In the comfy corner booth of Chicago's daily Bar and grill on a fall afternoon, the principal members of Veruca Salt, Nina Gordon and Louise Post, are aggressively lounging. Aside from signing with Geffen Records and with Q Prime (home of Def Leppard and Metallica) as management and playing their celebratory record-release party for American Thighs and both getting sick and enduring an if-this-is-Thursday-it-must-be-Amsterdam European press tour, it has been an uneventful past couple of weeks.
The animated and hyperaware Gordon has a slightness that won her a description as a "bag of bones" in a British music mag, for which she is not grateful; Post, not quite as thin, has darker features and a more insular mien. They're wearing the same shirt because they're best friends and best friends will do that. In conversation, they vary between listening intently to what the other has to say and rushing to finish each other's sentences. They order the same meals. "If you get something that I think I want," Post explains to her partner, more than half-seriously, "but I'm not sure, I get nervous that when it comes, I'm going to want it. So I just order the same thing." Adds Gordon, cheerfully, "We're trying to manipulate our media image."
Some observers charge they've already done that, all too well. In the wake of Veruca Salt's rapid launch from tentative bar band to Talk of the Industry, there's been no shortage of theories to explain their quick success, some far from flattering. There IS a certain mystery here: How did a relatively untested local quartet with one single on a tiny local label crack the major playlists of powerful rock stations like Chicago's Q-101 and Los Angeles' KROQ? What accounted for the concurrent surge of media publicity, including MTV play and interview offers from the New York Times? Did Geffen Records really sign them to a multimillion-dollar contract after their indie success on Minty Fresh, or has the company been secretly greasing the wheels all along as a clever marketing strategy?
These are serious questions, or at least questions that are taken seriously, on the indie side of town. And right now, there is no town more indie than Chicago. It's the home of Touch and Go Records, bastion of uncompromising Midwest underground rock; of Drag City Records, ultrahip purveyors of ultrahip rock from Pavement and Royal Trux; and of Steve Albini, seminal post punkster (Big Black, Rapeman) and producer (Nirvana's In Utero), the philosophical chief of a school of thought that says the indier the better.
Such thinking has earned its adherents an enormous amount of credibility in certain circles (Kurt Cobain, it's said, really wanted to be on Touch and Go). But until recently few others noticed. This changed in 1993, when Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream went triple platinum, Liz Phair's Exile In Guyville won the Village Voice's critic's poll, and Billboard, while touting those acts along with Urge Overkill, Material Issue and Ministry, devoted a front-page report to "Rock's New Cutting Edge Capital".
All of which helped promote a climate for a) major-label signings, b) indie angst. When Touch and Go favorite sons the Jesus Lizard were given $100,000 from a division of Warner Bros. for rights to a single recording of a single appearance (the basis of the Lizard's Show, on Collusion Arts Records), no strings attached, the issue caused a rift between Albini and the Lizard. And in what became the most talked-about broadside of the year, Albini lambasted the town's new rock royalty as "pandering sluts" in a letter to the Chicago Reader, pointedly including in his derision his former friends and labelmates in Urge Overkill.
Now it's Veruca Salt's turn. "Veruca Salt are a seamless paradigm for marketable 'alternative' rock," sniffed one local writer, Peter Margasak, reviewing a recent performance. "Lost in all the hoopla is the fact that Veruca Salt aren't a particularly exciting or compelling rock band."
With a mix of amusement and resignation Post and Gordon are coming to terms with their new positions as media targets. "I keep hearing that we're a marketing dream," says Post. "Maybe that's true, maybe we are a marketing dream. But that wasn't our PLAN. There wasn't a board meeting where someone said, okay, these two girls are going to front this band."
"It was our parents," Gordon says dryly. "My mom and your mom got together and said --"
"'We're going to have girls now,'", Post says, picking up the thread, "'and our girls are gonna have tits and ass and --'"
"'Cause in the '90s this grunge thing is going to be really big --'"
"'And it's going to be really trendy to have girls fronting bands...'"
