What’s In A Name? Rainbow Kitten Surprise Astonishes

Alex Chapman – Rainbow Kitten Surprise
Cover Of Pollstar issue 6/25/18

Rainbow Kitten Surprise’s May 20th Instagram post touts what was by all measures the group’s most successful tour to date: “38 shows. 33 cities. 2 countries. Over 50,000 tickets sold. 12,095 miles driven. 4 fantastic support bands. 10 amazing crew members. Thank you everyone for a 100% SOLD OUT album release tour.” This included sellouts of Austin’s famed Stubb’s (2,200 capacity), two nights each at Brooklyn Steel (1,800), Denver’s Ogden (1,600) and Raleigh’s Ritz (1,425) along with stops at iconic venues like First Avenue in Minneapolis, Chicago’s Metro and the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C.

“It was life changing,” says Sam Melo, RKS’s firecracker of a lead singer whose emotive and powerful croon, fire-spitting raps, and unpredictable dervish dance moves make for singular performances. “Having a team dedicated to the shows going smoothly has allowed us to think more about doing our show in ways we hadn’t thought of before. It took this tour for us to learn that.”

The team Melo referenced is led by manager Gray Goley of Scary Monsters and his partner Geoff Harrison and also includes CAA’s Ben Schildkraut, Gregg Nadel, president of Elektra Records who personally signed the band in 2017, and tour manager Rachael McKinney. But this crackerjack team would not exist without a certain agency’s artist development program led in part by that company’s entry level employees. 

Hannah Edelman / Courtesy RKS – Circling Greatness
From left: Darrick “Bozzy” Keller, Ethan Goodpaster, Sam Melo and Charlie Holt of Rainbow Kitten Surprise.

“They first came up in assistant meetings at CAA,” explains Goley, who worked as an assistant to Matthew Morgan in the firm’s Nashville office in 2014 and 2015 (he previously worked as a studio runner 

for Ryan Tedder) where he redlined backend expenses and handled festival contracts. 

“I thought they were really interesting,” Goley says. “I saw the streaming numbers cranking up, but they had no formal team around them and nobody quite knew why.”

By the time Goley reached out to the Boone, N.C., quintet of Melo, Darrick “Bozzy” Keller (guitar, vocals), Ethan Goodpaster (lead guitar, vocals), Charlie Holt (bass, vocals) and Jess Haney (drums), they had already started making a name for themselves. This included two releases for which each song amassed more than 1 million streams with little promotion and sold-out dates at Boone’s Legends, a 1,000-cap venue, as well as Nashville’s Exit/In and New York’s Mercury Lounge.

In May 2015, Goley moved from CAA to 30 Tigers working for Harrison, who was the head of the artist management division (and with whom he would form Scary Monsters). From that perch Goley invited RKS to meet him in Nashville. 

“I had them on my back porch,” Goley said of their first meeting. “We just spoke about their goals; it wasn’t a hard pitch. I was just trying to figure out who they were and what they were after. Then they stopped through New York and met with Geoff. Two weeks later we were working together. The day after we had proposals from attorney Farrah Usmani of Marcus & Colvin and CAA.”

Much like Goley, CAA’s Schildkraut also came upon Rainbow Kitten via the agency’s assistants, but out of New York.

“I first saw them at Mercury Lounge late on a Sunday night in July [2016] – not the most ideal time to play,” explained Schildkraut. “I was struck by the audience singing back every word to every song. This early in their career it felt like an underplay.”

With early sellouts and strong streaming numbers, Goley and Schildkraut hatched a plan to route the band’s 2016 headlining tour.

“This was when Spotify began providing backend analytics to managers and artists,” explains Goley. “You could see where your listeners were and how many streamed their music over the course of a month. Our rule of thumb was that if the city was in their Top 25 Spotify markets we would go into a 500-cap room; and if it was outside, we’d play a 250- or 300-cap spot. We sold out every show.”

The late-2016 tour included stops at the 40 Watt in Athens, Ga., Bowery Ballroom and an added Knitting Factory show in New York, a night at D.C.’s Black Cat and, significantly, a night at Nashville’s Exit/In.

Elektra’s Nadel is the third leg of RKS’s team to discover the band through CAA. “I was at their office in Nashville in the summer of 2016 meeting with folks,” Nadel recalls. “I always ask about bands they’re developing or following on the road. And they said, ‘Well, there’s this band you should listen to and it’s Rainbow Kitten Surprise and they played a song or two and it sounded really cool.’”

That very night the band was playing the Exit/In. Nadel, like everyone who sees a RKS show, was knocked out. “I immediately connected with it,” said Nadel, whose other signings include the Zac Brown Band, O.A.R., and Sturgill Simpson among others. “It was sold out, everyone knew all the songs and was singing along – I wanted to find out more.” Last August he signed the band to Elektra.

This past April, the label released RKS’ major label debut How to: Friend, Love, Freefall produced by Grammy winner Jay Joyce. The label released three stunning videos, including a masterpiece and quasi mini-documentary for the song “Hide.”

Ask any Rainbow Kitten Surprise fan to describe the band and they’ll more than likely say “go see them live.” That’s in part because their sound is difficult at best to pin down. It’s edgy and unpredictable with Americana, rock and rap at the core of the amalgam but with herky-jerky rhythms, multi-octave vocals and soul-searching, hyper-articulate songs exploring weighty themes of love, life, religion and identity led by Melo’s soulful croon. 

Rachael McKinney / Courtesy RKS – Curtain Call:
Rainbow Kitten Surprise bring down the house at the Ogden Theatre in Denver.

One very likely reason the band’s muse is like no other is Melo, the band’s driving creative force who at age 26 has led a life like no other. Have you ever met anyone, for example, who was raised by Pentecostal missionaries and spent ages 8-15 in Dominican Republic and became a Reggaeton Christian rapper known as Father Flow? Or who upon returning to North Carolina switched over to playing classic rock and basketball before declaring himself a dance major at Appalachian State University? Or someone who cites Florence + The Machine, Ice Cube and Brandon Flowers as major influences?

“At some point growing up I wanted to be a preacher,” Melo said from this year’s Bonnaroo with bandmates Jess Haney and Charlie Holt. “I was planning to go to the seminary and everything. That was the kind of performance I knew about.”  Melo then proceeds to dissect a Pentecostal service, starting with a familiar theme, moving to something shocking before hitting upon a universal theme. It’s not all that far from how an RKS set might go.

That performative knowledge will soon be put to test on a festival run that begins in late July with mostly daytime, second stage slots at Forecastle, Lollapalooza, and Outside Lands among others.

Coming off the heels of this past spring’s jaunt in which the band “went from a Sprinter van to a 70-foot bus and a 26-foot box truck with a crew of about 15 in a calendar year” as Goley points out, the team is planning a full fall tour of ancillary East Coast markets from Montreal to Tampa. Then it’s off to Europe. Next year, the plan is to move up to larger, 2,500- to 3,000-cap rooms.

All of which raises the sparkly elephant in the room: What’s in a name? How did a band with such substantive musical ballast and chops come up with a name evoking Hello Kitty, unicorns, and poseur electro acts? The answer is ostensibly that a friend in the hospital on a morphine drip named the band.

“Rainbow Kitten Surprise is one of these names you see and you’re like  what the fuck, but you’re intrigued,” says Gorley, who compares the band’s name to more established acts like 

Foo Fighters or My Morning Jacket. 

“The joke that Ethan [lead guitarist] always makes is ‘Yeah, the surprise is we don’t suck.