When I first heard of The Incredible Moses Leroy back in September I only knew they were scheduled at the Wiltern Theater to warm up for They Might Be Giants. I had no idea what they looked like or what the music they played was like, but hey, I'm always ready for something new. Little did I realize exactly how new.

Before they came out, on a screen behind their equipment there was projected an image of some black guys with guns and afros with the band's name underneath. They looked all vaguely 70's, maybe Jamaican, almost like they should have been on the cover of The Harder They Come. Assuming that picture was the band, I was all braced for some anti-Babylon militant reggae, but when the band finally appeared, surprise! They looked very modern in a low rent way--some white guys on bass, keyboards and, drums, another sitting in front of a laptop computer and a black guy with square rimmed glasses, a wild mop of hair and a guitar up front. And no guns anywhere, thank goodness! As they launched into the first song, the image on the screen changed to a pair of sock puppets that mouthed the lyrics. Lyrics that were delivered through an electric megaphone. It was light and quirky, clever and a whole lot of fun. I knew right away I had to talk to this Moses Leroy.

Only there is no such person, at least not any more.

What kind of guy names his band after his great grandfather? Ron Fountenberry is that kind of guy, one who's not inclined to do things in the standard fashion at all, and yet he makes a finely crafted kind of pop music that is highly accessible.

Electric Pocket Radio is Ron's second release. His self-produced first album was Bedroom Love Songs in 1998, but EPR is the first where he's had access to a fully equipped studio and a proper budget to play with. He's come up with some amazingly good stuff that runs through an implausibly wide range of styles. Its sixteen tracks run from the drum and bass of "Our Millionth Customer" through electronic soundscapes like "Treble," to modern pop songs like "It's A Sunday" and "1983" to "Fuzzy," which would have been at home on an Austin Powers soundtrack, to a cool jazzy instrumental called "Tomato Soup." Not bad for someone who started playing guitar less than ten years ago. Damn amazing in fact.

Maybe The Incredible Moses Leroy is the musical version of Fusion Cuisine, where cooking styles from all over the world come together to make brand new dishes. Likewise on the album there's a fusion of synthesizers, piano, acoustic guitar, then suddenly powerful electric guitar, a little violin and more all mixed together in tasty ways. Everything is different and beautiful, and very concise. Forget the food metaphor, it's like you're attending an exhibition by an artist who paints only miniatures. They almost make more sense played separately rather than as an album. Mostly though the Moses Leroy sound is found in Ron's friendly, sweetly expressive singing and his sly lyrics about the confusion love brings. Who else would call his "warm and fuzzy" girlfriend a "Nazi prom queen?"

Ron's been getting noticed a lot this year. Actually more people have probably seen his face in commercials for The Gap than in musical performances, but that's all changing. He's been the subject of articles in the LA Times, LA Weekly and he's also made an appearance on Craig Kilbourn's TV show.

Maybe that image of the revolutionaries wasn't that far off base after all--The Incredible Moses Leroy just might be taking over one day. And after talking to Ron I can't think of a nicer guy to surrender to.

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Cosmik: You seem to be grouped in with Beck and The Eels and people like that, making a sort of new millenium Southern California pop. Are you comfortable with that kind of category?

Ron: Well no, not uncomfortable with it, but I'm not really from Southern California... I really feel like the sound of the music we make is really reflective of the music I grew up with in the Bay Area. I'm definitely a Northern California kid.

Cosmik: How did that affect your sound?

Ron: In Northern California at the time when I was growing up, it was really amazing because we lived in a little town right out of San Francisco. We were particularly close to Stanford and San Jose State University and stuff, close enough to pick up their college radio. I didn't even know I was listening to college radio, I just knew that they were playing stuff that I liked... I didn't know what mainstream radio really was, I just knew like at 6 o'clock on Sundays there was like a pirate radio station that would play all this rap that no one else was playing. So I didn't know what I was listening to or how cool it actually was, or uncool or whatever. So all those things definitely shaped and influenced my ear and what I like about music and stuff.

Cosmik: It was interesting to learn that you didn't pick up a guitar until relatively late. Did you always harbor dreams of being a musician though?

