Almost every song on this album has some depressing backstory, rendering the Rootbeer Reports unenjoyable. This song is the exception. Every memory surrounding it is fun or hilarious.
That fateful night
The song was actually inspired by one specific night. You might not be able to tell by looking at us, or listening to the song about Pokémon, or considering the fact we have a song about Pokémon in the first place, but Rawhide and I don’t exactly party. A typical evening for us in college was him trying to listen through the wall to our other roommate having sex and describing it to me while I play Wind Waker and tell him to take his ear off the wall and get back to watching reruns of The Nanny.
So one weekend the semester after I graduated, but Rawhide was still in Potsdam doing student teaching, I took a trip up to visit. Rawhide had just survived a traumatic break-up, so a bunch of us decided to take him out to a club. Not sure why a group of people who had collectively stepped feet in clubs fewer times than they had feet seemed like a good idea, but it’s what we did. And while there we did exactly what you’d expect a group of people like us to do: we stood in the corner and made comments to one another when the DJ played something we actually liked. At one point a girl came up to us and just started rubbing her ass on us. She was a little heavier (so my type) but I wasn’t single at the time so I just stood there frozen until she went away. She tried to get at least three of the guys in our group to dance before giving up. Of course, when I wrote the lyrics I exaggerated her size and made it the focal point of my verse.
Eventually we all walked swiftly back to campus after a growing need to take a shit led to the discovery that the men’s bathroom had no doors on its stalls. Six months or so later I would include the concept for “Standing Around” in the first message I sent to Rawhide about the in-progress album. Shortly thereafter I selected a beat he had produced called “Dubstep” for the song.
Mike Larry Draw
I met Mike Larry Draw when he did a show in Albany, NY. It was in the back room of McGeary’s Irish Pub for a fairly small crowd. In settings like that, the majority of the audience is comprised of real hip-hop heads. Mike went on as the fourth of four equally-billed acts. Two of them were Knowle’ge and Hired Gun – both brilliant artists I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Mike, and I don’t think he would disagree with this statement, was a bit of an oddball by comparison. Songs about scooters stuck out like sore thumbs on the fists pumping for Hired Gun’s “Arrest the President.” The crowd was a little confused at first, or at least I was. Then he performed “Get Lite.”
Suddenly, an audience that was listening intently to the politically-charged lyrics of the previous acts had begun raging. I knew I needed a feature from this guy. I reached out to both Mike and L One Crackeriffic about “Standing Around.” Mike got back to me first and, no offense to L One because he had a dope verse on the “Rush Hour RMX,” I’m really glad he did. Not only did he turn the verse around in just a couple of days, he renegaded Rawhide and I.
I had the pleasure of seeing Mike perform recently at the 8th Annual Beatshot Festival and, instead of rapping, he played some of the beats he produced and invited everyone to get onstage and spit their best 16. We had a nice chat afterward.
The Rawhide Kid
Rawhide wrote and recorded his verse when he visited me in Schenectady in 2014. Since he had the final verse, he was going to be the last of us to want to stay at the club. As such, his plan was to spend 14 bars discussing how awesome the club is, then let the most minor occurrence completely ruin it for him. There was a point where he suggested a girl say to him “eww, no, this club is no-creepers-allowed” and I asked him who he had in mind to recite that line. Halfway through my question I realized who I was talking to so, yeah, that’s me rejecting Rawhide’s sexual advancements like I do off-record at least twice a week.
During that visit, Rawhide and I also recorded the interludes. I said last week that it’s an unspoken rule Rawhide has to re-record his adlibs until I laugh so hard I have to leave the room. You’ll notice I don’t say anything else in that interlude after he says “Have another Utica Club” because I literally had to cover my mouth and walk away after that. I had no idea what that was at the time. As he would explain to me, and I would later see while visiting him in Boonville, is that it’s a Central New York beer. No one outside of his Trump-voting, tractor racing section of the state would get the joke so naturally, the duo who brought you “Upstate Upbringing” would keep it in the song.
Rawhide holding a six-pack of David Duke’s favorite brew, probably
Easter Egg
I actually did record a chorus for this song but the pitch has been lowered and the interludes are recited over it. Can you figure out what I’m saying?