| WAITING-ROOM HEROES from Request Magazine by Hans Eisenbeis |
I am 30 minutes late for my first meeting with the Verve Pipe in downtown Minneapolis. The band members are patiently waiting in a sunny cobblestone courtyard, arranged around two plastic tables. Full glasses of beer, water, and cocktails, menus, and an empty seat await me - right next to Brian Vander Ark. He's the six-and-a-half-foot-tall singer wearing leather pants. He's sitting, I'm standing. Still, I'm looking up at him. There is a bleached-blonde spiky head of hair up there. The rest of the band members are hanging around comfortably. They obviously know how to wait. Introductions are made. Reaching to shake hands with Brian, his brother, bassist Brad Vander Ark, drummer Donny Brown, keyboardist Doug Corella, and guitarist A.J. Dunning, I manage to knock over four full pints. By my reckoning, that's a half a gallon of spilled beer. Rock stars jump back, seats tip over, leathers are brushed off. Lame apologies are issued, and we settle into our seats looking at each other. "What took you so long?" seems to be the question on everyone's mind. So what took the Verve Pipe so long to hand over its new self-titled album - and who cares? It's been three years since Villains, the group's major-label debut. Mostly that's remembered as the album that spawned the saccharine ballad "The Freshmen," a tuneful apology for fratboy callousness leading to untimely death. You've hear it dozens of times without even trying: "I can't be held responsible/She was touching her face...For the life of me/I cannot remember/What made us think that we were wise/And we'd never compromise." Although "The Freshmen" was written nearly a decade ago, and actually appeared on the Verve Pipe's first indie album way back in 1992, (it was re-recorded for Villains and subsequently removed from repressings of that first album, I've Suffered a Head Injury), it has had a damnable, timeless presence among mopey teenagers, hopeless romantics, and modern-rock radio stations. Brian says someone actually had the bad taste last spring to suggest they rewrite "The Freshmen" for the Columbine High tragedy as a kind of alt-rock reiteration of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind '97." Although the Verve Pipe is collectively a huge fan of John's - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is cited as a perpetual tour-bus soundtrack - Brian cringes and shudders just thinking about it. Two words: "Exploitaion. Ugh." So is it annoying to have to play "The Freshmen" now, trotting it out just to keep the teeny-mopers happy? "You have to give people a little bit. Women especially want that," Brian says charitably. "That song is sensitve, and it means something to them, and it is romantic. And I want to be romantic. But it's the amount you give it, and then you have to hold back." He appreciates the doors the song has opened and doesn't want to alienate fans who've embraced it. Still, there is life after "The Freshmen." Anyone who knows there's more to the Verve Pipe than this tawdary little melodrama might have been curious: What was the big delay in a follow-up? For starters, the band toured in support of Villains for almost two straight years. By the fall of '97, the Verve Pipe got off the road and began preproduction work on a new album, but a series of misfires and snafus snowballed. Everything that could conceivably go wrong, went wrong," Brown says. Amps blew, replacements were hard to come by, studios wouldn't cooperate. Most important, the band couldn't find the right producer. After several false starts, the quintet finally met Michael Beinhorn in spring 1998. Beinhorn is the eccentric genius behind several memorable albums by Soundgarden, Hole, and Soul Asylum. He was interested, but first had to finish Marily Manson's Mechanical Animals. In the meantime, the Verve Pipe found an inspiring side project and realized one of Brian's lifelong dreams by writing "Blow You Away" with XTC's Andy Partridge. The song landed on The Avengers soundtrack. The tape started rolling again in July 1998. "Between acts of God, personal problems, and health issues, it was really laughable," Dunning says. Twelve months later, The Verve Pipe finally came into the world. Maybe the single biggest relief in finishing this album is that the Verve Pipe has a reason to tour again, something the band members are really good at and enjoy. They've spent the better part of their career on the road, building most of their fan base and many of their friendships on tour. Here in Minneapolis, for example, they're meeting up with Semisonic, a band they go way back with, having swapped warm-up gigs between the Twin Cities and their hometown of East Lansing, Michigan, in the days long before "The Freshmen" and "Closing Time" became blockbuster hits. In the interest of getting these two pop-rock bands together in a crummy crosstown bar (and to redeem