Taking another look at “Candyass” (1998) the debut album from electro rock band Orgy, feels like jumping into a time machine. In contrast to today, when the rock music categories often aren’t even shown on the TV broadcasts of major awards shows, the late ‘90s saw bands such as Korn and Limp Bizkit clogging MTV’s airwaves as much as some of the biggest pop stars in the world. For good or ill, heavy music occupied a place in pop culture that it hasn’t come close to matching since then.
Behind smash hits “Blue Monday” (a cover of the 1983 New Order new wave classic) and “Stitches,” Orgy was one of the bigger acts of the era, with its image somewhere between glam and goth and technologically forward sound standing apart from the nü metal stars of the day. The band went on hiatus in 2005 after releasing three albums and remained dormant until singer Jay Gordon assembled a new lineup in 2012. Orgy released an EP, “Talk Sick,” in 2015, and recent years have seen a series of single releases, with more on the way. In spring 2024, the band is set to celebrate 25 years of “Candyass”—which, along with Orgy’s second album, “Vapor Transmission” (2000), has been remastered and released on vinyl for the first time—on a co-headline tour with Cold (see the dates below). Also set to appear this year at major festivals Sick New World, Welcome to Rockville, Louder Than Life and Aftershock, the band appears to be gaining some major momentum in 2024.
Live Metal’s Greg Maki recently spoke to Gordon about the tour, the making of “Candyass,” new music and more.
LIVE METAL: Orgy has this tour coming up, celebrating 25 years of the first album, “Candyass.” That kind of weirds me out because I feel like it can’t be that old.
JAY GORDON: I don’t even want to think about it. Yeah, it’s 25 years, man. Crazy.
What can the fans expect on this tour? I’m assuming a bunch of songs from that album.
Definitely. We’re gonna play a bunch of that, but we’re gonna play new stuff, too. Playing the whole record just seems counterproductive somehow. But I’m grateful for all the love and support and all that kind of stuff. I’m sure a lot of the fans want to hear a lot of it, so we’re gonna try to squeeze a lot of it in. We might do—who knows—a mashup of a bunch of ‘em all at once and kind of walk ‘em through it a little bit—maybe not play the whole song, like a medley or something. But there will be a lot of them where we play the entire song.
You have Cold coming out on the tour with you. I remember seeing Orgy and Cold back in 2000 right after the second album came out, so it’s pretty cool that you’re hooking up with them again.
Yeah, they’re cool guys. It’s gonna be an interesting co-headlining tour. One night they’ll be the headliner, the next night we’ll be the headliner. They’ll be the last band, then we’ll be the last band—something like that.
That show back in 2000 was actually the last time I saw Orgy live, so it’s been a long time. I saw Orgy a bunch of times on the first album cycle, including—I’m curious if you have any memory of this—one of the weirdest shows I’ve ever been to. It was a radio festival. It was outdoors in the middle of winter at a ski resort in Pennsylvania. Do you have any memory of that? (NOTE: This event was the WHFSkimo Snow Job, held Feb. 26, 1999, at Ski Libery, now known as Liberty Mountain Resort, in Carroll Valley, Pennsylvania.)
I do remember that! That was a cool show. It was fun. We fell a lot, but it was cool. (laughs)
I remember that up front I had to watch for crowd surfers and also snowballs that people were throwing. (laughs)
Yeah, they were throwing the hell out of those things. It was fun, though. It was a good time.
Going back toward the beginning, there was a curiosity around your band before the first album even came out, a lot of it because you were signed to Elementree, Korn’s label. At the time, did that put any extra pressure on you, or was that just an opportunity to make an album and work with your friends on it?
Not really. Korn didn’t put any pressure on us. We kind of just did our thing. We evoked a certain kind of style and a certain kind of element musically. They didn’t put any kind of pressure on us. I definitely didn’t feel it. I felt like we were allowed to do what we needed to do to make the record. I’d been making records since before then, so it wasn’t very hard for us to figure out how to do what we needed to do.
