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| Photo by Bradley Meinz. |
This story appears in the February 2011 issue of Milwaukee Magazine.
“Na na na.”
Tinkering with that funny little phrase in a soundproof, nondescript brick building in Wauwatosa are the two members of the band Chester French, holed up in a tiny room, working on the melody for a song. The duo, a nationally known pop group with hip-hop influences, is big enough to be working anywhere in the country, but frontman and Milwaukee native D.A. Wallach is loyal to his hometown, though the city hasn’t exactly returned the feeling.
In jeans, red high-top sneakers and a navy blue striped polo, Wallach could pass for a college student. Put him in the hallways of his alma mater, University School of Milwaukee, and he might even blend in with the high school kids. Still, his eye-catching bright red curls peeking out from beneath a gray beanie suggest something of his on-stage flair.
“Na na na,” he croons, playing with each “na,” almost posing a question to his bandmate.
Multi-instrumentalist (drums, guitar, keyboard) Max Drummey, a Boston native who made headlines in 2008 for a quickie Vegas marriage to British socialite Peaches Geldof, is at the keys. His signature messy, long brown mane is uncharacteristically kempt (he will later chop it). In the hipster uniform of gray skinny jeans, white low-top canvas lace-ups and a T-shirt, he’s edgily sarcastic, lacking Wallach’s slightly preppy friendliness.
“I don’t really care about that,” Drummey answers. He is focused more on getting the right pitch than the style. “It’s the bass note of the chord.”
“Na na na,” Wallach sings again, louder, harsher, projecting his characteristic rasp and rawness.
Stop.
Glare from Drummey.
Then Wallach tries again.
It continues, difficult for an outsider to understand. Amid all the back and forth, they’re tweaking a melody, speaking in tongues, in blunt bandmate language. It’s a grind of long days, sometimes 15 hours, in the windowless rooms of Burst HQ, the Tosa studio where they’re working on their second album. It’s the fourth month of a rather anonymous five-month stay, and the duo, both Harvard grads, both 25 at the time (Drummey turned 26 in September), are used to all-nighters. “You get in the habit of working really hard and not feeling like you’re working super hard,” Wallach says. “It’s just the culture.”
So far, it’s paid off. Mostly.
Chester French (named after sculptor Daniel Chester French of Lincoln Memorial fame) actually hit it “big” before its first album, Love the Future, landed on record store shelves. As Wallach and Drummey neared college graduation in 2007, hip-hop greats Kanye West, Jermaine Dupri and Pharrell Williams entered a bidding war to sign the band. Williams won, and Chester French went to Star Trak, a hip-hop-centric Universal subsidiary distributed by Interscope, with a $1 million signing package.
Hello, attention.
In 2008, Rolling Stone declared Chester French an artist to watch, Spin awarded a comparable honor, GQ lovingly dubbed them “smart-asses,” and socialite/blogger/influential loudmouth Perez Hilton voiced support. In 2009, they released Love the Future but were already in the thick of national touring behind big-name acts such as Blink 182, N.E.R.D. and Lady Gaga. The band’s single “She Loves Everybody,” first released in an oversized condom wrapper as an ode to safe sex, was heard by millions on HBO’s “Entourage.”
Here were two white guys, flourishing with the support of the mostly black world of hip-hop, with a musical style closer to standard (not quite bubblegum) pop. The duo posed for a 2010 fashion spread in Vogue and seemed to quickly cement their off-the-cuff, jokester approach to interviews in the psyche of music journalists nationally.
Yet despite the tsunami of attention, Milwaukee has resisted the wave. Here, Chester French has mostly gotten small writeups (mediocre concert previews and album reviews) and a whole lot of criticism, most harshly from DJ Hostettler of ThirdCoast Digest. But Wallach hasn’t given up on Milwaukee and pushed to do the second album here. Soon, Drummey and sound man Dan Stringer were moving into a house in Wauwatosa, while Wallach took to his mom’s house in Fox Point. When they needed horn players for their first album, he called a drum teacher from his high school years to help track some down. When approached about playing a free Planned Parenthood benefit, he readily agreed, getting Drummey on board and helping the nonprofit pick the venue. Then, despite all of his efforts, the August event drew a small crowd.
Chester French simply can’t get love from Milwaukee.
