By Dylan Mason
Recently, I had a very wonderful and very lucky opportunity to sit down with Mr. Russell “Rusty” Redenbacher to talk about a number of different topics, including his childhood, musical inspirations, Birdmen of Alcatraz, Mudkids, his solo work, and his upcoming (now active) stream of work known as “Rusty Redenbacher is Nasty Slim,” a mixture of house music and hip hop. It was a great honor to sit and interview Rusty, and the following is what I learned about this true legend of the Indianapolis and regional music scene.
Childhood, Teenage Years, and Musical Inspiration
Rusty Redenbacher was born in 1970 in Gary, Indiana, but he and his mother moved to Indianapolis when he was three years old. He was raised on an enormous mixture of soul and rock. He stated that “they were listening to all of the popular stuff of the day, the Jackson 5, James Brown, Led Zeppelin, The Doors — you know what I’m saying?” But while he was being shown all these pieces of music history, he was also getting an education in jazz from someone Rusty said was extremely important to him, his uncle, Tim. His uncle Tim was introducing him to several different jazz records at the age of only five years old. Rusty specifically mentioned Miles Davis as one of the notable musicians that he listened to with his uncle. While Rusty wasn’t being introduced to specifically chosen music, he was listening to the radio. WTLC and Q95 were the big soul and rock stations at the time, and so he kept a radio around him at all times, sleeping with a radio under his pillow every night.
Getting into Rusty’s teenage years, rap and hip hop music were beginning to take off. Rusty kept listening to the radio and getting educated about hip hop and rap through the radio. He was listening to The Fat Boys, the first Run DMC albums, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and License to Ill, and Public Enemy. He was getting introduced to the early years of rap with gangster rap, conscious hip hop, etc. He went to a record store called Rockin’ Billy’s to pick up a new rap album because at the time, they were a prominent carrier of hip hop and rap albums. But there was one album in particular that he said was the most influential hip-hop album of his life. I asked the question, “What was the first hip-hop record that made you go, ‘I wanna do this?” Rusty’s answer was LL Cool J’s I Can’t Live Without My Radio. He told the story of how he heard LL Cool J on the public access channel, heard the drum sound in the beat, and loved it. He eventually started writing poems and started writing lyrics to hip hop songs, and that leads to him joining his first band.
Birdmen Of Alcatraz
Birdmen of Alcatraz was a band that really got their start in the late 80s but took a stylistic turn in the 1990’s. Rusty Redenbacher joined the group in the early nineties. Before he joined the group, it was essentially a heavy rock group, but when Rusty came along, it essentially turned into something akin to Nu metal. A mixture of rap and metal came along, and they were seemingly doing what Rage Against The Machine would do just months after Birdmen’s biggest and most accessible album, Focus. The band released a total of two albums with Rusty Redenbacher as one of their vocalists.
However, the group didn’t last extremely long. They were on a label that was far smaller than the other ones, like Warner Brothers, Columbia, Atlantic, Epic, etc. Birdmen had an outstanding sound, but their work only really made it to the surrounding areas, staying mostly in the underground. They reached a level of regional success, with headlining stops at The Vogue and other venues, but never skyrocketed like Rage Against The Machine did. They were around for around nine years in total. The band went through a creative struggle and went through a lot of personal issues. Rusty described drummer Matt Van Kersen as the heart of the band, and ultimately, when Matt went on to play in other groups and pursue different projects, Rusty reflects, essentially, the flame that Birdmen of Alcatraz had gone out.
But there was one Birdmen show that would lead to Rusty’s next project in his music career. Birdmen once played a show in Bloomington, in a place that’s currently The Jazz Kitchen, but used to be a reggae club called Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro used to hold hip hop nights, where they’d seemingly just have open mics. At one of these hip hop nights, Rusty met Tyler Knapp. Knapp was sitting in the corner of the place with a case of tapes, and it turns out that Tyler Knapp was a producer.
