Rowan & Hastings
written by Tabitha Vidaurri
It was at the Khyber, a dark Philadelphia rock club, during a comedic variety show called Die, Actor, Die! A duo, Rowan and Hastings, did an entire rap about the proper way to write a resume, including which fonts to use. It was the first time I saw them and I was floored. It may have been because I was looking for a job at the time, or it could have been because I had never seen anyone incorporate a PowerPoint presentation into a rap before. I think in the end it was a combination of all of these elements that made Rowan and Hastings stick out, not only in my mind, but in the local comedy scene as well. Writing a catchy song is one thing, using your administrative skills to create an audiovisual extravaganza is another.
“As you can see my skills include Adobe, Excel, I speak Italian too/ CPR, first aid, search and rescue /Behold my various internships/ I’m willing and able to undertake business trips.” – The Resumé Song, from the Rowan and Hastings Album
Rowan and Hastings are actually Gavin Riley and Nathaniel Holt. Gavin and Nate, both 27, have been making comedy and music together since they were in middle school. “We’ve known each other since we were 11 years old and were doing really silly stuff together even then, whether it was home videos of fake infomercials,” says Nate, “We’ve been writing raps together since the 8th grade, and we made recordings under the name The Konfuzed Insane in high school. It wasn’t until some time after college that Gavin and I had the idea to write decidedly un-gangsta rap tunes.”
Upon first glance Nate and Gavin make a pretty odd couple. Nate is over six feet tall, Gavin has long hair, and they both really like clip art. Paul Triggiani, a member of the sketch comedy group Secret Pants, has worked with Nate and Gavin a number of times over the past few years. “Rowan and Hastings are odd,” said Triggiani, “first on an individual basis as far as appearance is concerned, but also as a duo, because they just don’t look like they belong together under any circumstance, let alone as a hip hop group. I expected to be entertained in an awkward, standard novelty act kinda way-- but that isn’t what they deliver. They bring the pain.”
A live multimedia presentation is something you’d expect to see at a management-training seminar or a Christian summer camp. But Rowan and Hastings’ live shows retain the spirit of a West Philly basement show, where the amps are packed in as tightly as the crowd and there’s a pervasive sound of feedback throughout the performance. Gavin and Nate have played at such venues; in fact their first gigs were just that. “Our early shows were awesome, though often wrought with technical difficulties. We lugged around large TV’s and ran our footage off a camcorder. A couple times we couldn’t get the TV to work so we had people gather round Gavin’s twelve-inch laptop. This, combined with an assload of adrenaline, gave the show a feeling of watching a humorous train-wreck.”
“If we could play in front of a wall of TV’s that would be the best way of displaying our stuff,” says Gavin, the chief composer. “Nate doesn’t really fuck with the music, I pretty much do all that. Basically I’ll come to him with something and be like what do you think about this beat? And he’s like, ‘Any beat is fine as long as you can dance around to it.’”
“It’s all Gavin.” Nate adds, “I hold his talent and the standard he holds himself to in the highest regard. He makes the beats meticulously and then I usually deliver a sub-par vocal recording that he fixes by adding effects to my voice. “ When it comes to the lyrics, however, it’s more of an equal give and take. “We get an idea and then discuss, for lack of a better term, the narrative of how the song will evolve and the role each of us will play in forming that narrative. Then we each write rap verses and get feedback from one another and revise. Sometimes the writing takes weeks and sometimes it takes less than twenty minutes.” Their musical styling’s have crossed genres too, sometimes into progressive rock, sometimes into chanting– it all depends on the subject matter.
As far as the rapping is concerned, Rowan and Hastings have avoided cliché by remaining indefinable. Part of this is due to the fact that is unclear exactly what age group they are targeting. They do sing about subjects like sharing, Home Alone, and camping, which can at times feel like it is meant for children. While the subject matter may be kid appropriate, the tone is not. In fact, one teacher learned this the hard way. “Our best and simultaneously worst show was at this workshop for over achieving kids.” Gavin recalls. “Some woman had seen us play and she offered us two hundred dollars to come and perform for this high school group. The kids were completely confused; they didn’t know what the hell our message was. They had just come out of this two-hour training session and their teachers were like, ‘Now you’re going to listen to this music’. There were some kids laughing, there were some trying not to laugh. But, they were really polite about everything and clapped for us at the end.”