The hard part was getting a bunch of gear up, speaking of snow, to the Lake Tahoe area—like north shore Tahoe, Truckee, Donner Pass area. That’s where we recorded the majority of that record, ‘cause L.A. was too nuts. The studio was crowded as hell, everybody’s partying, and we just had to get away and make this record. So we went up to the snow. We brought a tape machine. That was back when a 2-inch tape machine was the way that you did it—very limited computer stuff back then. So we had brought like a $100,000 two-inch tape machine up there and dropped it right off the truck in the snow. Kind of screwed up some things in it, so we had to get that fixed. So that was interesting. Then once we got set up and going, we just rolled through it.
Could you tell while you were making it that it was gonna be something special?
I think you have those moments where you don’t know which ones are gonna be the ones. You kind of have an idea, I guess. We were kind of messing around in uncharted territory, so it was a little weird. But it all worked out. I kind of can tell more now when I think something is a hit or something like that. But this day and age, it’s hard to promote it. Back then, everything was in place to make it work—labels put up the money and you go nuts and do what you can.
Twenty-five years later, do the songs still have a lot of personal meaning for you today, or are they more time capsules of where you were back then?
A little bit of both. They mean a lot. That was our baby record. That was our intro to the world. So they have a lot of meaning, profound meaning, like that. I get more out of what people give back to me when they tell me, “This song was like this for me.” That makes me feel really good about it. In other ways, it’s like let’s move on and let’s keep going. So both. (laughs)
Were you surprised when “Blue Monday” blew up like it did?
Yeah. The first single was “Stitches,” and it was doing good, and then all of a sudden—boom—they started playing “Blue Monday,” and they just went nuts for “Blue Monday.” So I was like, “Alright, cool.” “TRL” kind of followed along with that on MTV, and they kind of blew up “Stitches,” too. Both videos retired at number 1, and that was a pretty cool thing to see happen back in the day. But I had no idea it was gonna be as big as it was.
That feels to me like the last era where heavier music really was a big part of the larger popular culture. Do you think we can ever get it back there, and does that even matter?
It would matter if stuff like that was to happen again. I think that would be a really cool thing to do. I wouldn’t mind hosting something like that. It would be great to be able to have bands from this generation have that platform to address people and have people have access to their music. I think it would be really cool to be part of something like that. I’ve been asked that question quite a few times, and yeah, I think it would be really cool to have a platform, a medium to be able to show this kind of music or heavy music in general or different music in general—I think that would be really cool to have a real MTV again perhaps. (laughs) But it’s not up to me, man.
Sometimes when a band has a big hit that’s a cover, they’ll try to distance themselves from that in later years. Did you ever have that kind of thought toward it?
Oh, I’ve had that thought a million times over, to be honest. But you’ve gotta play it. You can’t leave that one off the set list, as much as you might want to. That’s why I like to go out into the crowd on that one and have the crowd sing it with me so that it feels more like a fun thing to do. There’s always funny things that happen when I do that. I’ll put the mic up and they’ll freeze up or some of them sing the wrong words. Some of them sing it perfectly. Some of them are killer. So it just depends. But yeah, I’ve had those thoughts, for sure.
I’m sure once things started taking off for you, it must have been like a whirlwind. Were you able to really appreciate the success and everything that was happening at the time?
I definitely indulged and appreciated way too much, but at the same time it was all a learning curve, a learning experience. It moved pretty fast actually, coming to think of it. I didn’t really have a lot of time to realize things. I think about it now, and it feels like yesterday. It doesn’t feel like 25 years at all. But I have my memories, so that’s good.
Not long after the album came out, the band was really thrown into the fire touring-wise being part of that first Family Values Tour—Korn, Rammstein, Ice Cube, Limp Bizkit and Orgy. What was that like?
That was crazy ‘cause we hadn’t even done clubs at this point. I knew that we were gonna get some opportunities because Korn had signed the band. Jonathan (Davis) was like, “Let’s get you out there and do this shit,” and I was just like, “Whoa, OK.” Limp Bizkit gave us the first gig, and it was at a festival, like 30,000 people, and I was not prepared for that. That terrified me. But it was cool. Something had happened to Fred (Durst)’s arm or his wrist, so he wasn’t gonna do the show, and so they gave us that show. So that was cool of them. That’s a crazy experience for a band that’s just starting out—friends or not. (laughs)
About a month ago, there were vinyl releases—the first time on vinyl—for both “Candyass” and “Vapor Transmission.” Are you happy with how those came out?
