IN CONCERT
Everlast with Mother Mother, Hey Ocean!, Reggie Watts and more
When: 6: 45 p.m., Sunday
Where: Royal Athletic Park
Tickets: $80 at rifflandia.com, Lyle's Place, and Ditch Records
The era of shamrocks and shenanigans is pretty much over for Everlast.
But for everyone else on the planet, the bleating horn blasts and housewrecking beats of the rapper's most famous song - Jump Around - still explode on impact.
House party or performance hall, hockey arena or college football game, there's a party in motion when Jump Around is pumping out of some speakers. In fact, a mosh pit erupts during each and every football game at the University of Wisconsin, which has been plying crowds with Jump Around between quarters since 1998.
Fresno State University and the University of North Carolina have since followed suit, as have major-league baseball teams the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Angels.
Though he doesn't play it much these days, Everlast (a.k.a. Erik Schrody) still has lots of love for the biggest hit of his former group, House of Pain.
"It ain't going nowhere," he said of the Grammy-nominated cut, deemed one of the signature songs in rap history and one of the most enduring hits of the 1990s.
"If you got to do that once in your life, you did something. And I get to drive nice cars because of it."
Though he still talks and walks with an intimidating presence - adding extra impact to a six-foot, one-inch frame that is layered with tattoos - Schrody is mellow compared to his boozeswilling, party-rocking House of Pain days. By his own admission, the 43-year-old is basically "an old man" who often feels left in the dark when it comes to today's music.
"There's plenty of artists I like, but if I see something that's huge and I don't like it, I probably just don't get it," he said with a husky laugh.
"No longer do I say 'I hate that,' or 'It's bad.' I'm 43, so I understand there is sh--coming around that I just don't get."
House of Pain was an immediate hit for obvious reasons. Three scowlfaced twenty-something Californians raised on New York hip hop, the trio was cast as a gang of Irish-Catholics bent on destroying everything in its path. Its debut from 1992, which also featured the hits Shamrocks and Shenanigans and Put Your Head Out, was the perfect bookend to the ongoing grunge revolution at the time.
Tours with the Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine solidified the group's status. But for a variety of reasons, including rumoured drug abuse and alcohol dependency, the group's four-year run had fizzled by 1996.
Everlast went solo soon after and found fame with his multi-platinum reinvention, 1998's Whitey Ford Sings the Blues.
Schrody had grown tired of hip hop from a performance perspective. So when his new persona, which he mined from bad-boy country acts like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, gave his career a shot in the arm, a creative rebirth erupted.
He was no longer Everlast, the rapper. He was now Everlast, the singer-songwriter.
"It's what I enjoy the most, playing with a band," he said of his set this weekend at Rifflandia, which will feature a three-piece backing band.
"Hip hop, even with a live DJ, there's a certain amount of musical control that is not there.
When all the music is being created right in front of you, you can manipulate it as you choose. It's different every night."
It was tough going at first, trying to convince audiences that the former hard-drinking Irish-Catholic rapper was now a serious artist - and a sober Muslim at that.
Whitey Ford literally almost killed Schrody. On the day recording wrapped, he nearly died of a heart attack caused by a torn aorta. The sudden back story gave audiences something to latch on to emotionally, and singles What It's Like and Ends became smash hits.
What It's Like was nominated at the 2000 Grammy Awards, as was Schrody's collaboration on the Santana single Put Your Lights On. The transformation was complete.
His recordings in the years since have run the gamut, from his role in hardcore hip-hop group La Coka Nostra (a reconstituted House of Pain) to his recent tales of twang as a solo artist.
Though his music falls under a range of banners, there's a thread that ties it all together, Schrody said.
"When I do my solo work, I like the highest common denominator - that thing amongst us all that is uplifting, even in despair or darkness. A lot of my songs are real dark, but they have a pinhole of hope at the end of the tunnel." [email protected]
Follow Mike Devlin and Amy Smart on Twitter for live coverage of Rifflandia: @tc_vicarts