****
Nobody really expected David-Andrew Wallach to become a musician. Certainly not Dave Bayles, a percussion instructor at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and UW-Parkside who gave Wallach drum lessons. “He was very analytical,” Bayles says, “and he would ask questions, which not all high school students did.” When Bayles asked Wallach what he was likely to do with his planned education at Harvard, he received a strangely self-assured answer.
“I think I’m going to become president of the United States,” Wallach said.
Wallach wasn’t joking, Bayles realized. “I for sure thought he’d go into politics.”
Many did. “I thought he’d be a politician,” Wallach’s father, Alan Wallach, says. “When I went to visit him at Harvard for parents’ day, he knew like 300 people.” Childhood friend Siavash Sarlati pictured him as a senator. Wallach’s mother, Rochelle Lamm, saw him as an influential statesman and expected him to attend the Kennedy School at Harvard.
Precocious.That’s how Lamm describes Wallach as a child.
Born March 2, 1985, in Denver, Colo., David-Andrew moved before he turned 2 to Appleton, Wis., where Lamm became the CEO of a mutual fund group. By fourth grade, he was a Milwaukeean and enrolled at University School. When he was 10, the Wallach family grew, as they adopted a baby girl from Paraguay named Sierra. With 10 years between D.A. and his sister, Lamm says, “Each of them have been only children in a sense.” He also has two much-older 40-something half-brothers from his father’s previous marriage.
Wallach was “relentlessly curious,” says Lamm. His high school history teacher John Stephens remembers him as a voracious reader, and that hasn’t changed. Wallach rotates between incredibly complex subjects – physics, the brain, philosophy. (“I read a book that f–king blew my mind,” he says. “The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. It’s one of the best books ever. Ever. You have to get this book.”) He earned straight A’s throughout high school and college. And in both, he received top graduating senior awards.
Yet the presumed future politician was also drawn to performing. His dad, who is a lawyer by trade and owns a Whitefish Bay franchise of the consulting business The Alternative Board, did magic shows as a kid up through college. He considered majoring in theater and used to dance semiprofessionally. His mom, who is now the chairman and CEO of financial services consulting company Acceleration Partners, used to recite long poems. “We’ve all been interested in performing arts,” Alan Wallach says.
When Cats hit Broadway, the Wallachs were living in Appleton, and Lamm took her young son to New York to see the show. “For months after, his dad and I had to sit captive while he performed magical ‘Mr. Mistoffelees,’ ” Lamm says. “He would leap around from couch to arm chair. He certainly was a showman.”
By then, the young redhead was following in his father’s trickster footsteps, going to magic camp every summer in New York and doing his first show at age 6. He performed at birthday parties, a bar mitzvah, Appleton’s children’s museum, the Audubon Court and Barnes & Noble book stores in metro Milwaukee. “He took it seriously,” Alan Wallach says. “He was better than me.” The two traveled to magic conventions throughout the nation.
D.A. was comfortable on stage, but at age 12, he suddenly left the magic act behind. “He decided it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to be different,” Alan Wallach says.
Whether to stand out or fit in. It’s a classic conflict for teens, but D.A. seemed to handle it adroitly. He gallivanted with a diverse group that played video games, discussed politics, listened to music and hung out at restaurants. Evenings at Kopp’s, Zaffiro’s and Pizza Shuttle could lead to epic conversations about world issues, discussions that led Wallach and others to help plan a benefit concert with Willy Porter, which raised enough money to build two schools in Afghanistan.
Wallach also got involved in the High School Fed Challenge, the national economics competition. He competed twice, winning the Midwest division with a group led by Stephens and traveling to Washington, D.C. “He was an extremely enthusiastic student,” Stephens says, “just so interested in everything.”
But he was still intrigued by performing. Wallach participated in ComedySportz and, through basement jam sessions with friends, made highly influential music discoveries (Wu-Tang Clan, Outkast, The Roots).
Wallach’s childhood friend Sarlati, a UW-Madison med student, bonded with Wallach early in high school over a mutual interest in music. Wallach played the drums (he didn’t start singing until college), Sarlati worked the turntables, and a rotating cast of “laid-back goofy guys,” as Sarlati puts it, filled in the gaps in Wallach’s basement. “My thing in high school was that I didn’t like to leave my house,” Wallach says. “I was just able to create this situation where I always had friends over.”
