Veruca Salt's lead guitarist and vocalist, Louise Post, is trying not to panic. The next day, the band is playing the biggest show of its short life -- in front of 10,000 people -- at a Chicago arena. It's a hometown crowd, but judging from the way the local press has savaged the band lately for being too successful too quickly, Chicago is looking more like the hog butcher of the world, with the band as the hog.
What's really worrying Post, 27, though, is her solo on a cover of the Bee Gees' "Holiday". Thinking about the next day's bill, which includes Weezer, Hole and Dinosaur Jr., it suddenly occurs to her that "J. Mascis [of Dinosaur Jr.] is going to be there."
"Just wail," the rhythm guitarist and vocalist Nina Gordon, 27, tells Post as the band practices one more time at a Wicker Park rehearsal space, surrounded by equipment left behind by former and current Chicago behemoths Styx and Smashing Pumpkins. Still wearing their coats in the chilly studio, Post and Gordon look slightly out of sort, as if they just walked off the set of the Bob Newhart rent-strike episode.
Drummer Jim Shapiro, 29, Gordon's brother, offers encouragement, while bassist Steve Lack, 24, suggests, "I think we're being too careful."
"I think we should be careful about all the songs we play," Post snaps, momentarily showing the side of her personality that allows her to embody a serial killer in "All Hail Me".
A year and a half ago, the band was opening for a group that performed Fleetwood Mac's Rumours in its entirety in a small Chicago club. In March, Veruca Salt released their first single, "Seether" (produced by Brad Wood, whose credits include Liz Phair), on the tiny Chicago label Minty Fresh. That same month, a stint at the South by Southwest festival, in Austin, Texas, sparked a major-label bidding war. Now, just a few months after Veruca's signing to Geffen, "Seether" has landed in MTV's Buzz Bin, and their debut album, American Thighs, is climbing up the charts.
A coed band from the city of the moment, Veruca Salt (the name of one of the spoiled brats in Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ) definitely have trendy credentials, but the band is no mere flavor of the month. Though detractors who can handle only one female-fronted band at a time dismis the group as Breeders clones, Veruca Salt offer heady pop confections laced with a dash of menace that owe as much to My Bloody Valentine, Big Star, Cheap Trick and the Go-Go's.
The title American Thighs is a sly reference to AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" ("Angus Young is our Gazoo," Shapiro explains, referring to the Martian on The Flintstones). The songs are pop candy that -- like Willy Wonka's exploding sweets -- usually pack an unexpected bang. Many of the tracks are tales of abusive relationships couched in double-edged lyrics ("You're so nice/You tie me in a web," Post sings in "Spiderman '79") and sing-along hooks barbed with distorted guitars.
"Seether", for example, is at once a joyous romp (kicking off with Gordon's giddy "Ow") and a harrowing self-inquiry full of barely repressed rage and pain that sounds all the more sinister as rendered by Gordon and Post's angelic harmonizing. It's such a blatantly infectious pop song that Gordon apologized to the band the first time she played it. The band forgave her.
Gordon says she wrote "Seether" after confronting a frightening side of herself. "I was talking to someone, and I felt myselt seething," she says. "I had this vision of scraping this person's face on the sidewalk. I was so shocked that I wanted to do that."
Gordon wrote most of the songs when she was "lost in a relationship, struggling to find myself" and jokes that she and Post are "angry post-feminists." But if there is anything post about their feminism, it's that they aren't afraid to confront their vulnerabilities.
"Nina and I sometimes have to make decisions," says Post, "and that's been strange. Making decisions for men is awkward because I'm used to deferring to the central man in my life."
Both women have had to come to terms with the misconception that rock is a boys' game. Before they met, a Wendy and Lisa concert they both attended sparked similar revelations about female rockers. "I remember this troupe of women storming the stage," recalls Gordon, "all of them beautiful, talented and powerful. I went away feeling, 'I'll never be a part of anything like that.'"
When Gordon and Post finally did meet, they were each so blown away by encountering another woman who rocked that they wanted to form an all-female band. Although those plans fell through, they don't regret it.
"I love coed rock," says Post. "I think it's part of the solution."
Nor do the male band members feel insecure about being in a band fronted by women. "Some guys I've been in bands with have had really sexist and creepy attitudes about women," says Lack. "I don't get that in this band, which is nice."
For Shapiro, who had played guitar and bass in several bands, the main challenge was just learning to play drums. "I went to the beginning of Side 3 of Physical Graffiti and tried to do whatever I heard," he says.
One thing the members all have in common is divorced parents. Much of their mordantly cynical sense of humor, anger, insecurity and even their love for cheesy 70s pop was forged when their families fell apart. "Forsythia", which sounds at first like a children's nonsense rhyme ("Yellow baby is a bad sign . . . Spider monkey is a good lie") actually refers to how Gordon dealt with her parents' breakup.
"I started telling lies," she recalls. "I said I had a pet spider monkey. I knew of a girl who was born with jaundice, so I told people I was. I said I had a twin sister named Julie, because Nina was a really odd name. Anything I was, I didn't want to be."
Shapiro coped by withdrawing to his room to listen to ELO and Badfinger and to play with his hermit crab. Post refers to the time of her parents' divorce, when she was 9, as her "pot-smoking days".
Lack, whose parents coincidentally first split up in the same year as the others' -- 1975 -- lived above his father's funeral parlor. He says his father liked to scare him by leaving him alone in the coffin room. But not all of Dad's attempts to frighten him were successful. "I wanted a motorcycle, and it happened we had somebody who died in a motorcycle wreck," says Lack. "He showed me the body, and it was really gruesome. I said, 'Well, OK, I still want a motorcycle.'"
"So your rational mind is unable to comprehend his greatness," Iha says with mock sincerity.
"Are you making fun of me?" Roeser asks.
"I'm so excited I could almost cry," says Lack's father, who is wearing a custom-made gold necklace that says VERUCA SALT. "Steve's piano teacher said he would never amount to anything musically. Poor thing, we just buried her." Of course, he means that literally.
When Veruca Salt finally go onstage, their pre-show anxieties are forgotten. As they launch into "Victrola," their bubbly love song to a record player, the roar of the crowd puts to rest any notion of a hometown backlash. The band has never sounded tighter as it tears through its set with a newfound confidence. Sparks and stage divers fly. Though "Holiday" is conspicuously absent, Veruca Salt perform "25" instead. Arguably their most complex song, "25," an anthem about youthful stumbling, survival and ultimate triumph, sounds like a metaphor for everything the band has been through. Its version that night blows away the one on record. And Post takes Gordon's advice on the solo. She wails.
"It was a rock & roll fantasy," says Gordon after their set.
"The band really seemed to come together," says Lack.
Shapiro calls it their "best show ever" and says he is having almost as much fun as when he watched the Mets win Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. He still carries the tattered ticket stub in his wallet.
Only Post is unsure. "I don't know how it went," she says.
As the evening ends, Urge Overkill's Roeser is feeling almost parental toward Veruca Salt. "I'm painfully aware of what's been said," he says. "As people, they're not bogus. Musically, they've still got some ground to cover. But, hey, this is their first record." He shakes his head in bewilderment. "I couldn't imagine my first record selling this much."