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Meet Justus Lacewell of Rastasaurus in Clayton

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Justus Lacewell.

Justus, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’m going to go way back here. I was born on a farm deep in the southern Missouri Ozarks outside of a tiny town called Eminence. My parents were hippies of the “off the grid” variety and I was raised accordingly with no TV, central heating or microwave. That type of thing.

I spent a lot of time in the woods by myself with my dogs and my cats and was always pining to get away to where I perceived normal to be. I never really fit in at school because I wasn’t overtly religious and religion was everything back there with it being the bible belt and all. I mean me saying I believed in evolution was like hanging a sign on me that said, “Soul Needing Saved ASAP! Stay Away From This Kid.” I also wasn’t related to anyone because my parents weren’t from there and had moved into an isolated area with its own very tightly woven social fabric. All of these experiences made me very comfortable with being alone and just hanging out with myself. If you can ever reach a state where you truly don’t care about what the people around you think it can be very liberating, especially as an artist.

The music came into my life from the beginning. When you don’t have a TV you read tons of books and you listen to a lot of music. My parents had a copy of Tommy by The Who that I just positively wore out. I was also the youngest of three kids and would listen to whatever my older brother and sister were. My brother was in high school in the early 90’s so naturally if I was riding around with him, I was listening to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. As for my sister, she gave me a copy of the Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt and my first Sublime CD. Looking back those two CDs have to be where I got started with the reggae feels.

Every once in a great while my parents would get together with some of their hippie friends from other parts of the state and these gatherings were pure magic. Out came the guitars and songbooks and there would be these epic jams and sing-a-longs to Bob Dylan, John Prine and all things “folk”. Everyone was encouraged to participate, even the kids. The instrumental players would be takings solos regardless of skill level and everyone received compliments and encouragement. In the back of the room would be the ones that couldn’t play and they would all be huddled around a lyric sheet and singing harmonies. In retrospect these events made expressing myself musically very “safe” emotionally and laid the groundwork for why I enjoy doing what I do and my demeanor on stage. It wasn’t until I got out in the world that I realized everyone else didn’t have this attitude toward expressing themselves artistically in public. This experience was very formative for me and for this, I am eternally grateful.

Fast forward to 2005. I graduated high school and was finally free to advance into what I saw as “the normal world.” I went to college at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) in Columbia, MO and after puttering around in art school for a year, I ended up getting a plant science degree and fell completely in love with science. During my years at the university my father ended up getting sick and passing away. No other way to put it… this sucked big time and there was no hiding from the new reality. Somewhere in the complex emotions that surrounded that event’s impact on my 21-year-old life, I spontaneously started writing music. I had played tenor sax in high school band and had been playing guitar and singing other people’s songs since I was 13 or so, but I had never been able to write songs. I had tried, but it was like a mental block or something. Suddenly that was gone and I was writing songs and it was like a bolt of lightning had hit me. Now there was a new possibility, a new dream. I wanted to be a musician!

I started playing open mic nights and people were super encouraging. They kept saying things like, “Man, your songs are great you need a band!” After a few of these comments, I got a group together called The Getdown Underground and we started to play shows in the region and it was so much fun. I had never experienced anything like it. I knew then and there that I wanted to be a musician for life and that to take this thing all the way, I needed to find a bigger market.

I graduated in 2010 and decided to move to Denver because it had good jobs for plant science grads and it was a happening music scene. I figured that since cannabis was already legal here at a civic level a reggae band would do well and so I saved up as much as I could, packed up my stuff into my little Mazda Protege (it was mostly my guitars that fit) and made a move. I tried to join a band when I moved out here but realized that I didn’t do well as just a member of another band… I needed my own band and to do my own thing. It was all very congenial with this realization. They basically told me the same thing I was thinking inwardly. Still, it was hard for me to take that leap and say, “Man, you need to do your own thing you got what it takes.” It seemed somehow arrogant in a way that I usually detest when I see it in others. I have found in life that you have to take risks and you have to act confidently once you make a decision. There are things that you don’t particularly want to do, but you know you need to do because they are the right thing to do. Moving to Denver and starting Rastasaurus were those types of decisions.

It was hard mentally at first. I had no friends out here, who will come to my shows? Where will I find other players of the right age and ability? Not only that, I had only been playing in bands for a year or so, I was greener than a twig. It was like that Leon Russell song, “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

So I got on Craigslist and made an ad looking for a bass player and in no time at all ended up finding the “twins”: Eric and Mark Ciccone. This was a serious stroke of luck for me. They had moved out to Denver for the same reasons I had and we not only had the same love for The Grateful Dead and the festival scene in general but we all had the same birthday, June 20. This was like a sign from the universe like the monolith in “A Space Odyssey.” Not only that but we CLICKED musically. There are folks that you click with and folks that you don’t and with music it is even rarer that you find people that you can play with effortlessly and that you share the same style of listening with. We just gelled in general and on top of that, these kids were GOOD. I was like, “Man, I can do this!” I then found our first drummer at a dispensary where he was my budtender and boom we had a band going. We decided to call it Rastasaurus because we all were obsessed with dinosaurs as kids and we had a reggae feel with extended jams and let’s face it, we needed a name that was still available on Myspace. Back then that was the litmus test for a band name. Is it open on Myspace or is there another band called that?

After that we started rehearsing and landed a show at a celebrity costume themed house party that we had booked through the twin’s Phish Tour friends they had met at a bar called, “Pete’s Monkey Bar” (The Monkey Bar and the adult bookstore next door later closed and those spaces merged into what is now the 1up Colfax.) The people in that living room that night became our first fans and they came out to our first bar gigs en masse. This helped us, in turn, get more and more shows because of our perceived fan base and we began climbing the ranks in the Denver scene. After a couple of years of progressing into weekend shows and direct support slots around town we met our manager and good friend, Dave Halchak, who has aided us in advancing our name and music, becoming more professional, garnering bigger shows and getting us playing outside of the state. Finally, after years of member changes in the drum position, I convinced the drummer from my college band, Sam Niehaus, to move out to Denver and Sammy’s been behind the kit for three years now.

Has it been a smooth road?
It never is completely smooth in my opinion. Bands are very much like a complex romantic relationship. I always call it “a five-person marriage.”

People come and go for different reasons. Either they don’t want to put the time into it because it affects their personal life or they decide to have a kid and their priorities change accordingly. Sometimes people just don’t get along and it festers for a while and it’s bad for the social fabric of the group. Then there are situations where it is simply about the money and there wasn’t a lot of it at the moment and they didn’t want to “pay it forward” in the hopes that we would someday make it. You can’t squeeze water out of a rock. You just have to do what you do and do it good and hope that it pays off someday.

I would say the hardest part has been getting real with the fact that some things are business decisions. I mean no matter what kind of disagreements you have with people in the band, you are all family and you love them as you would your brothers and sisters. That makes it even harder to say, “Man I’m sorry but we have to go on without you this just isn’t working.” That is such a hard conversation to have with someone you have been in the trenches with. It is very weird to distance yourself in this way and make these very sterile decisions.

Can you give our readers some background on your music?
We play all original music that we call, “American Reggae.” It is not roots reggae music by any means. We are basically a rock band with jam leanings that plays reggae. With that being said we don’t sing with fake accents or try to be clones of the top songs on the reggae charts. We don’t care about that. We are here to throw the rowdiest party possible and play the best music we can for no other reason besides it’s the absolute best music we are capable of playing at the moment. That’s what makes us tick.

One thing I enjoy about our style is that we can open for both the reggae groups and the jam groups when they come through town. We will just write a more reggae set or a more jammy one and can straddle those two markets. I feel like that is a fairly unique position to be in and something I am very proud of this band for. There is a lot of Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin going around in the van when we decide to take a break from listening to Harry Potter audiobooks.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
It is difficult to say. As I write this the COVID-19 crisis is in full swing. If I didn’t still have an essential day job, I don’t know what I would do to eat right now. This pandemic has laid bare the issues with having a musical economy based solely on live performances. The record industry, as it was during the golden age of rock and roll died with the internet age. So if the only way to make money for most groups is to tour and mankind has the capacity to spread disease worldwide so quickly and that in turn makes touring impossible then what is the solution? I believe firmly that this will not be the last pandemic or even the second to last. Our technology and ability to travel has made us a truly global society and so viruses and diseases are going to be able to spread at unprecedented intervals and rates.

I think we are just going to have to see how this shakes out. This is the first time since the live music scene started taking off in the 1920’s and 1930’s that we have been met with a situation where we literally CANNOT perform live. We are all going to have to adapt or fade away.

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  Image Credit:
Jarred Media
J.Mimna Photography
T.Ganner Photography
Jillwave
Frank Roddy Photography
Memorandum Media

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