myself for the spilled-beer incident), I drive the Verve Pipe to the meeting in my rusty Volkswagen van. Brad Vander Ark is quiet, scrawny, and cute in the backseat. He's your classic skinny-as-a-rail punk rocker, permanently bowed by the weight of his bass guitar. He generally does not speak to anyone. Brown, by popular edict the "grandma" of the band, is the Verve Pipe's official historian, torchbearer, and facilitator. He's riding shotgun. In contrast to Brad, Brown is the kind of guy who eagerly turns questions back on his interviewer, and seems genuinely interested in knowing, "What's your favorite record lately? What's your wife's name? Have you ever played in a band?" Brian, stretching his legs by the van's side door, is the plainspoken, mildly geekish frontman everyone already knows from "The Freshmen." Dunning is every inch the professional lead guitarist. He's neither proud nor embarrrassed about how he smashed an Epiphone hollow body in frustration on the first night of this tour, winning the applause of his bandmates who have had a lifetime of equipment problems in the past year. Corella, the only one who actually finished college in this erstwhile college-rock band, is a chronically helpful, patient, and fatigued multi-instrumentalist. He wisely hitched a ride with a friend. The guys are all mild-mannered, mellow, and looking forward to seeing Semisonic - except for their drunk tour manager, a boisterous man sitting on the floor of the van who keeps urging me to "get her up on two wheels" and "find a titty bar." He's obviously not from the Midwest; the rest of us are paralyzed with embarrassment for him. See, the Vander Ark boys were raised in a strict Christian Reform household in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Indeed, most of the band members were brought up in conservative Dutch country in outstate Michigan.) There's still friction at home, which isn't surprising, considering the wayward sons and their rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Parents who wouldn't let their kids swim on Sundays aren't likely to cotton to the usual lifestyle choices of pop-rock musicians. While Brian was in the studio recording last year, his voice mail informed callers that he was in hell, so please leave a message. Dad called and left a message strongly disapproving of Brian's use of the four-letter word. "You know, I really thought we brought you up better than that," Dad said. "And he was serious!" Brian says. "Here I am, 34 years old," he laughs, "and I can't say the word 'hell!'" Even though mom and dad would rather see their boys in a Christian band, they may have made their peace. Brian says they come to hometown gigs and show a lot of pride and support - in their own quiet way. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Vander Ark: Jesus loves your boys. They are modest and kind. They use their powers for good. Although they curse, drink liquor, and smoke cigarettes, it is not excessive. They entertain amorous young ladies, but mostly in a chaste, PG-13 kind of way. All things in moderation! You can rest easy; their friends in the band are fine young men, too. Their only real vice - and it's pretty forgivable, really - is lying. They tell me there are fights, they say they're egotistical. They claim to be hungry for the vanities of celebrity, the various unspeakable degradations of rock stardom. This is a pack of lies. They are nice to a fault, grateful for small favors, polite, easygoing, smart, and articulate. You did good. OK, maybe not that good. After meeting up with Semisonic and drinking a lot of beer, the members of the Verve Pipe and their Minneapolis buddies indulge in that most decadent of current vices: '80s cover bands. They eagerly and appreciatively listen to a local all-star group play such moldy oldies as "Wildfire" and "What Are Words For." On the way back to the hotel, the men of Verve Pipe bitterly complain about the early local bar time - one a.m.- immortalized in Semisonic's "Closing Time," the poignancy of which is fully appreciated only now. Waving good night, the band members head to bed, except for Brian. Too hopped up to sleep, he spends the rest of the night plying the woman behind the hotel's front desk until she lets him back there. He makes random wake-up calls and monitors who's watching lame hotel porno videos. A certain member of the band tries to place an order for Back Door Ladies, and Brian makes great sport of it. It may seem like bizarre, back-door reasoning to compare the Verve Pipe to Radiohead, but it makes some kind of cosmic sense. The Verve Pipe guys have long been inspired by their Cambridge, England, colleagues, not only because they have a soft spot for all that is British and cool, like XTC, Elvis Costello, Elton John, and the Beatles, but because they had a specific affinity for Radiohead's 1995 album, The Bends. They saw sonic similarities, a parallel