Soon after they met, Rusty got back down to Bloomington. They met up at Tyler’s house at the time, and they cut four demos. These demos were taken to the same record label that Birdmen was on, and almost instantly, they had a little record label. Tyler and Rusty would be known as Mudkids.
Mudkids
Mudkids got directly into the studio after recording some demos. Soon after the first album, Rusty and Tyler moved in together to record their second album. During the recording of their third album, Tyler got married. Tyler produced the beats, and Rusty rapped over them. Rusty didn’t go into all of the lengthy details that he did with Birdmen, but did call Mudkids the project in which he takes the greatest pride, describing it as “the project most people remember.” Rusty described the group as influenced by De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest, and chose not to curse on their albums.
According to Spotify, only two Mudkids albums were ever recorded, and a single EP was released in 2009, but Rusty talked about how there were at least six albums that Mudkids recorded in total. The albums included 4TrackMind, Upward, Higher, Basementality, and Rusty recently began releasing demos for their unreleased We Are Dynamic and People Like Us album. There was a song that Mudkids did back in 2007 for the Super Bowl, when the Colts played against the Bears. This is where their biggest song would come from.
They ended up releasing this song, and it ended up getting enormously popular on MySpace. It went from having 2000 plays to 300,000 plays overnight. This put them on the front of the Indy Star. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC ended up talking about the song. They were in USA Today. It was just a huge overnight success story for them. After their final released EP, MKEP, they went on hiatus. Rusty stressed that the band never broke up, but rather just decided to go on hiatus. Rusty has continued to work on the band’s demos to get them released eventually, but when he’s not working on his Mudkids albums and demos, he’s working on his solo work.
Solo Work
His solo work, more or less, began with the assembling of a group called ATFU (All Together For Us, A Total Family Unit, And They’re Fucking Undefeated). It was a group of 7 people, essentially a co-op of MCs, and the members were Rusty, F.I.R.E., Dotta, Skywalker, Kinetic, Sunny, and Alpha. When it comes to his musical work, his first solo album is a collaborative effort with producer Mr. Kinetik. The project was called “The Professor and the Hustler.” Mr. Kinetik was a member of ATFU, and the album also features Dotta, another member of ATFU.
After finishing up on the album, Rusty moved on to his true solo work, which began with his album The Tinkerer. Rusty essentially produced the whole thing on GarageBand. He said that it took him eight months to a year to fully produce it. He learned GarageBand from scratch, and eventually mixed and created The Tinkerer. He discussed his album, which was followed by Lower, which was this more experimental hip hop record that was influenced by David Bowie’s Low, even down to the cover. He got more musical equipment and ended up releasing both The Tinkerer and Lower in the same year after putting non-stop work into Lower. Then he ended up doing a lot of feature work, singles, demos, and more albums before moving on to his current project.
“Rusty Redenbacher Is Nasty Slim”
In recent years, Rusty Redenbacher has switched from doing his predominantly hip-hop-influenced music to doing house music. And this house music that he’s doing is involved in his stretch of albums, singles, and ep’s in the enormous project that he simply calls “Rusty Redenbacher Is Nasty Slim.” He told me that he has an enormous amount of tracks from which to choose, some hip hop, some house. Essentially, Rusty explained, this is just going to be a non-stop release until he runs out of material, which may never happen. Rusty just sounds like he’s happy making the music that he’s doing right now.
I asked Rusty if his music would ever get political, and he said, “I’ve only written one rap song for this record. You think I’m not gonna address this stuff?” It’s a certain message that he sends here. He will get political in his future works when he decides to delve into hip hop and rap once again.
How to Find Rusty Redenbacher on streaming
If you’re looking to find Rusty’s material, you can find Focus by Birdmen of Alcatraz, Mudkids’ work, The Professor & The Hustler, The Tinkerer, and Lower on Spotify. You can find the rest of his work on Soundcloud and Bandcamp, as well as other smaller streaming services.
The link to my full audio interview with Rusty Redenbacher.