Brendan B. Brown--guitar, vocals Rich Leigey--bass (on the album) Mike McCabe--bass (current) Peter Brown--drums Phil A. Jimenez--percussion, keyboards, backing vocals, harmonica
You're about as likely to win three-card monte as see a major record label let a new band self-produce its debut. Then along comes Wheatus. "We wanted to make a record by ourselves," says Brendan B. Brown, the vocalist, the guitarist, the songwriter. And that's just what they did. So what makes Wheatus so damn exception-to-the-rule special?
Tunes, primarily. "Wheatus is about crafting pop-rock songs with punk/street credibility," says Rich Leigey, the bassist. "Period." Balls-out, straight-on, pissed-off and charged up. Piercingly direct smarts spewed with skewed humor. A raw and rowdy approach that doesn't sacrifice top-notch musicianship. You hear it all on the scratch-inflected first single "Teenage Dirtbag," the crunchiest crush song ever composed. And on "Love Is A Mutt From Hell," a sonic sling-shot strike at dysfunctional romance. And in the coolly acoustic rap-folk of "Wannabe Gangsta."
But it's not like the trio came outta nowhere. Actually, they came outta Long Island, New York. Brendan, an AC/DC-Willie Nelson-Prince-Madonna devotee, and Rich, who'd been in and out of punk and hardcore bands since his teens, bonded over a mutual appreciation for Rush. Naturally, they had to work together.
Which leads to sense-of-purpose, the final factor that makes Wheatus so damn special. "There comes a point when you say, 'I'd rather be poor and stupid and make all these mistakes than be right for somebody else's goal,'" Brendan asserts. Rather than soured by the demise of a previous ensemble, he took the knowledge gained (not to mention the cash) and made a run for the border of artistic freedom. "The experience was monumental in terms of how to make a record--we were in the studio all the time--and the money I made from it was spent on gear," he says. "I started writing songs for me. I consider this my first heartfelt creative effort."
His method was unconventional. "Every song was an idea before it was a song--a title came first and the story followed," Brendan explains. "That's my favorite way to do stuff--the title is an emotional blueprint for the song." The snotty-but-sweet single, for instance: "I wanted to write a song called 'Teenage Dirtbag' so I contemplated what that meant to me--a skinny guy with a mullet who probably didn't have a lot of friends."
Still close enough to his teens to taste the angst in his adenoids but old enough to have earned perspective, Brendan's adolescent back-musings inform such other Wheatus songs as "Truffles" and "Wannabe Gangsta." "You can't do anything when you're a kid. You have no power; you have no resources. You're subject to everyone else's crap," he says.
Other tunes stem from more adult--but no less ludicrous--situations. "'Hump'em n' Dump'em' I wrote when the Senate was considering impeaching the President," Brendan says. "The cheapness aspect to it--this big fat dumb cheesy sex going on in the White House." A personal encounter with music business sleaze led to "Mister Brown." "I was trying to get paid for something I'd done and it didn't look like I was going to go," he says. But "Sunshine," the first song Brendan wrote for the record, encapsulates the Wheatus do-it-for-yourself ethos. "It was an explanation to myself about what I'd been doing wrong, working for other people," he says.
The song mission accomplished, Brendan recruited his younger brother Peter to play drums--basically the younger Brown's destiny. "Every day since I was 11, I'd wait for my brother to come home with a new album," Peter recalls. "Brendan was the coolest person I knew." But it wasn't blood that hooked him on Wheatus. "I love these songs," he says. "The day I decided this band would occupy the majority of the rest of my life was a great one."
To add some just-right flourishes to otherwise no-frills arrangements, Wheatus turned to Phil A. Jimenez, a multi-instrumentalist and engineer Brendan knew from around. "The first song I heard was 'Dirtbag' and before the end of the first verse I knew I was going to work with Brendan," Phil recalls. "The next week I was at rehearsal--I heard every song and I loved every song. The power of the pop elements plus the story-telling and the social commentary was just something I really wanted to be a part of." Phil not only added percussion, harmonica, even a bit of banjo, he also co-produced Wheatus with the band.
Which was done by-and-large in the Brown family home. "We were all still working day jobs and recording at one in the morning in the basement of my mother's house," Brendan says. "We set up the control room on the dining table, then ran a hundred-foot snake downstairs to record." Adds Peter: "The neighbors would complain. Grandma would make us lunch. You can hear her dog barking on ''Hump'em n' Dump'em.'"
Wheatus was made the Wheatus way. By Wheatus. For Wheatus. Now, Wheatus is for everybody.