universe. Brian says Radiohead is "the most important band today." Describing the Verve Pipe's primary pop influences, Brown says, "If you talk about great songwriting, you're gonna talk about the Beatle. If you're gonna talk about somebody who made a significant musical impact in the last couple years, you gotta mention Radiohead. We're bastard children of that." In fact, years ago the Verve Pipe happened to see Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke on the street in New York City. Brown ran up and introduced himself to the unimpressed head radio, saying, "We love your stuff, and we're ripping off your ideas!" Yorke coolly responded, "That's OK. We've got lots of new ones." That, of course, turned out to be true. But it's not like the Verve Pipe has been slacking in the meantime. The Verve Pipe's career may mimic Radiohead's, too. Here's the logic: Like "Creep," "The Freshmen" was a huge breakthrough hit. Both are ephemeral and unrepresentative of the band's depth and artistic potential. Just so, that success allowed each band to garner the confidence of its label. Having demonstrated their "selling potential in the industry's eyes," as Brown puts it, they were given the freedom to create albums on their own artistic terms. Call it the "one-hit wonderful" phenomenon, in which a band leverages a throwaway pop hit into an opportunity to break real artistic ground. The comparison with Radiohead extends to the music, too, though not in an obvious way. OK Computer and The Verve Pipe are similar in tone and texture, but the latter is fundamentally American. Whereas Radiohead's melodies degrade into beautiful chaos, the Verve Pipe's are held to a strict pop structure. Whereas Radiohead sings of alienation, the Verve Pipe sings of - what else? - love. Not really high-minded, but that's about as conceptural as American albums ever get, rarely rising above the level of the heart. Well before the release of The Verve Pipe, the band is playing a series of small-club dates to sharpen its chops after two years of downtime. There aren't many people in this stylish music cafe in the warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis. Aside from a handful of journalists and music-industry flacks, most are here for "The Freshmen." The Verve Pipe wil comply, but not before introducing a dozen stunning new tunes to a naive audience. I stand next to a man in an electric wheelchair who drums his fingers impatiently on his armrests, obviously waiting for something. He endures 40 minutes of this year's best pop rock, cranked up with soaring guitars, canny sound loops, and dead-on vocal harmonies. There are so many great, anthemic pop songs in the new set list - and the band is so good live - that it's hard not to laugh out loud with pleasure. At long last, the guy in the wheelchair hears "The Freshmen." As the final chord rings, he performs a tight little 180 and heads out, apparently with his personal tragedy freshly confirmed, affirmed, confessed, whatever. Anyway, his departure has freed up more front-and-center space - the kind that'll be in short supply, once the rest of the world has heard The Verve Pipe. After the finishing touches of this sweaty, smiling, and smoky workout, which includes a raucous encore performance of Morrissey's "Glamorous Glue," the show is over. At least one member of the local press is standing there with a shit-eating grin, incredulous. Like it either sucked unbelievably or it rocked unbelievably. I watch as he rushes backstage, spilling his drink on the way, and pleads with the band, the crew, other journalists, anyone who will listen: "I want that new record right now! I cannot wait for that record!" Join the club, my friend. - Request Magazine September 1999 JUST THE FACTS, MAN NAME: doesn't mean anything, stop asking NEW ALBUM: The Verve Pipe PREVIOUS SELF SOUNDS LIKE: Live, Pearl Jam FULLY REALIZED PRESENT SELF SOUNDS LIKE: XTC meets Husker Du head-on in Elvis Costello's driveway FORMED: East Lansing, Michigan, 1992, from the remains of two rival college-rock bands FANS: mostly earned the hard way PREVIOUSLY KNOWN FOR: "The Freshmen" and "Photograph" from Villains, the band's 1996 big-league debut (RCA) OTHER ALBUMS: Two indie albums on the band's LMNOPop! Records (I've Suffered a Head Injury, Pop Smear) BEST ROCK-STAR BUDDIES: Semisonic, Kiss, XTC's Andy Partridge SINGLE: "Hero" SOON-TO-BE BEST B-SIDES EVER: "In Between," "She Loves Everybody," " La La" PRIMARY WRITERS/CENTERS OF ENERGY: Brian Vander Ark, Donny Brown UNSUNG GUITAR HERO: A.J. Dunning CUTE, SKINNY BASS PLAYER: Brad Vander Ark UTILITY INFIELDER WITH GOATEE: Doug Corella IS LIKE A RUSTY VW VAN BECAUSE: trustworthy, versatile, simultaneously corny and cool, will eventually blind you to all minor imperfections STATUS OF IMMORTAL SOULS: "spiritual" but not religious, credited for time already spent in hell as children of Christian Reform and Catholic families |