Wallach says his teen years listening to hip-hop were influential. Even today, Wallach’s litmus test for writing and recording a song is whether someone in high school might like it.
Wallach applied to one college and one college only. Harvard. “He felt Harvard was the best school in the world,” Lamm says. If rejected, Wallach vowed to go to drum school in the Caribbean. But he was accepted.
The Harvard freshman met Drummey in the cafeteria, and they formed a band with three other students. Other musicians filtered through over the years, but Wallach and Drummey were the only constants. They wrote odd, medieval-oriented songs about knights and drawbridges (“I don’t know. We just thought that was funny,” Wallach says.) and played small shows around campus. The then-quintet didn’t record that material. “When we were doing this knight stuff, we thought, ‘Oh, of course everyone’s going to think this is funny and just love it,’ ” Wallach says. But audiences didn’t. “We weren’t the big men on campus.”
Love the Future and their free comedy rap album, Jacques Jams, Vol. 1: Endurance, still emphasized humor but to a more accessible degree. But their upcoming album takes a different, more honest tone. “We’re trying to be less funny, I guess,” Wallach says, earnestly, but then he displays his signature smirk. “We’re trying not to undermine the way people hear the music by thinking that it’s comedy,” but there may still be some comic touches. “We just like jokes,” he adds.
And then he laughs.
*****
Just below the Virgin Islands is the island of Nevis, a 36-square-mile magnet for tourists in the Caribbean. When D.A. was 12, his parents bought a second home in the West Indies, eventually settling on Nevis, a former British colony with gorgeous sandy beaches and a population that is mostly of African descent. “David-Andrew spent a lot of time growing up there,” says his mother.
A few years later, his parents divorced. He had led a privileged existence, but now inequalities began to become apparent in both Milwaukee and Nevis.
He admired some of his teachers, namely Stephens (“I really got a few just amazing teachers who were better than most of my college professors, honestly,” he says.), but noticed weaknesses at University School. He made friends from other schools and took note of the differences. “What I became bothered by was that [University School] made some efforts to integrate and bus kids in or give scholarships, and it just didn’t work because the culture of the school was very inhospitable,” he says. “That really awakened me.”
As a senior, he took on the role of prefect, one of the six student council leaders, and launched a schoolwide conversation about race in Milwaukee and the role the school played. “It was interesting because it brought out old-school racism that I didn’t really know existed,” Wallach says. “Milwaukee’s one of the few places where that still flies. Some of these people are living in the stone ages.”
He was also imbibing the culture in Nevis. “He is just as comfortable with Nevisians, with a fella who has worked at a beach bar in Nevis,” Lamm says. “David-Andrew has stayed in touch with him. Randy. He came and stayed with him at Harvard.”
“He knows people from all over the world,” Lamm adds. “We just like interesting, diverse people.”
During his senior year of high school, at Christmas dinner, a trip was planned. Wallach, a group of friends and a chaperone spent seven and a half weeks in India after graduation. “They had an incredible, incredible opportunity,” Lamm says.
For his 18th birthday, just a few months after the holidays, Wallach requested a dinner party at his mother’s house with Thai food. After the party, Lamm teased Wallach about his guests. “I looked around the table and said, ‘Don’t you have any friends who are named Mike or Tom?’ ” she remembers. “There was this very eclectic, multiethnic group.” To which he frankly replied, “Mom, you cannot raise a raging liberal child for 18 years and then look at him and ask, ‘Why?’ ”
That mentality was announced in his college application essay – “Why would a white kid from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, want to major in African-American studies?” It helped win admittance for Wallach. “It was very compelling,” Lamm says.
At graduation, Wallach received an award for being the student who most exemplified the spirit of the program. “Here are all of these African-American graduates and graduates from Africa,” Lamm says. “And who gets this award? My red-headed kid.”
That embrace of diversity, though, has been a tricky thing for Chester French. Few can relate to the duo’s Harvard affiliation. More urbane than urban, their backstory lacks the gritty, blood-sweat-and-tears storyline. And they don’t fit in a scene. Chester French is the kid in high school without a group, not quite in any clique, making acquaintances but spending Friday night at home.
Furthermore, there’s no illusion of indie cred (they’re signed to a major label), they’re privileged white guys, and listeners get confused. Is it hip-hop? Pop? Rock? What does “gentlemen rock” (a term the duo tried for awhile but is now abandoning) mean? “People have expectations for what we’re going to sound like,” Drummey says. And they’re often wrong. The focus is on songwriting, the sound is pop, and hip-hop influences (some rapping and sampling) are incorporated. It’s certainly commercial, even at times kitschy, but its precise audience isn’t always obvious.
“We’re not really in a scene,” Wallach says. “We’ve never fit in with the Brooklyn independent scene. We’ve never gotten support from the [online sites] Pitchforks and Stereogums of the world, and because of that, we kind of have to do it on our own.”
At a Starbucks last summer, Wallach is making a quick pit stop on the way to the studio. He’s unshaven and looks tired. He attended a concert in Chicago the previous evening, hanging with hip-hop stars Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe and Pharrell Williams. Opting for bottled juice over coffee or tea, he speaks in contradictions, his mind flailing from topic to topic. He loves the beauty of the suburbs, but thinks people should move to Riverwest. (“All the f–king young white people are going to Bay View because they don’t want to live in the hood.”) He doesn’t care about integrating Milwaukee but thinks Riverwest, again, (one of the more diverse sections of the city) could be a “staging ground” for some kind of community.
Wallach can love and hate Milwaukee in the same sentence. “I’ve been to every major city in the country five times, and there’s such amazing things about Milwaukee – being on the lake and the lack of traffic and the resources of a big city but the feel to some extent of the Wisconsin kind of hometown culture,” Wallach says. He loves Beans & Barley (he’s a vegetarian), swears by Kopp’s custard and grilled cheese, and only gets his hair cut at The Men’s Room in Shorewood.
But gradually, the distaste arrives, as he sips his juice, calling Milwaukee unstylish while wearing Harvard sweatpants and passionately dropping F-bombs. “We’ve got a city here that’s f–king falling apart, has been for 20 years, and no one cares about it. And I’m still paying the f–king stadium tax every time I come to Starbucks.” He reverts to utmost politeness in a snap when an employee approaches with another round of free samples. “You guys are too much. I can’t do it. This is like dim sum Starbucks.”
*****
Hip-hop mastermind Pharrell Williams has produced music for pop artists, hip-hop acts and flat-out superstars, including Madonna, Shakira, Britney Spears and Beyoncé, and has taken home three Grammys. He has also collaborated with Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes and is one-half of N.E.R.D., which is widely recognized for combining various genres, including pop, hip-hop and funk.
But while getting signed to his label was a coup for Chester French, Williams is not producing their albums in the traditional hip-hop sense (he doesn’t write but rather serves as a mentor), and his company is not necessarily providing tons of promotion anymore. Nowadays, the onus is on the musicians themselves.
Wallach’s an active Twitter user with nearly a million followers. He’s following more than 60,000 and yet still acknowledges tweets from individual fans. Then there are the fan e-mails (he vows to respond to each one) and the off-the-cuff packages on chesterfrench.com. Buy T-shirts, autographed CDs and stickers, or opt for a slumber party for $874.36 or an African safari for $75,000. “I wish someone rich wanted to do the safari because we would do it in a second,” Wallach says, but they might have to settle for the sleepover in which Wallach and Drummey cook the family breakfast. “We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries about the slumber parties. We’ll probably do some of those on the next tour.” Also online is the Chester French VIP Concierge Service, which gives members special opportunities to meet the band and get last-minute invites to fairly secretive gigs.
Lamm advises Wallach about certain marketing approaches. She’s not on the payroll but is actively engaged in their business. “I’m someone to bounce ideas off of,” she says. She switches effortlessly from marketer to mom and back, playing host to Wallach’s celeb guests (Williams, Samantha Ronson, Asher Roth), whom he picks up at the airport and drives straight to Kopp’s for custard. Then it’s to mom’s house for dinner. “At heart, he’s a down-to-earth, Midwestern, 25-year-old kid who loves custard,” Lamm says.
Lamm straddles the line between mom and strategist at the August Planned Parenthood gig. She spent the show in the crowd, dancing alongside Mayor Tom Barrett’s wife, Kris, who at one point took to the stage in support of the cause. But then Lamm jumps back to marketing pro, speaking like she’s reading from a script: “Their objective is to develop an intimate and ongoing connection and dialogue with their fans. They have built a large customer relationship database. Chester French has a very well-developed long-term business plan.” My son, the corporate rocker.
For now, that well-developed plan involves Chester French releasing its second album and contemplating a headlining tour. They’d rather not play the Rave again (“I hate the Rave; everyone hates the Rave,” Wallach says.) but recognize that they probably will. “I would hope the next record is successful enough that we could do Riverside in the next year and a half,” Wallach says.
The 18 new tracks they presented to Williams in May are different. The group spent the summer ironing out the selects, which are more electronic, more focused with more guitars, keyboards and drums. In the past, they called on string and horn players and other musically talented acquaintances. This time, they’re working within their abilities. “It’s way more self-contained,” Drummey says. “It’s about what we can do as the two of us.”
On a Wednesday evening in May, Chester French heads from the studio to the house in Wauwatosa where Drummey and production man Dan Stringer have been living for the past four months. Owned by Kanwardeep Kaleka, a med student at the Medical College of Wisconsin, the home on 84th Street is a cookie-cutter party house – filthy, sticky, dust-filled.
Wallach found it on Craigslist and scoped out the digs before Stringer and Drummey moved in. “The whole interaction was pretty funny,” Kaleka says. Wallach was cordial, detail-oriented and businesslike. He took particular note of the purple suede wraparound couch, and Kaleka said it was good for people who want to crash. Wallach was sold. This way, Drummey and Stringer, New Yorkers in the unfamiliar Midwest, would be around people rather than in a stuffy condo Downtown.
Talk about an understatement. At 11:30 p.m. this night, the noise is audible from the street. Inside, guests are everywhere – on the patio, in the living room, in bedrooms, in the kitchen. A keg of homebrew is allegedly on the way. And beer pong is heating up. Stringer and Wallach on one team, Kaleka and a friend on the other. Drummey’s already passed out, and Stringer’s had a few, but Wallach appears sober and social, talking about the best rappers and asking people about their favorite Jay-Z lyrics. The last time he saw Jay-Z, he says he got a hug.
The game ends, and Wallach works the party, talking to old friends and meeting new people. He’s not a big drinker and doesn’t go out much, so this shindig is more about mingling than imbibing. He pulls out his BlackBerry to find a picture of his girlfriend of three years, Liz, a student at UCLA. While clicking through photos, he stops at one of he and Diddy in Vegas. It was snapped while Chester French and Diddy recorded the “Ciroc Star” vodka video. With that, the conversation turns to music. And the new album. And moves to Wallach’s Lexus.
All good fun, but Wallach is already drifting away in his mind. He slips quietly out of the house without saying goodbye to anyone and heads back to the studio. It’s a half-hour after midnight, and Wallach turns off the alarm and settles into the recording room he’s essentially lived in for months. Embodying Dr. Dre’s approach of always having cohorts around, Wallach made the studio a hangout for his Milwaukee friends. Sarlati spent many days doing homework here. But now Wallach is without his supporting cast, and he wants an honest opinion on the music from the reporter he’s brought along. Suddenly he looks vulnerable, surprisingly so. He has everything invested in these 18 recorded tracks, in this second album. Everything.
In the eerie dark of the studio, lit only by the glow of the control panel, Wallach plays the songs at full blast. And they’re a surprise. Gone are the medieval lyrics of freshman year and the oversexed songs of the debut album, all sung with something of a smirk. More stripped-down Jack White than polished Brian Wilson, the music is grasping for something real. These are songs of adulthood, of someone facing a quarter-life crisis and a gut-wrenching realization: I’m not invincible. Listening to a song – the favorite he’s ever recorded – he stares straight ahead, looking somehow older. It ends, and he looks for approval. Nervous. Concerned. Back to being boy-like. “I think the new music we’re doing is the most universal music we’ve ever made,” Wallach says. It’s raw, emotional and, in a way, touching. It might even please Milwaukee.
Cristina Daglas is an assistant editor at Milwaukee Magazine. Write to her at cristina.daglas@milwaukeemag.com.
