SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

It's after 10 on a Saturday night, and most of the tables at Lake Worth's Bamboo Room are empty. Instead, a sea of undulating hips and swaying booties fills the aisles and the space in front of the stage. After all, this is a Spam Allstars show, and nobody sits through a Spam Allstars show.

Hell, it's near-impossible to keep still while spinning the Miami band's just-released CD, a fat and sunny slab of world funk titled Electrodomésticos. Featuring guests from Phish keyboardist Page McConnell to James Brown saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, the recording blends brass-fueled funk and jazz with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and electronic dance-floor pulses.

Onstage at the Bamboo Room, the Allstars ramp up the excitement with their riff-oriented attack and visual flair. The burly Tomas Diaz beats out a travel guide to the tropics as his busy sticks tattoo a brightly painted timbale. The tall, bearded Chad Bernstein, his long hair flowing from beneath a checked cloth cap, expertly works the slide of his trombone while the dreadlocked AJ Hill, crowned with his signature snap-brim hat, blows hard-edged funk from his tenor sax. And stage right, flutist Mercedes Abal, whose impossibly chiseled bare midsection swivels in time to the beat, trills and flutters atop the ever-flowing groove. Regular guitarist Adam Zimmon isn't in the house tonight, but he'll hook up with the band when it pulls into New Orleans for a gig at the legendary Tipitina's.

Behind it all, literally and figuratively, the lanky DJ Le Spam, a.k.a. Andrew Yeomanson, feverishly works a pair of samplers, his clean-shaven head bobbing to the rhythms as he unleashes the bass and drum loops upon which the Allstars dance. One ear nestles in a cushioned headphone so he can hear the mix coming from the soundboard, while the other remains naked so he can hear what everyone's doing onstage.

And make no mistake, it's Yeomanson's ears that have taken the Allstars from a beloved local band to a Latin Grammy-nominated sensation garnering international acclaim. DJ Le Spam's signature blend of deep funk with Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazzlike riffage has earned the Allstars rabid fans in South Florida and Atlanta, as well as in New York City, where the group has been playing a monthly residency at the club SOB's since 2001. The fact that the group has been able to attract world-class talent on its new CD also speaks volumes.

Considering its title and much of its musical seasoning -- not to mention the ethnic makeup of many of its members and contributors -- Electrodomésticos might be pegged as Latin music. Yeomanson prefers the term electronic descarga, which bows to the Latin jam sessions popularized by the likes of Charlie Palmieri and Israel "Caçhao" Lopez in the 1960s but gives the concept a modern spin.

"If you just stuck Spam Allstars under the Latin section of a CD store, I think it would be a little bit inaccurate," Yeomanson says. "But where else are you gonna stick it? Even with the dance thing -- then you're sitting next to a bunch of pure house and techno artists. So it's somewhere between electronica and jazz and Latin. You could put it in all three, and it would probably be OK. We have elements of all these different things going on, but it's not purely any of them."

And that's just fine with the capacity crowd that bumps its humps across the wooden floor of the Bamboo Room. They're some 70 miles north of their home base at the Little Havana club Hoy Como Ayer, but the Allstars are turning them away at the door.

"It's like that every time," says Bamboo Room proprietor Russell Hibbard, who has booked The Spam Allstars regularly over the past three years. "Every time. In Palm Beach County, that audience is just developing."

Spam in the making

Like the iconic meat product for which they are named, the Spam Allstars blend several elements into a seamless whole. Yeomanson, who grew up alternately in Tampa, Canada, Colombia and England, fell in love with South Florida's multicultural mix. After trying a bit of college at the University of Toronto and working as a bike courier in England, he headed for Miami at the invitation of a favorite aunt in 1991.

A lifelong record collector and budding guitarist, Yeomanson says he was somewhat adrift when he first came to South Florida. Putting music on hold, he waited tables at T.G.I. Friday's and the Fishbone Grill next to Tobacco Road, and worked at the music shop Flippers.

During this time, he met and played with Cuban percussion great Florencio Baró -- the conguero found him practicing his guitar in an alley outside Tobacco Road -- as well as the Haitian group Lavalas Band. He was also beginning to experiment with electronic sound collage, placing snippets of conversation, spoken-word performances or bits taken from TV, radio or records over sampled grooves. One of his early efforts made use of a Spam commercial from a Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson radio show. "The commercials were horrendous," he recalls, "so I took them and laid them over this little groove. It was the first thing I liked enough to play for anybody, and that's why I started calling it the Spam Allstars."

Yeomanson put Spam on the shelf in 1995, when Miami rocker Nil Lara invited him to join his band. However, three years of incessant touring took its toll on him, as well as on Lara, whose career came to something of a standstill. Still, the traveling did afford Yeomanson opportunities to feed his record-collecting mania.

"I'd be going to record stores everywhere we were going," he relates. "We had the trailer with the van, so I started throwing records in there. If we were leaving town at noon, I'd be up at 8, and I'd take the van out and drive all over whatever town we were in and hit all the thrift stores. So I was already moving in that direction. And then, once we had no more gigs with Nil happening, I said, 'Well, I might as well revive the Spam Allstars.' "

Back home in South Florida, Yeomanson's funky musical collective became a regular fixture at DJ Snowhite's spoken-word hip-hop night Faatland at Zanzibar and landed a regular night at Brandt's Break. But the Allstars' break came when the band started playing regular Thursdays -- dubbed Fuacata! -- at Hoy Como Ayer.

"That just exploded on us," Yeomanson explains. "The two or three years leading up to it, everything just came to a head, and things just really clicked there for us in a way that I never imagined could be possible. In '98-99, all I wanted was to be making a living off of music, not to be doing any bullshit side jobs."

When the international film crews started showing up, Yeomanson was amazed. But he was downright gobsmacked when the band's 2003 live recording at the venue earned a nod from the Latin Grammys. "I would never in a million years think we'd have a chance of winning that thing, because our album wasn't even distributed, so most of the people there that could vote didn't even know what the hell it was," he says. "It was just a name on paper."

Spam in the machine

Yeomanson notes the irony of being a die-hard musician whose role is mainly pushing buttons, as he humbly refers to it. Of course, his contributions to the band go way beyond that, as his loops and samples provide the foundation of The Spam Allstars sound.

"Some of the samples he pulls up -- 'Fuck! Where'd you get that?' " exclaims the Bamboo Room's Hibbard, a fellow record collector who says he detected a snippet of what sounded like a Bulgarian fiddle tune during a recent Spam performance. "It's very sophisticated; it doesn't seem like it at first, but that's what makes it elegant. He's not using just a simple drum-machine loop but a variety of sources. … There are several acts that could be considered as using a descarga approach down here, but they're the best. What sets them apart is the sophistication in the grooves that's not readily apparent to the listener."

Alternating between a pair of samplers, Yeomanson cues drum loops and bass lines, which he can mute or modify, delay or speed up. He's acutely aware of pacing, and he may jack up a set that starts at 98 beats per minute to finish at 103 bpm. Ultimately, he'd like to pick up the guitar again, maybe even realize his dream of playing bass with the band.

"I'm the guy who was the guitar player and purist who couldn't stand drum machines and hated seeing that shit for years and would talk crap to anyone," he notes. "When I'm playing [for audiences including] drummers and bass players, I feel like, 'That guy thinks we suck.' So I always strive to keep the shit feeling live and feeling like it's a performance and you're not there listening to some people dance to a bunch of tracks."

That conflict, Yeomanson says, provided the concept for the band's 2004 recording, Spam Allstars Contra los Robóticos Mutantes (Spam Allstars vs. the Mutant Robots) and carries over into Electrodomésticos. The tracks flow organically, with live instrumentation from the Allstars and their guests, most of whom stopped by Yeomanson's North Miami home studio to record their individual parts.

In fact, DJ Le Spam handed out assignments to all his players, asking them to come up with arrangements for the songs on Electrodomésticos, most of which the band had been playing for some time. Yeomanson treasures spontaneity and says he often springs new tunes on his bandmates during gigs.

Even with all the momentum The Spam Allstars have right now, Yeomanson just doesn't know how to coast. He continues to tour like a demon, packing his bandmates, equipment and records into a huge, white van for shows from Key West to Gainesville and flying to gigs in New York, Vermont and later this summer, Santa Monica, Calif.

"I honestly never get a break, swear to God," he says. "Even when I am taking a day off and doing nothing, I feel guilty about it. I just feel lucky to be doing what we're doing, and I have this tremendous fear of not being able to pay my mortgage one month, so I just don't stop. You'll see me selling shit on eBay if it comes to that."

The Spam Allstars will perform 9 tonight (Wednesday) at City Limits, 19 N.E. Third Avenue, in Delray Beach. Admission is $10. Call 561/279-8222 or visit Citylimitsdelray.com. The group will also play a 21-and-older show 10 p.m. Thursday at Hoy Como Ayer, 2212 S.W. Eighth St., in Miami. Admission is $7. Call 305/541-2631 or visit Hoycomoayer.net.