As a not-dead-yet member of a still-existing-but-slowly-fading one-hit-wonder, I am often asked at cocktail parties and police line-ups “What was it really like?” Really.
Sure there’s shows and tour buses and stuff. But this is the story I like to tell. This is what is was really like.
SCENE: THE EARLY POST-MILLENNIUM ALT-ROCK MUSIC WORLD
We were a band with a gold record and successful tour under our belts. We were a band on the rise that didn’t realize we were actually on our way back down.
We were a band working to avoid the sophomore slump, and trying to do all the right things:
- We rented out our friends studio at the toxic Hunter’s Point Superfund site to woodshed and write a smash.
- We broke our copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater in half, and started drinking less.
- We diligently recorded new songs and sent them off to our label. They were so disappointed with our work that they responded by sending back the demo from an up-and-coming songwriter/guitar player they thought we could work with. We weren’t wild about the song, “Your Body is a Wonderland.” We passed. (In retrospect that was one of the worst decisions of our career)
However, despite all our finest efforts, in the words of the late-great TP:
So our work continued.
CUT TO SAN FRANCISCO, WHERE WE ALREADY WERE
One sunny-to-foggy day we convened in Luke’s Russian Hill apartment with the inklings of a new song. There was “an idea.”
We scribbled out some words about a series of loves lost, found, lost again, criminally indicted, and ultimately failing. It was fun, silly, clever, short. It was right in our wheelhouse.
Looking back with the gift of perspective, the lyrics are wildly misogynistic (as I have repeatedly been told), but hey, can we just say “different times” for the sake of the story?
We were working it out in his living room, getting progressively more excited as the stupid cable car barreled by his window and ruined multiple recordings, and struggling to make the overly verbose lyrics work.
It was all clicking. The verses were cooking, the parts were falling in to place, and as we approached the point in the song where the chorus would be, really only one thing was going to work: We would lift “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before,” as popularized by Willy Nelson and Julio Iglesias.
So we did a take where we dropped that in, to see if it would jibe.
And did it ever jibe.
We laughed our asses off. We high-fived. It was beautiful. It was ridiculous. But it just worked. We slapped together the demo (from which the guitar break transferred to the actual final version, something we are very happy about), popped that bad boy into an envelope, mailed it down to Hollywood, and headed to Shanghai Kelly’s for a pint.
Things were looking up.
CUT TO LOS ANGELES
The demo was good enough that the label gave us the go-ahead to drive down to Henson Studios in slimy, er, sunny L.A. to record with a big time producer, David Kahne. Like, Fishbone, Sublime, Soul Coughing, fucking Red Rockers David Kahne.
This might be it.
We rolled into Henson right after G n’ R had done some pre-Chinese Democracy work. The staff was breaking down Buckethead’s chicken coop, which he sat in while recording his parts. And Poison was in another studio! And we watched them stand outside and smoke! For some reason Kiefer Sutherland was wandering around! It was GLORIOUS.
We got to recording, and it was sounding, in the parlance of the times, phat. Kahne was working his magic, we had some strings going on it, the drum sound in the room was amazing, bing bang boom. It was all turning out good enough, and the label started putting out the feelers with radio program directors, seeing if this was going to be the first single.
AT THE SAME TIME…
We started getting phone calls from friends.
“I’m hearing your name everywhere. You guys are blowing up.”
“I just heard your new song on the radio. NICE!”
“Holy Shit, I heard you guys are going to be on SNL!”
Unfortunately, nope. We never even came close to SNL. We were once going to get Leno, but it came down to us and the dorks in Vertical Horizon, and they got it, just because they had the number one song in America. So we got Kilborne. wah-wah.
We did some pre-existence-of-Google research, and found out the problem. It wasn’t that this SNL booking never made it to our agents. No, there was a band with a very similar name to our two-word name. But their name was pluralized on the first word and skipped the number for the second word, and they had gotten the gig.
Whelp, that sucked.
And as the misplaced lauding continued to roll in, we became a little annoyed.
Look. We weren’t annoyed because a similar sounding band was doing better than us. We know naming a band is lame, and the names are all stupid, and we never even really liked ours anyway. Especially when Eve 6, Nine Days, Blink 182, Third Eye Blind, Sum 41, and all the other dumb name-number bands happened around the same time as us. I guess we should have checked in with Kansas, Alabama, Chicago, Boston, or Asia.
No, the thing that annoyed us was because it had cost us a lot of money to secure our stupid name.
See, when your band starts to get popular, you take a few steps. You form a business. You get a big-time booking agent. You get a big-time lawyer. And then you sign a record deal.
*fun fact we signed our record deal with pens pinched in our butt cheeks*
We got that big-time Beverly Hills lawyer. He was great, he was a shark, he helped us through the process. The thing that clinched him for us was the time he accidentally lit the filter of a cigarette and played it off flawlessly. If you’ve ever had that happen, you know that’s hard to do.