Yeah, definitely. I have some special test pressings that I got that I’m gonna be maybe auctioning or something like that. I think it’ll be cool for people to get the test pressing of that. I think that’s a cool thing—special items that no one else has. But yeah, I’m stoked. The vinyls came out pretty good from what I’m told. I haven’t actually heard it on a record player yet, but I plan on it.
What is your preferred method for consuming music these days?
The streaming services are cool. I have Spotify, and I use it. It’s so easy to use, but they just pay the artists like shit, to be honest. Your streams can be way up, and you’re seeing nothing from that. It’s so crazy. The artists always get fucked one way or the other. I hate to say it like that, but it’s very true. I’m not even being a crybaby. That’s just a fact. It’s always been that way. It’s always been like a label signs you, they put up some money, but then they make the bulk of the money. Live concerts is where bands stand a chance to do the best. So I always encourage people to come check out live shows. Plus it’s a lot of fun. It’s my favorite aspect of the whole thing.
I think Tidal is really good, ‘cause they actually pay their artists and I think it sounds better—I know it sounds better. The music is high quality, and it’s a better medium to check it out, all the way around. If you want to support your bands, Tidal is a good one. I think Apple Music works, as well.
What do you use, Spotify?
No, I don’t use Spotify at all. I don’t like the way they treat the artists. I know I’m just one person and it doesn’t really make much of a difference, but it means something to me.
Yeah, good looking out. I’m definitely gonna be heading more toward Tidal myself. It’s worth the money, and it really does help the artists to get paid.
And I’ve really gotten into vinyl the past six, seven years. I got the two Orgy albums on vinyl.
Oh, sick. Thank you. I appreciate you.
Speaking of that, the second album, “Vapor Transmission,” that’s actually my favorite Orgy album. To me, it sounds like a band that had been on tour for a while. It’s more live sounding and bigger and, I think, a little more diverse. How do you feel about that album?
I love that record. There’s some gems on it. We’ll be playing a few songs from that on this tour, as well. I don’t know if I like it better. I love both of those records a lot. I like ‘em both for different reasons. But yeah, I think it sounded a little better. I would like to, honestly, remix all of them, just put the modern technology on those records, maybe make it Atmos or do something like that that would really make it worth it. So maybe down the road, I’ll do that at some point.
I’ve been into the newer stuff you’ve put out, too, especially the latest song, “Ghost.” I love that heavier sound. Is that where you see newer Orgy music going?
The name Orgy, in a nutshell, obviously things getting together, not sexually at all—it’s more like a musical base situation. So I’ve always wanted to kind of do whatever I want to do other than stay in the lane like everybody tells you to do. I’m a little rebellious in that sense. But I love the heavy stuff. There’s some more heavy stuff coming, too. The next couple songs you hear are probably gonna be pretty heavy. I’m working out a lot of details right now. We’re learning some stuff that I put together, and we’re gonna figure it out. So there’s gonna be some heavy ones coming, for sure.
Is that you doing the screams on that one?
Me and Joey Scream, we do ‘em together. I do a lot of ‘em on that song in particular. And the next one that’s coming out called “Perfect Weapon,” I scream with this guy Robbie. He collabed on a couple songs with us already. I like doing it. It’s fun. I never used to do it, but it’s fun to reach into your bag of tricks and pull that out every now and then. People seem to gravitate towards it sometimes, so it’s cool.
Yeah, it’s cool after 25 years to pull out something new that we haven’t heard.
Yeah, I could always do it. There was little bits and pieces of it in the first couple records. But I love heavy music, and that’s the shit. But you’re gonna hear some heavy industrial stuff, more heavy rock type stuff and mixed in with a bunch of trap sections and stuff like that—a little dexterity, a little versatility.
Is the plan to continue to release them as singles, or is a full album in the works?
It’s a singles-based world now. It doesn’t really pay to be like, “Here’s 14 songs all at once.” Then it’s like, what do we do now? So it’s better to release them as singles and give it some time in between each one so that people can get familiar with that and catch up.
LINKS:
www.orgymusic.com
Orgy on Facebook
www.instagram.com/orgyofficial
www.twitter.com/orgyofficial
Orgy YouTube channel
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