With a sort of futile idealism, Veruca Salt has labored over the course of their short career to be judged on their music. This has sometimes backfired, as when Gordon and Post turned down an interview request with the New York Times last winter, on the reasonable grounds that they hadn't done anything yet, and were promptly dubbed prima donnas. But it's still a good idea. American Thighs -- the title is an acid tip o' the hat to an AC/DC cock-rock anthem -- IS an audacious debut, an album that uses a set of well-constructed pop and rock songs as the setting for a distaff coming-of-age story -- and girldungsroman of twentysomething pop. "I'm speeding up/I can't control my car" are the prescient words that open the record; in the songs that follow we watch our heroines on a deeply felt quest for self in a world of slippery surfaces, unstable relationships and shattered families. Along the way they address elegantly primal subjects like murder ("All Hail Me"), anger ("Seether") and suicide ("Wolf"), and also rather more complicated things, like the price of female self-denial in the face of the male sense of entitlement ("Celebrate You"). As the record progresses, the listener is unnervingly dragged along on their quest, a journey nicely resolved in the concluding song "25," which begins with a metal roar and settles into a silky confessional.
The record also bristles with salutes to pop flotsam and jetsam -- "25" references "Bend Me, Shape Me" by Chicago forbears American Breed; the concussive begining of "Seether" is an homage to Cheap Trick's "He's A Whore." (And wait till you hear the band's volatile cover of the Sex Pistols' "Bodies", due out as a B-side.) Veruca Salt's secret weapon is that Gordon and Post write separately, and both write well. Attempts to pigeonhole either one collapse: The band's indie hit "Seether" is Gordon's handiwork; one notes her pop facility and contrasts it with Post's more rococo and emotional approach in a song like "Wolf". Except that the even more epically scaled "25" turns out to be Gordon's, while "Victrola", as irresistible as "Seether," is a Post song. That's Gordon howling on "All Hail Me", ripping through the puns of "Number One Blind" a few tracks later; that's Post blazing away on guitar on "Wolf", proffering a delicate falsetto on "Fly".
The Verucas embrace a classical, romantic notion of rock: The emotional divides and haggard longings that mark their music have roots in the familial wreckage they experienced or witnessed while coming of age in the 1980s. "I spent my life believing that I had this perfect family and making my friends believe we had this perfect family," Gordon says. "My mother and I worked hard to keep this rosy facade up, that everyone was so close and happy." A "huge and miserable" divorce ensued: "That rewrote my entire life."
"I've seen all those kids having a hard time deciding what to do with their lives, or having problems with drugs, feeling worthless," Post adds. "I don't feel confident or competent in this world." That's what "Celebrate You" is about: "It started with my father and extended to the other men in my life," she says. "I spent so much time celebrating them that I sort of neglected to celebrate myself or even acknowledge myself in that way."
It is this powerful sense of discovery, at once sobering and intoxicating, which permeates American thighs from first song to last. "If I were the only songwriter in the band it would be obnoxious to analyze the songs," says Gordon. "I do think there is a thread through the record; it's about trying to find out identity. I think about the line in 'Celebrate You' -- I can talk about it 'cause it isn't my song -- when Louise says, 'I lost my innocence today/When I learned how to write this.' When we made this record it was a turning point in our lives. Maybe not even making: maybe just writing the songs, or making the decision to be in a band together.
They are friends who met over the phone. Gordon is a child of the tony Chicago Gold Coast who'd gone to Tufts and was back home precociously coordinating a Monet retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. (How many rock stars have translated Monet's correspondence on the side?) Post, from St. Louis, went to Barnard; back in Chicago, she hooked up with actor John Cusack's theater group New Crime, which specializes in raucous pieces of commedia dell'arte. Both wrote songs at home.
At a New Year's party, a friend of a friend played Gordon a tape of Post's music over the phone. They made a date, and "I felt like I met my mirror," says Post. "We both immediately felt we wanted to take this really seriously." They advertised for a female rhythm section, but ended up with bassist Steve Lack, who saw the ad and applied anyway, and with Gordon's brother, Jim Shapiro, on drums. When they ventured into the Chicago club scene some 18 months later, it was into one with its senses heightened by the Pumpkins' success and the Billboard pronouncement; Veruca Salt, playing most of the songs that would make up American Thighs, drew local attention almost immediately.
Enter Jim Powers, a onetime A&R man for BMG International (he'd signed the Cowboy Junkies) and Zoo (The Pooh Sticks), who'd come back to Chicago to start his Minty Fresh label; one of his early releases was Liz Phair's first single, another was by Love Jones, which later signed with Zoo. Powers put Veruca in an artfest music program he was curating, then convinced the band to record his label's first full album. Brad Wood, already acclaimed for helping Liz Phair craft the luminous song-settings on Exile, agreed to produce.
By the end of the year Veruca Salt were getting looks by some majors. By the time the band played an arresting set at the South by Southwest music conference the following March, the buzz was overwhelming. "Every label president you can imagine was there," marvels Powers. Post and Gordon claim they'd resolved by then to stick with Minty Fresh; the majors could have a crack at their second release. "We went on Minty Fresh because we weren't ready for a major, because we weren't a good enough band," says Post. "We were scared," concurs Gordon. "We just wanted to make a record with songs we loved and no pressure." Powers put out a single of a power-pop Gordon tune, pressed 2,000 copies and started preparing for the fall release of the album.
It didn't quite turn out that way, of course. In overheated Chicago, rumours fly that the fix was in with Geffen form the start. It's true that Uni, Geffen's manufacturer, handled Minty Fresh product; true also that Powers now has his own A&R deal with the label. ("'Minty-Gef,' we call him," tweaks Gordon.) But what put the band on a major label ultimately had less to do with that (at that point, the pair nearly went with Virgin) and more to do with a song called "Seether".
Gordon thought the tune, despite a fairly intense lyric limning a woman's fight with her own anger, was a bit light. "When I walked into the practice room I said, 'Forgive me, you guys.'" What transformed the songs into a hit was a strange and unusual disease that began infecting certain radio programmers in 1993 and 1994. Everyone knows that radio has shifted massively leftward over the course of what critics are fond of calling the post-Nevermind era, to the point where one of the fastest-growing radio formats is "alternative rock". While some and perhaps a lot of these stations play too few songs too often, they display a crucial conceptual difference from the rock stations that ruled the airwaves just a few years ago. Based in grunge and fed by MTV, modern rock radio has gotten into the business of providing listeners with what's NEW -- something mainstream classic-rock and AOR outlets had avoided as a matter of principle for years.
Some stations -- here's the symptoms of that strange disease -- have even gotten aggressive about it. Soundtrack cuts, odd covers, live tracks, B-sides, IMPORT B-sides -- many of them unavailable in stores, much to the dismay of record companies -- are often put in rotation at some very large outlets. Hench the phenomenon of Beck, whose "Loser", against all odds, was a number-one song on L.A.'s muscular KROQ as an independently released 12-inch, and the Offspring's Smash, at nearly three million sold, is the biggest indie record of all time.
Powers sent a radio friend in Albany an early copy of "Seether" and was happy when the station played it. But when Chicago's Q-101 -- the most powerful rock station in the market and a format bellwether -- slammed the song into heavy rotation, he blanched. The 2,000 Minty Fresh singles were long gone; Powers had been in the business enough to fear that fickle stations would forget the band once the album came out. So he asked Q-101's programmer Bill gamble to stop playing the song. "I told him that this was a first," Gamble recalls. "I said that I was going to mark this day down in my calendar." But he shrugged and agreeably scaled airplay back to evenings.
By this time, one of the spotters for KROQ had brought the single in to program director Kevin Weatherly. The radio's staff spun it at a weekly listening meeting, and put it on the air that day. Soon it was being played heavily on modern-rock stations across the country. Q-101 put the song back into days.
Billboard, meanwhile, was continuing to buzz the Chicago scene in general and Veruca in particular. Gordon and Post found themselves in an enviable but difficult position. They had a hit single on a record that effectively didn't exits. Did they want the same thing to happen to the album? Powers had decent distribution lines up, but..."At some point we realized that 'Seether' was going to be on the radio whether we liked it or not," Post says. "We'd guessed we'd better enjoy it and figure out what it meant. What does it mean for the rest of the record, what does it mean for the rest of our careers? In a certain way, it was liberating. Once it was out, we wanted to make sure that we were protected and that we were dealt with well. And whatever one can say about a major -- we're very wary of major labels -- I don't have the incentive or the drive or the finances to release my own material and distribute it. So you have to make the decision to break down the shop and not make music anymore or go to a label, and at that point a major is no worse than an indie, depending on the major."
Of course, one's leverage with the major labels is considerably increased when you've already recorded an album with a hot producer that boasts a surprise hit single. In the end, Geffen won out over Virgin -- and over another label with a male rep who apparently thought he was trying to sign Lita Ford. "There was one guy who refused to kiss me on the cheek," Gordon explains. "He always turned his head to kiss me on the lips and always told me how hot and sexy we looked instead of telling us how good our shows were. I was offended by him."
Asked about the dollar amount, Post says, "It was a good deal as far as deals go, I understand." Around town the figure being bandied about is $1.8 million, the pair are told. "Eek!" says Gordon.
Can Veruca Salt survive the stardom they didn't court? Approaching their third year of friendhsip, the pair remain close. "We can talk for seven hours about our personal life and talk for another seven hours about business," avers Post. So far, the big controversies in the band tend to be over photographs. "The worst," says Gordon, "is when there's a photo where you think you think you look good, and you say say, 'I want this one, I want this one,' and someone else hates themselves." "The worst," says Post, "is when I think Nina looks great, and I think I look great, and she says, no, you look great and I look terrible."
Both musicians worry if they're making the right decisions; they admit to being hurt by criticism, too. ("I've never been the sort of person who said, 'Oh, I don't give a fuck what other people say about me,'" says Gordon.) But ultimately the indie-underground analysis misses the mark. While Veruca Salt certainly has the opportunity -- and the right -- to screw up their careers and their art if they want to, bringing all the indiecentric cliches home, it's not clear that they or their music were ever a part of that world.
"It's a mindset I can't relate to. I've listened to pop music my whole life," says Gordon. "I've also listened to heavy metal and hard rock, and now I'm responding to it in my own way."
No matter. What cynics will call hype unparalleled and fans will call talent rewarded has conspired to shake the pair's plans up a bit. "Things have just grown beyond our expectations these last few months," says Post.
"I don't totally love the record," Gordon agrees. "But I do think there's some good things about it. I do think we're going to be a great rock band. We just got put in the spotlight a little too quickly."
"I know what they're going to call it," says drummer JIM SHAPIRO, excited about appearing in the Musician equipment sidebar: "'Salt Licks'!" Well, close. Shapiro plays a Slingerland kit with a teakwood oil finish -- "a dead branch on the evolutionary tree of drum finishes," he notes. He's got an 18-inch floor tom and a 24 kick drum: On it is the disturbing drawing of an imp (official title: "Evil Sailor 9") that graced the cover of the band's original single. Also: Ludwig snare and lots of Paiste cymbals.
NINA GORDON plays a Gibson Melody Maker with a Gibson humbucker put in, and a 1974 SG. Either can go through a Mesa/Boogie dual rectifier to an orange cabinet -- just one, four 12s. She's got no pedals and "some hi-tech microphone." LOUISE POST plays a 1972 Gibson Les Paul Custom, a '74 Junior through an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff to a Rivera 100-watt head cabinet. Bassist STEVE LACK generally pounds away at a '77 Fender Precision, but also owns a '75 Rickenbacker 4001: "I'm oscillating between the two at this point." He also oscillates through a Hughes & Kettner Blue Tube pedal ("I'm using it as a boost for now") and an Ampeg SVT II, which he says he uses o nly because he has a road case for it. He'd rather use his Ampeg V-9, but too many of the speakers are blown. "If anybody knows someone who can recone speakers cheaply, I'd be much obliged."