He also urged us to research and secure the trademark to our dumb band name worldwide.
Luckily, his old man did that for a living! He convinced us to hire his dad, spend a shitload of money, and we locked our dumb name down.
So we were there first, and now here come these super-hip, beloved, model-dating, beautiful young men from New York city who were confusing the consumer space. It was making going to Paradise Lounge on the weekends a real pain in the ass, with us constantly correcting, “No, that’s actually a different band.”
So we acted upon the God-given right handed down to every red-blooded American: we sued.
Was that the right thing to do?
Who knows.
Did we think it about it very much before we did it?
Not really.
But we sent the papers anyway.
CUT BACK TO US IN THE L.A. STUDIO RECORDING THE NEW SONG
We were sitting around the lounge, annoying Kahne with questions such as, “Yeah, but what was Bradley really like?” when the label called.
“We have a little problem.”
In the music biz, this ain’t a good thing.
I’m sure you’ve all watched enough Spinal Tap or Entourage to know those motherfuckers can spin anything:
The label president has turned over.
“This is actually a good thing. He will bring fresh ears and energy to all the outstanding projects.”
Radio isn’t picking up the second single.
“This happens with ALL second singles. Backpack is still going strong, so we want to save up for the THIRD single, which we’ve known is the hit all along.”
Your release date is 9/18.
“This is great timing. People are going to want a diversion, want new music to heal with on that first Tuesday back. And we’ll be the only ones getting something out.”
So, this “little problem” might actually be a “bad thing.”
The label said:
“We circulated the roughs around, and the songwriter of ‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’ got wind of it, and said it is a desecration of his work, and if the radio stations play it he will file a formal complaint with their corporates, with the RIAA, the CIA, the NBA, he will pull his songs from the radio networks, sue you, sue us, sue everyone, and be general pill about the whole situation.”
So basically, if we release the song, the TATGILB songwriter comes after us.
Great news! Let’s go for a drink.
CUT TO US PLAYING SOME ONE-OFF GIG BACK UP NORTH
We jammed back up to SF to play an outdoor show for something I don’t really remember, and to be honest I don’t remember most of the shows, before returning back to L.A. to mix the new song.
It was a resoundingly unremarkable concert, and per our usual we went to the merch table afterwards to unload and autograph whatever shitty t-shirts we had left from the last cycle.
I was standing next to John. We both had Sharpies.
A dude was patiently waiting in line, and when his turn came, he handed John an envelope. We’d sign anything; other band’s CDs, frisbees, ATM receipts. We DGAF, so this was nothing extraordinary.
“Hey, thanks for coming out,” John said without looking up. “Do you want me to make this out to someone?”
“Stroke 9 you’ve been served.”
“Ok, wait, haha. You want us to autograph to ourselves? That’s weird…Oh…ooooh…”
The dude walked away.
CUT BACK TO THE STUDIO IN L.A.
The lawyers, who were taking a decent chunk of our overall gross percentage for having previously vetted some boilerplate contracts and taken us out to sushi and billing us back, were finally being put to use.
On one side of the beer bottle-covered table in the break room was the countersuit from the “other band” that had been served at the show, mad at us for what they thought was a frivolous lawsuit.
On the other side of the table was the warning from the TATGILB songwriter, hinting at copyright infringement and threatening to claim songwriting credit, which would reduce our potential revenue for the song from small to microscopic.
Then we talked, and paced, and pretended we knew what we were doing. We said “Fuck them” and “Fuck that” and “We’re fucked” a lot.
We researched Weird Al Law. We speculated if we would win in a “parody” defense. We wondered if the song was parody. We made jokes that like those in the song, most of our relationships were parodies of healthy relationships.
Ultimately, we realized we were already on shaky ground. The song, while getting some interest, was by no means a slam-dunk. We needed to get an album out cleanly, we had a couple other potentials, we needed to get touring again. So we decided to play the smartest hand we could at that point.
We retreated to a studio in Richmond and changed the lyrics to a more generic “100 Girls.” We reached a settlement with the other band.
But right before doing that, we, as a band, actually took two seconds to review all the formal documents that were presented to us, which up until that point we had dealt with conceptually, but not actually.
And in the literal reading of those documents, we saw
And came to realize
That the guitar player
In the band that we sued
Was the son
Of the songwriter.
Postscript: I used my share of the settlement to buy a Jetta, straight up cash (don’t judge, it was the early Aughts, we were living in a post-farfegnugen era).
A day before 9/11 we flew one of THE flights back to SF, the Thursday after we were on the first flight out of SFO to South Carolina, the week after our album came out, and as of last week you can find a copy of it at Amoeba for $1.
So take a listen, and just imagine the GLORY that would have been the “To All The Girls” lyrics, and then give us a swift kick to the ass:
