BUSH PENTHOUSE ARTICLE: Jan/98

"BUSH Whacking" by Bob Gulla.

Why can't the biggest British import since the Stones get any respect? Maybe they're too darn good-looking.

The kids packed into the Jones Beach Amphitheater are getting restless. Minutes and minutes pass. Squirmy anticipation escalates into piercing whistles and hollers, which in turn become audience-wide chants ("We want Bush!" "Bush! Bush! Bush!"). As the chants crescendo, the house lights at last go down, and a deafening roar of gratitude rises to the sky.

Seconds later a cloud of dry ice billows into the stage while the eyeball-rattling peals of teenage girls continue unabated. As the artificial cloud builds to a thick density, the four young musicians who are Bush - Nigel Pulsford, Robin Goodridge, Gavin Rossdale, and Dave Parsons - emerge, and the place explodes. Frat boys pump their fists, biker chicks climb onto the shoulders of willing studs, and first-time concert-goers - there are many in this underage crowd - whirl clean new T-shirts over their heads like young cowboys trying to rope a calf. It's unqualified mania, a screeching, rapturous throng eager for a night of loud, intestine-jarring rock'n'roll.

So who are these guys? Are they, as their label and legions of fans insist, a story of rags to riches, a Horatio Aler-with-guitars classic in the annals of rock'n'roll? For sure, this crew of once-downtrodden, dead-end London rockers has seen stratospheric success spring from less than zero in little more than four years. And the numbers are indeed compelling: 13 million albums sold, seven smash singles, five jam-packed U.S. tour

But there are those in the media and the music industry who tell a different tale. Instead of authentic rockers risen from near-failure to the platinum-plated pinnacle of rock, Bush, the skeptics say, are, like the Monkees before them, sheep in wolves' clothing, a corporate-generated pawn patterned after a mosaic of bands already proved popular. A band so carefully marketed to a precise demographic that Ira Robbins, author of the highly regarded "Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock" labels them as "commercially calculated as a gambling casino."

Like a casino, Bush has generated money. Lots of it. Enough for the band (and their friends) to live quite comfortably, thank you. But, basking in the worship of their devotees, the four Bushmen dismiss all this with an unrepentant shrug. "Twelve million fans can't be morons," says guitarist Pulsford. "We can't tell them how to feel or what to buy."

Nor does the skepticism bother drummer Robin Goodridge. "A photographer friend of ours said to me recently, 'You know, the kids are always right. It doesn't matter what anybody says or writes. The kids are always right.'"

Tonight on Long Island the kids aren't just right. They're ecstatic. As the band thuds into "A Tendency to Start Fires," singer Gavin Rossdale runs forward and reaches out ot a mass of clawing fans. They grab at his pants, his leg, his hand, like hungry boat people clutching at food. Rossdale remains calm and aloof, like a natural-born star. He radiates ethereality, like something in a Catholic girl's wet dream: a safe, sincere, profoundly sexy rock-star guy, with a smile that says he'd just as soon help you across the street as invite you home for a joint and a tumble. No doubt (bad pun) many of the screaming girls here tonight long for the latter.

One such in the third row stares intently at Rossdale from her seat, her hands on her cheeks, her mouth frozen in an "O" that suggests Edvard Munch's iconic "Scream." Her rapture is obsessive, as if she's hatching some sort of kidnapping plot. Her friend, a pretty peroxide blonde, launches herself over the seats to touch Rossdale's hand, but comes up short - and, distressed, pounds on a seat back in anger. From the opening chord it's clear that Rossdale, a onetime semi-pro English footballer and longtime house painter, is tonight's main attraction, the sexual heat at the center of Bush fever.

"Did you see it? It was like a sweet shoppe out there," says Rossdale with a smile after the show. He's happy to have had his choice of candy, but unwilling to indulge in the sugar buzz. "The temptations of the road don't really exist for me anymore. I've seen too much, been around too much," he says, propping his rubber platform shoes atop a coffee table. "One girl told me she'd give me head good enough to make me see God, but I told her I already had a decent relationship with the Man."

"Gavin realizes the more humorous aspects of the worship," says Goodridge, seated beside Rossdale on a white canvas couch. "We all do. It's better to realize how ridiculous it is, with the girls, the limousines, the chaos. Gavin, he doesn't let it get to 'im much."

Born October 30, 1967, in a posh North London district called Kilburn, Gavin Rossdale spent the first four years of his life speechless, choosing to communicate only through his older sister. The sullen product of a broken but well-to-do home, he lived his teen years with his physician father, expressing rebellion through shoplifting and soccer. After graduating the British equivalent of high school, he played semi-pro soccer as a midfielder. At the same time, he became a habitue of the London club scene, developing an appetite for marijuana and general bacchanalia. Before long, women and weed had replaced soccer as young Gavin's passion, and he found himself seeking a new career that would accommodate his enthusiasms. What better than rock 'n' roll?

In 1989, Rossdale formed his first band, Midnight, with his friend Sasha Puttnam, son of "Chariots of Fire" producer David Puttnam. But the band, inexperienced and incompetent, floundered. Following that, Rossdale fronted a convey of uninspired bands, but couldn't muster enough talent, vision, or focus to make them work. Burned out on London, he fled to L.A., where again Rossdale found himself wheel-spinning. "It was the lowest of the lows," he recalls. "I remember sleeping in my ex-girlfriend's apartment while she was sleeping with her new boyfriend." Beaten, he retreated to London, to relative comfort, the loyalty of his Hungarian sheepdog, Winston, and his only steady gig: house painting.

Around the same time, guitarist Nigel Pulsford was spinning his own musical wheels in an ambitious but luckless band called King's Blank. Meeting in a pub one night, Rossdale and Pulsford discovered that they shared enough musical common ground to have one more go. They recruited bass player Dave Parsons from the moderately successful pop band Transvision Vamp, and found drummer Goodridge plugging away with the club act The Beautiful People - both working class musicians stuck in dead-end London gigs. The four coined themselves Bush after the Shepherd's Bush enclave of London, and began writing songs. The resulting studio sessions produced an album's worth of crashing hard-rock demos, closer in style to the sound of American grunge rock than the fey chime of the prevalent Britpop. In late 1992 they began shopping the demo to British labels, hoping some forward-looking record executive could relate to it.

For more than a year, the band peddled its sound to no avail. Enter an American music executive named Rob Kahane, a whip-smart visionary with the newly formed Los Angeles-based Trauma Records. After learning about this "great unsigned band" from somebody at England's BBC Radio 1, Kahane hopped a plane to London. When he arrived at the studio he signed the band on the spot. "Between that look and those songs," he says, "it would have taken a lot for me to fuck that up."

Well connected with MTV and radio outlets, Kahane had already introduced a number of successful British acts to the U.S., including such image-rich performers as George Michael, Robert Palmer, and Madness. In mere milliseconds on that first visit, Kahane realized that Rossdale's teen-idol looks and the band's American sound would be commercial winners. "That style didn't pop in England but we knew it would in the States," Kahane says. In the spring of 1994 he and his partner, Paul Palmer, began making plans.

Kahane and Plamer remixed a few tracks, then took the first single, "Everything Zen," to the heart of grunge country, Seattle, home of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. Kahane went straight to influential alternative radio station KNDD ("The End") in the Emerald City. "I said, 'Don't hold it against them because they are British - this could be the best thing you'll hear all year.'"

Propelled by Kahane's arm-twisting, Palmer's remixes, and Bush's raw edged material, "Everything Zen" cracked the station's coveted playlist in September 1994. The response was overwhelming, and the buzz on Bush began in earnest.

In November 1994 Bush released its debut album, "Sixteen Stone". Produced by the veteran team of Alan Winstanley and Clive Langer, who had worked with such stars as Elvis Costello, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie, it went on to sell more than nine million copies on the strength of five hit singles. Because the first of these, "Everthing Zen" rollicked in the style of the original grunge acts, the critical line on the band was that they were "teabag-grunge" - a bunch of British hackers who stole the blueprints of a distinctly American musical style popularized by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, tweaked it with some cryptic Britspeak, and sold it was their own.

Despite the critics, Bush songs scaled the national charts faster than the high-speed elevators at the World Trade Center. Rossdale's gruff ennui and Pulsford's adrenaline-charged riffs struck a chord with young audiences. Still, the sniping continued. The band's style card had already been played by Nirvana, the snipers insisted, and the entire Bush phenomenon was little more than alternative-rock correctness, or worse, a cheap ploy to capitalize on Kurt Cobain's then-recent death.

When Rolling Stone featured a bare-chested Rossdale, sans band, on its April 1996 cover, it stoked suspicions that Bush was merely a well-marketed vehicle for Rossdale's good looks (The issue became Rolling Stone's biggest seller of 1996) Later that same year the band was awarded MTV's Viewer's Choice trophy. But instead of emerging as underdog successes from overseas, the most successful English band in America since the Rolling Stones became the band folks loved to hate.

For Rossdale the skepticism has made his long-awaited success bitter-sweet. "I'm not walking into a bank, sticking a shotgun in people's face, raping them, and taking all their money. I'm making music, cutting records. But you'd think from the venom unleashed at us we had done something terrible."

In November 1996 Bush released its second album, Razorblade Suitecase. Produced at Abbey Road studios by Chicago noise-rock aesthete Steve Albini, the decidedly uncommercial producer of Nirvana's "In Utero" and the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa" it was an aggressive statement intended to distance Bush from the grunge scene.

Regardless of its dark, demanding pathos, the album notched triple platinum on the strength of two more hit singles, and attracted millions of new fans. Either their young fans are relating to the band's bleakness or they aren't listening closely.

Which raises a question: What will Bush fans and detractors make of the band's latest effort, "Deconstructed"? Featuring abstract eletronic remixes by D.J. specialists Goldie and Tricky of his tracks like "Everything Zen", "Swallowed," and "Mouth," it may establish Bush's creative credibility - or drive away the loyalists. Meanwhile the Bush juggernaut rolls on.

Rossdale's newfound star power has landed him in some tasty company. At one point it was rumored that he and the widow Cobain, Courtney Love, were a hot item. Lately he has found bliss with another high-profile blonde, Gwen Stefani, lead singer and taut midriff of L.A.'s No Doubt, whom Rossdale met while the two bands were on tour together.

"It's really good," he says of this romance. "We spend as much time together as we can, though life on the road can be quite barren. It's my first stab at a relationship in a while, and I still do things that might upset her. You know, I'd speak to her on the phone and say, 'Hi! I've been up all night for three straight nights, but I'm having a great time!" He pounds himself on the forehead. "I keep having to remind myself, Fuck! I have a girlfriend! They don't like to hear shit like that!"

Although he's the object of worship by millions, Rossdale exhibits remarkably little cockiness. "Look how much I've been beaten up over the years," he says. "I'm not allowed to have an ego. I just know where I came from, and that makes all the difference. The odds that we wouldn't do what we've done are so massive that in some ways all of this is a picnic."

Albeit a very busy picnic. The pace is grueling - five major worldwide tours in two and a half years, 100 shows in the first half of 1997 alone. But the foursome have grown more adept at following their own instincts, a sign of confidence and maturity. "Where I couldn't see the woods for the trees before," says Goodridge, "now I know my way around the woods pretty good."

Dave Parsons, the band's quiet man, sits cross-legged on a windy Jones Beach pier, tossing crusts of bread to some wading ducks. "Has money changed anything?" he asks rhetorically."In some ways I feel a sense of guilt, because every dollar I've got is that many times more than what my friends have." Parsons spent years struggling to make ends meet as a musician in London, a slacker bloke eager to ditch his working-class life. Now he's planning to fly a group of his friends to the South of France, where he's rented a villa to spend a rare vacation. When he returns he'll settle into his newly purchased London flat. "When you are a penniless musician trying to get your act together, you have a massive group of friends trying to pull one another through. But when things work out for you, people sort of vacate; then you learn who your core friends are."

"The rewards are everywhere," says Goodridge, joining Parsons. "They've touched all parts of our lives. They've enabled us to buy houses and cars - ones that we actually like - go on holiday, do things we previously had no access to."

With his share of the band's take, Rossdale bought a house in central London, but not much else. He still dresses like the American teen he apparently so wanted to be. "I don't have 75 pairs of shoes," he says, pointing to his worn-out soles. "I'm not the Imelda Marcos of alternative rock. Money was never an incentive for me. I had to pay rent I had to eat, and I had to buy recreation. The three essential elements. I haven't changed intrinsically."

In the wake of Bush's huge success, Kahane's relationship with the band, Rossdale in particular, has changed. "In many ways our relationship has gotten better," Kahane says. "[Gavin's] life financially and emotionally has gotten stronger. But at the same time success changes an artist's perception dramatically from where it began. If he and I have had any differences, they've been over me trying to maintain what I believe is the true reality for Bush versus all those people surrounding Gavin telling him how great he is."

"The only thing that's changed in my life," Rossdale insists,"is that people aks ME for money rather than the other way around." Then he adds with a laugh, "That's the irony. Everyone knew I never had any money for most of my life. But I'm not a lug. I give to those who would give to me."

Several days later, at a tour stop in Boston, Rossdale and Goodridge sit begrudgingly backstage. Their mothers are in town- Goodridge's mother, who lives almost three hours outside London, has never seen the band live - and the boys are less than happy about having to spend their valuable time with a journalist. But a question about the nature of Bush, especially in light of their mothers being around, begs asking.

"Are we rock 'n' roll? Of course we're rock 'n' roll," Goodridge snorts. "We're not Animal House or anything," adds Rossdale sarcasticlaly. "We're more like the 'houseless animals' and we come alive as soon as the journalists f*ck off. Then all hell breaks loose." "Seriously, though," Goodridge says, "the moments of madness have to be tempered with moments of more sensible behavior. We exist to play music, not stand in bars until ten in the morning with beautiful girls because we haven't got the sense to go home at seven."

Rossdale follows up in a cheeky tone. "Right. Well, last week we came off-stage, got into a limo, got onto a plane to a party in the Hamptons, went to a club in the Hamptons, got onto a plane to Saratoga, went to bed at 7:30 in the morning, got up and did a show. It's fucking boring. Really, really dull. I don't know how we got through it." Sensing his sarcasm has been lost on his target, Rossdale gets up and heads off to look for his mum.

Later as show opener Jesus Lizard does its stuff, Rossdale bops around back-stage, a state-of-the-art video camera pressed to one eye. He runs up into the eaves of the stage and films the Lizards, focusing on charismatic provocateur/front man David Yow, a man famous for exposing a "hairy tangerine" through his zipper to an audience of thousands. "I love these guys!" Rossdale exclaims. "I'm beyond stoked. This is better than being on tour with f*cking Elvis!"

As he cavorts backstage, he's thoroughly engaged, ecstatic, as if he'd just as soon scrap the whole Bush thing and become a fan back in Kilburn again, with a skateboard under his arm and a beat box at his side. Then again, it could be giddy energy. Bush has been on the road for nearly six months without much of a break, and this is, after all, the second-to-last day of the tour before they treat themselves to a five-week holiday, away from the acid burn of skepticism, away from the burgeoning backlash.

"I think we need to go away now," says Pulsford, looking fatigued before their set. "It's time for a break, time to give people a break from Bush. WE need a break from Bush. You need a break from Bush."
Any regrets?
"Not really," he says, smiling, pulling on a cigarette. "Sometimes you just need to glean something from somewhere else to remember why you are where you are in the first place."
END