Ron: I got my first guitar when I was eighteen and I really started actually playing it in college. I was about twenty. So I kinda had it sitting around for awhile... I had no idea that I would be in the music business. I'm still really not, I'm just on the fringes. When we got cable, like when I was in high school, we got MTV. MTV had actually been around for awhile at that point, and this was like when Poison, Guns And Roses and Skid Row and all these bands [were big], as well as Bobby Brown, Run DMC, Curtis Blow, Duran Duran; so there's all these influences. But I remember like when Poison would come on and they had this one song I really liked and I would always pick up my mom's guitar and just pretend like I was playing. I used to stand in front of the mirror pretending to play guitar.

Cosmik: When I saw you at the Wiltern I was wondering a couple of things about the performance. By the way I was really upset that it was only twenty minutes, barely got to know you!

Ron: They had us off pretty fast.

Cosmik: What I wanted to ask about first was the slide and video show. Is that something you do for every show?

Ron: It typically is something we bring to every show. Unfortunately last week on Halloween we had an incident where someone stole some of that gear we use to project the images. Everything is insured but now we're in the process of having to go back and redo all that... Here we are trying to bring people a little bit of joy and somebody steals our gear.

Cosmik: Do you have one set guy in the band who does nothing but the video?

Ron: I do all of the video myself. As far as triggering the video [on stage], sometimes we have friends that will come help us out that will trigger it, or if we can, just one of us will. It's on a computer now so just a couple of clicks and points and that's it.

Cosmik: The other performance question was, where did your singing with the bullhorn come from?

Ron: The megaphone is just for something that's on our album, "Beep Beep Love," which sounds kind of like it's sung through like an old microphone. I just wanted to get as close as I could to that kind of sound. It's become a part of the show. I think sounds kind of interesting.

Cosmik: The name of the band is after your great grandfather who I understand was a longtime activist in Houston. Did you know him that well? Is he a particular hero to you?

Ron: I did know him really well. He died when I was eighteen, so he lived into his nineties and he was really active all the way to the end. He was a really incredible guy. It was more an issue of when looking for a name for a band, I wanted it to be a solo [name], because initially it was really me just by myself in my bedroom. I wanted it to have that kind of feeling, like this is a person and not so much a band and I didn't want to use my own name 'cause I don't think my own name is that interesting. So I [thought] Moses Leroy sounded interesting because it's such an old type of name. You don't hear of any like that, an old Southern Black kind of name, and then I thought about [putting it together with the names you find in] the circus. These people always have The Amazing This and The Incredible That and The Stupendous and I just stuck the two ideas together and that's kind of how it happened, The Incredible Moses Leroy. Eventually of course it became less of a one man show. I still do pretty much everything but now I don't have to play the bass or whatever, I have someone to do that. It's definitely more of a band situation.

Cosmik: Do you have a song that's about Moses Leroy?

Ron: No I don't. I shy away from writing songs about like family members... I do write a lot about myself and about my feelings and things but I try to shy away from writing stuff about that, cause it seems to get kind of shlocky, kinda cheesy. I write in abstracts; it's a little bit easier for me.

Cosmik: I also got the EP called Growing Up Clean in America (containing five songs from the first album). It seemed like there was a little more touch of political awareness in it somehow, more than Pocket Radio. We're suddenly living in a very political time, has that affected what you're writing now?

Ron: I'm still writing the same kind of stuff. I generally just write from my own perspective, in terms of things I see or perceive and I kind of mutate them a little bit. I try not to be very direct because sometimes I find it's really hard to say things. I use more metaphor. I may know what I'm talking about but no one else may, but that's OK. I'm doing it for myself. There's a song I wrote like about four months ago and I don't have a complete title but basically the main idea of the song is that New York is the center of the world. I've been playing in New York a lot and I started writing this song. It actually was becoming one of my favorite songs and I was looking forward to trying to put it on a record. Now with the lyrics that I have, I'm not sure that it's going to be appropriate even a year or two years from now. That's kind of disappointing. I may do it anyway, but I'll change the city or whatever. We'll have to see. But all that stuff has definitely affected me, in terms of that particular song. If I am going to be writing protest things, it's not going to be about a war, it's going to be about being black in this country and the way I feel about I'm perceived and treated and stuff like that, because that's more important to me. I think there's plenty of things to work on here at home, and there's a lot of issues that I think are unresolved. There's things I experience on a daily basis, so if I was to write something more political it'd probably be something like that.

