we wrote a big band tune by virtue of having this disc.” Roberts laughs. “It became a fountain of creativity.”
The new album, according to Roberts, is generating more positive feedback than the band has received in years.
“I’m very happy and flattered,” says Roberts. “We are really putting our balls out there doing this completely different thing.… And there is plenty more left. These songs are just the tip of the iceberg.”
The band, touring as a three- piece, has already played a number of dates in key American cities and will be making their way through Canada this fall.
“The crowds have been unbelievable,” says Roberts. “We haven’t toured in so long that people who wanted to see us were dying to see us. I haven’t had this much fun touring in my life.”
Roberts and the Dummies burst onto the Canadian music scene in 1991 with the now-classic “Superman Song” off their debut album The Ghosts That Haunt Me. Their follow-up, 1993’s God Shuffled his Feet, containing the hit song “Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm,” broke the band in the United States, and the album sold 10 million copies.
