Dayton Daily News (May 16th 1997)
No Doubt dealing with rock ‘n’ roll stardom
When your band has been the cover story of Rolling Stone, Spin and Details magazines, what else is there to say that hasn't already been said? The question causes No Doubt's drummer Adrian Young to hesitate a minute. `Let me ask the rest of the room,' he said last week from a hotel in Long Island, N.Y., where the band was to perform that evening.
`Is there anything that hasn't been written about us?' he called to his bandmates, whose muffled conversation could be heard in the background. There's a moment of silence, and then, a collective: `No!'
Young returned to the phone. `Everything's been said,' he said. You could practically hear him shrug. But has it been accurate?
`They get most of it right. The Rolling Stone article was good. I thought it was well written.' The writer of that particular piece followed the band around for a week during a tour leg that started in Israel and ended in Europe. The rock-star life that's enveloping No Doubt these days, such as being followed around by magazine writers, is relatively new for the band - and as far as Young is concerned, it's completely unexpected.
`This tour is actually awesome. Everything's being done for us.' The tour, which started in mid-April, has the group headlining in major arenas across the country, including a stop tonight at the Ervin J. Nutter Center at Wright State University. `We're pretty much living the rock musician's dream,' Young said. That success has been more than 10 years in coming.
Essentially a garage band out of Orange County, Calif., the group had a significant hometown following early on, but it found national attention somewhat more elusive. A 1992 self-titled album on Interscope Records failed to make much of a mark. And the same was true for a self-released album called Beacon St. Collection, which the band put out in January 1995. According to bassist Tony Kanal, the second album was an offshoot of the phenomenally successful, but yet to come Tragic Kingdom, which the group released in October 1995 on the Trauma/Interscope lebel. `We had so many songs we knew weren't going to make it on to we'd written about 60 - that we just decided to put a CD of some of the stuff out ourselves,' he said.
But it was Tragic Kingdom that took No Doubt to the top. There was nothing meteoric, however, about the climb. `It did pretty well by our standards at the time,' Young said. The band was thrilled, for example, when KROQ in Los Angeles began playing the album's first single, Just a Girl, a ska-tinged, tongue-in-cheek litany of the perils of being a girl.
After that, `it was a gradual process,' he said.
That process included almost nonstop touring, opening for bigger acts that included British grunge band Bush. It was while traveling with Bush that No Doubt made a quick pit stop in Dayton early last year to plug Tragic Kingdom on WXEG-FM (103.9). The plan was to sing Just a Girl live on the air. But at the last minute, lead singer Gwen Stefani got sick and couldn't make it.
They did the song without her, with Young taking the lead vocals. The results were inspired, giving new feminist meaning to the lyrics.
`That was the only time I ever did that,' Young said when reminded of the experience. `I had to read the lyrics off the CD,' he said with an embarrassed laugh. `I was kind of winging it.' Listeners would never have known.
Tragic Kingdom has since sold almost 7 million copies, and it spent nine weeks at the No. 1 spot on Billboard's Top 200 list. Last week the album was in the 13 spot after 69 weeks on the chart. And four singles off the album, including Just a Girl, have gone Top 10. The fifth and final - according to Young - single off the album, Sunday Morning, was released in April.
The band members are still learning to live with their success, Young said. And they've taken to conducting what Young called `sociological experiments' - they like to `go out incognito into the crowd before a show and see what kind of people are coming in.'
The mix of the audience has become surprisingly diverse, Young said. Mothers and teen-age daughters, `long-haired guys with Metallica T-shirts' - they're all ages and appear to come from all walks of life, he said.
He assumes that the diversity of the crowd reflects the diversity of No Doubt's music. `We play so many different styles,' he said. `And each of the singles are pretty different, too.' But his tone reflects a trace of incredulity, a hint that he's still not totally convinced the success is real.
And then: `Hey, I just opened the drawer on the desk here and it says: `Grateful Dead, 1990 spring tour.' Cool.'