Las Vegas Review-Journal (July 28th 2000)

Good for a laugh

No Doubt is back with a new CD and tour, and once again the band is an anomaly in pop music.

In 1996, the pop-ska hits "Don't Speak," "Just a Girl" and "Spiderwebs" from the "Tragic Kingdom" album forced the band onto grungy radio playlists. Now No Doubt's new wave-pop resurrection is in competition with the bubble gum of Britney Spears and the Korny ruffians who have overtaken MTV.

"With the last record, we didn't fit in, either," says drummer Adrian Young. But the players in the band, which was formed in late 1986, weren't intent on recording a hit album when they spent two years making the follow-up CD, "Return of Saturn."

"You can't really bank on (making a hit album). We didn't really go into it with that attitude. We just wanted a good record," Young says.

Sales haven't kept up with "Tragic Kingdom," but many critics are impressed.

"That's something we didn't expect, because the last album really didn't have good reviews," Young says.

Young, 30, calling from Santa Monica, sounds tired. He's been doing a lot of interviews. On the cover of a recent Spin magazine, there he was with leopard-colored hair, standing next to a freshly reddish-pink-headed singer Gwen Stefani. On this day, he's giving his fifth interview within a few hours.

It can't help his midday demeanor that he is his band's "professional socializer." That's what his record label's publicists call him. He's done things such as vomiting in Stefani's yard during a party.

"At least I made it out of her house," he says.

Young also enjoys getting naked in public on tour just for fun.

"I'm pretty good at it," he says.

But he's not sure he'll have time to party in Las Vegas as he usually does. He has spent many a dollar in this town. Before No Doubt was famous, in the early 1990s, he blew a few hundred bucks gambling. That was a fortune to him back then.

"In fact, I lost my whole (tour) per diem at the Aladdin," which was across the street from where the band was playing, the now- defunct Shark Club. "And I spilled hot chocolate on the blackjack table at 7 in the morning, trying to sober up."

"I like to come out to Vegas and rage," Young says. "If we have time off, things could get crazy."

He has also been known to frequent a local gentlemen's club. Nina, his wife of six months who is also No Doubt's former production coordinator, doesn't mind her husband's excursions.

"My wife is very, very cool, meaning I can look at naked women," Young says.

Young, who once was a psychology major, says No Doubt provides him an extended childhood that would ruin a 9-to-5 man. Bandmates don't get mad at him for going wild. They like making each other laugh, because bands that don't laugh break up, he says.

Young responds very sparingly when asked about Stefani, but he points out that as famous musicians, all the band members try to stay grounded in reality, "even though it's a strange reality" of constantly "talking about yourself" to journalists, then getting eyeballed by strangers in hotels and restaurants in tour-stop cities. It helps that they all went to college after being raised well, he says.

"We're not just a bunch of dumb (expletives) out there trying to" sleep with groupies, he says.

"We've all had solid upbringings, so we're not flighty people to begin with, and we have a lot of the same interests musically, often," he adds.

They just try to keep spreading smiles. They can always get naked to fill that bill.

"That's one of the ways I do it," Young says.