Anyone who’s been to a Rowan and Hastings show is familiar with Nate’s acrobatics. He has a special way of dancing that is best
described as a cross between break dancing and yoga. “I get to freak out in a way that in regular life could only be excused by alcohol or a well-chronicled mental disorder. Afterwards, I feel like I’ve taken a giant shit that I’ve been holding in for months.”
Gavin likes to let loose during the set as well. “That’s my aesthetic, I have always enjoyed just improvising and letting mistakes happen and then highlighting those mistakes. We try and freestyle a lot, and that goes over poorly sometimes, but it’s more to keep ourselves entertained.”
The pair is also known for their fog machine, which they bought half-price at Rite Aid the day after Halloween. They’ve managed to find a surprising number of uses for it, both in their videos and on stage. Gavin sees it as more of a visceral connection to the music more than anything else. “There’s things that you just don’t see anymore, in the scene in Philly, even just in popular music, too. You don’t see people really shredding on guitars any more, there’s not enough epicness in music nowadays. In the seventies, it was totally epic, but that’s pretty much what the fog is all about. Making it epic. Also, it is a guaranteed laugh. You just turn it on. It’s a laugh machine.”
Although they’ve known each other for a long time, Nate and Gavin’s solo endeavors differ greatly. Nate got his start on the stage in Philly performing with the sketch comedy group Bad Hair. He’ll also be starring in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival this spring. Gavin has been touring the tri-state area performing his own brand of musical storytelling, occasionally under the alias Christmas Man. “The music is secondary to the concept. I hope that people are excited enough about the concept that they don’t care that I’m not holding a guitar” He also has plans to create an entire choose-your-own-adventure album.
“I have seen Rowan and Hastings at least a half dozen times. The first was in a fire trap of a basement in West Philly with one light bulb, a microphone and a faded old color TV displaying their Power Point backdrop,” recalls Dave Jadico, the External Relations Director of 1812 Productions, Philly’s all-comedy theater company. “I’ve seen them rock a full crowd on the mainstage at World Café Live and I’ve seen them get standing ovations from despondent indie rockers, stand-up comedy snobs and on-the-fringe theatre artists. Simply put, everyone who sees them is blown away. Their ability to energize a crowd is matched only by their ability to be really damn funny and smart. And on top of all of that, if rap were the art of sneaking up on somebody, Rowan and Hastings would be friggin’ ninjas.”
When I was in middle school, we were corralled into the auditorium to watch a state-of-the-art multimedia presentation about peer pressure. It involved music and video projected over three giant screens, and it was supposed to give you better self-esteem. I believe Rowan and Hastings are doing the same kind of thing, and they have managed to make it extremely entertaining because their multimedia presentation is designed to make you laugh, especially at how weird multimedia presentations are. It’s not necessarily ironic as much as it’s a way to force their strange perspective on the audience, and to encourage others to get as excited as they are.
“It starts with having a good time. It starts with fucking around,” says Gavin. “It’s the same attitude we had in the seventh grade, but now we turn it into a finished product and show it to people. Us being in a group together, that’s kind of the fundamental principle of what we do. We can do that whether we’re making a career out of it or not, as long as we’re able to do it and have fun. Hopefully, people are in on it with us. I want to make our stuff inclusive, it’s the same mentality as showing it to a group of friends. Everyone is in on this joke with us and we’re not professionals. We just made this thing and happened to show it. It’s the same as what we used to do when we were kids.” Finally, as adults, they have acquired a fog machine.
For more on Rowan and Hastings,
visit myspace.com/rowanandhastings.
Tabitha Vidaurri is a writer from Philadelphia.