Cosmik: Electric Pocket Radio really does cover an awful lot of territory. Like "Our Millionth Customer" is basically drum and bass, but with those nice, almost Beach Boy vocals on top. By the way are you all the voices on that?

Ron: Yeah.

Cosmik: Cool! I like really spacey stuff too and "Treble" appealed to me. I liked the pop sound of "1983" and "Beep Beep" a lot, but by the same token I also like "Anthem," and a lot of the others. But they're all so different and I'm sure it requires a special set of guys in your band. Any stories about how the band came together?

Ron: It was pretty typical like, boy starts solo band, boy needs to play out and then realizes that he can't play every instrument live, so he finds like- minded individuals and they start playing together. Maybe one person left or another person left and that person was replaced and so on and so forth, finally until we get to this point. It's still in an evolution process because the band is not really done yet. I foresee us getting more people to play and maybe other people doing other things. You never really know who's going to be playing in the band.

Cosmik: Are there just four regular members then?

Ron: Yeah, basically. It's kind of a rotating arrangement but we're all friends and that's kind of how it goes.

Cosmik: Who's the longest member so far?

Ron: Technically Jake, the drummer, who started in the band, is earliest, but he left for awhile. In terms of days passed in the band, it would have to be Kristian Dunn, the bass player.

Cosmik: I like Kristian's singing and playing a lot. How did you hook up with people like Joey Warnocker (the drummer on a lot of Beck's work) who helped produced Electric Pocket Radio?

Ron: Well Joey produced four songs on the album and Keith Cleversly of Flaming Lips and Spiritualized fame did the bulk of the album. Basically I sent them my original album that I made... as well as a bunch of other producers. Almost everyone was into it and wanted to do something. So I made the decision on how I felt about people over the phone or in person.

Cosmik: How did it feel to be working on all those Gap commercials? Were you getting any soundtrack work or were you solely on camera as a model?

Ron: I modeled and I did a bunch of billboards. That was cool.

Cosmik: But it's not your music on the commercial, right?

Ron: They're playing the music in the stores now but that's not really what it was about. There were huge billboards with just my face in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Dallas.

Cosmik: It must have been strange to get all that exposure for something other than your music. Did you take it all with a huge grain of salt?

Ron: I took it with even less than a grain of salt... It was kind of funny at first. On some kind of nerdy never-been-cool kind of level I felt vindicated for all the times I got dumped in the garbage can in high school. But I also know that no billboard's going to stay up there forever, so I can talk about it and be happy as I want, but at the end of the day, in another week or two, or at the end of the month someone else's face is going to be up there and then all that will be forgotten. I didn't really think about it too much

Cosmik: I've heard Electric Pocket Radio on KCRW here; how are you doing getting it into other radio stations?

Ron: We've gotten to other radio stations across the country but it's been a really tough sell. We've done amazingly well on college radio, although the lifespan of an album on college radio is definitely a lot shorter than a mainstream station. Mainstream obviously if they like a song and they start playing it, that song can last for months before they even think about playing another track...We went [to KCRW to play live] about five months ago. That was one of the highlights of being in the band, sitting in the studio with those people who just the day before had PJ Harvey in and you're singing on the same microphone. That was pretty amazing. They've been really supportive but in general commercial radio has been just like, "This is really cool. We're eagerly anticipating new things in the future, but it's not something we can fit in right now."

Cosmik: Are you going to write something that might appeal more to them?

Ron: Our next record is shaping up to being less listener-friendly than this one. In fact I'm pretty sure it's going to be because I've been feeling a different vibe.

Cosmik: Last we come to the ole Open-Ended Question: If there's one thing that you hope people get by listening to your album, what would it be?

Ron: I want to make albums that are important as art. This record I've explored things in my own artistic way that I thought were interesting. Someone told me that they thought this record was in a small way kind of like Sergeant Peppers. I thought that was the biggest compliment. Obviously I could never compare to the Beatles or whatever but what I'm saying is that it has that ...(pauses) it's not static, it moves in a lot of different places. That's how I want my records to be and that's how my next record will be something like that, we'll see. I think there's a lot of good songs on this record that most people will never hear, but that's life... I hope that they would listen and maybe kind of think about what I'm saying and maybe try and figure out what I'm talking about. But it's not super deep, it's really an experiment, so I hope people realize that (chuckles abashedly) and accept it for that and enjoy listening.

(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes