Three Stars: Ra Ra Rasputin

Where to visit them: http://www.myspace.com/rararawks

Where to see them next: Friday, July 10th @ 9:30 Club.

What are some of your favorite local acts?

Ken: I like True Womanhood a lot. Our friends fffever (***), who are playing Fort Reno with Imperial China (***), another cool band, the night before we're playing at 9:30. Laughing Man, don't forget Laughing Man. Patrick did a show for them, played bass for their last song. Nouveau Riche. Actually, Brock and I met at a Nouveau Riche show back when they were at Wonderland. I went to high school with Gavin (Holland).

Patrick: Lode Runner (a band that features both Brock and Ken). US Royalty (***) are really good. I was skeptical at first because they're so well-dressed, but they're a great live band. Spiritual Machine is good. Mittenfields are quite good, too.

Brock: Wild Fictions

Anna: Dance Party, definitely. There are a lot of new bands too...Solar Powered Sun Destroyer (***). I like Greenland (***)

Ken: D.C.'s pretty friendly. Every band we play with, we become friends with.

What are your day jobs?

Patrick: Ok, full time job is I work for an anti-sweatshop non-profit called the Fair Labor Association. I'm a monitoring program assistant. That's my 9 to 5. I do a little bit of blogging. Music, mostly obscure stuff from the 80's and 90's. And I occasionally contribute to Brightest Young Things and a couple political blogs.

Ken: I work for a technology company called buySAFE. We certify online stores.

Anna: I'm a middle school science teacher at Sidwell. It's awesome. I just finished my first year.

Brock: I'm unemployed. It sucks. I had some money saved up but that's basically gone now. Hopefully I'll get a job soon.

What are your favorite D.C. venues?

Ken: D.C. is totally blessed with some great venues.

Brock: People here are really willing to get into shows, too. Especially on the weekends.

Patrick: I think we've played almost every venue of note, except 9:30.

So are you guys a little nervous about that?

Patrick: Of course.

Ken: Totally excited.

Anna: Super excited. Sure it can be a little nerve-wracking but not nervous, more like anxious and ready to play.

Ken: I've been going to 9:30 Club since I was 12 years old. I saw Silverchair in 1995 with a band called Handsome...not Hanson. I've probably been to 50 or 60 shows at the 9:30 Club so it's really exciting.

Patrick: I got to see Fugazi there in 2001. They did two shows that week and it was absolutely phenomenal. Probably the cheapest 9:30 show I went to because they insisted tickets were only $6 or something. We all went to see LCD Soundsystem there, too.

Anna: I got whiplash at that show.

Patrick: It's nice too, because the bill for July 10th is three-quarters local bands. And Tigercity is coming in from New York.

Ken: Yeah, Tigercity is one of my favorite bands.

And The Dance Party is sort of blowing up right now...

Patrick: Yeah, they're what they call "all-in." Really putting a lot of time and a lot of effort into recording, writing, and playing as much as possible. They played a Club NME show on Thrusday night up in New York. Apparently, it was a huge success.

Are you guys trying to record right now?

Ken: We're working on some recording of our own. We have limited equipment. But we're starting to figure out how to do things ourselves. We've always focuses on playing live and writing new songs and better songs, and I think we've waited to have something we feel is worth recording. I think we're finally at that point.

Anna: And often what happens is we will record, and because we're so meticulous about it, that by the time we've finished we've changed our sound so much that the song doesn't work for us anymore. So we have to go back and kind of start over. And I feel like since February, we've made some big changes so people who haven't seen us play for a while might be surprised.

Ken: Well, I wouldn't say big changes...

Brock: Some pre-programmed stuff.

Ken: We've always talked about how we wished we each had three or four arms because our music is so layered. But with only four of us there are only so many layers you can add. So we've come up with a pretty good way to do things, where we'll put on some of the foundational elements of the songs and we'll loop them. That also allows us to do more live sound manipulation. And it kind of frees us up to play some of the less repetitive elements live. That's worked really well and filled out our sound.

Patrick: One of the things that helps too is you start listening to your songs more closely and you start to figure out how other bands will do this stuff live. Youtube is very good for that. We'll watch old footage of bands like New Order or Depeche Mode and try to figure out how they pulled off some of these complicated recordings live.

Where do you rehearse?

Ken: We rehearse in Brock's basement.

Brock: We used to rehearse at a capoeira studio. We'd walk into this studio after a class and it would be a huge sweaty mess. There was a storage area in the back where they let us keep our stuff.

Patrick: It gave us a lot of stamina and it taught us how to set up and tear down quickly.

Ken: It was a huge pain in the ass, though. We'd get there at 10 p.m. and spend thirty minutes setting up our gear, stop playing at 3 a.m. and spend another thirty minutes tearing down. I wouldn't get home until 4:30. I consistently showed up late for work for probably about six months.

Anna: But now we're in the basement where we can leave everything set up.

What is the origin of your band name?

Patrick: It's a Boney M song, actually.

So Patrick picked the name?

Ken: No, we had like a run-off voting system where we picked names and then voted on them. That's the great thing about gmail is we have all the records of all the emails that we've sent back and forth from years ago, and I was recently looking at the chain about picking names. There were like a dozen or more names we threw out there.

Do you remember any of the other finalists?

Ken: Coups and Earthquakes was a finalist. The idea came from a book that said the news only reports coups and earthquakes from other countries. The other stuff doesn't make it to our shores. One of the others was Good Danny's.

Patrick: I don't think that would have made it. It doesn't roll off the tongue very well. It sounds like the name of a hopeless ska band.

Ken: Yeah, so the name, Ra Ra Rasputin, we picked it and then about a month later we heard about this band called Ra Ra Riot. And then a few months after that they got a lot of publicity, their drummer passed away. And since then, we'll see things like us at DC9 and Ra Ra Riot at Blackcat during the same week.

Patrick: Yeah we actually played a warehouse party, which was out of control, wall-to-wall sweat, and they were at Rock & Roll Hotel the same night. We got in touch with them and asked if they wanted to hang out after the show but they said they had to get back to New York.

Ken: Open invitation, next time they're in D.C., we'll do a Ra Ra show together. Oh, I think there's a band from Baltimore called Ra Ra Replica.

Patrick: There's a band called Ra Ra Rabbit that ducked out and changed their name.

But you guys are holding firm?

Patrick: Damn straight.