South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Oct. 25th 2002)
No Doubt recipe for success: a little reggae, a little rock, a little weepy pop and some Gwen Stefani glamour
No Doubt drummer Adrian Young went to see Rush in concert not long ago, partly out of curiosity about a band he had loved as a kid and partly to marvel at one of rock's most fearsome rhythm sections.
"The musicianship was beyond amazing," Young raves. Except for one thing: Whenever the Canadian power trio played reggae, a genre that Rush has experimented with on a handful of songs, the would-be Caribbean vibe sounded, well, Canadian. Young remembers a similar quality to the early strivings of No Doubt, four high school kids playing reggae rhythms with the stilted, punctual deference of tourists.
"We always -- how do I put this? -- we were really white when we played it," he says.
Young's band performs on Tuesday at the Office Depot Center in Sunrise. Arena-scale drawing power is one reason that Young sounds credible critiquing reggae technique: "We think we're a little better now."
No Doubt's music is a pop-wise and hitmaking mixture of reggae, ska, dancehall and dub, as well as rock 'n' roll, teary-eyed pop and, on their latest millions-selling album, Rock Steady, dance- club electronics. If Young, bassist Tony Kanal, guitarist Tom Dumont and singer Gwen Stefani have mastered the shivery, fluid motion of the riddim, and incorporated it well, it is because they've been at it for years.
"Ever since the band started in 1987, reggae has been a part of the sound and I guess it just came from listening to bands like the Specials and, of course, listening to the Wailers do reggae," Young, 33, says in a telephone interview. "At the time, the English ska bands were doing their version of reggae, and even the Clash, some of what they did was intriguing to us."
In fact, it seems to Young that no genre of music was safe from No Doubt's curiosity.
"Even in the beginning, the music, stylistically, was all over the map," he says. "And we were all teenagers. We're going a mile a minute from punk to ska to Dixieland to I don't know. It was just all over the place. I think it took us a long time to get signed because our songs were all over the place."
Once they got signed, it took time to break through. Two albums, No Doubt (1992) and The Beacon Street Collection (1995), attracted little attention outside the Orange County, Calif., ska-punk scene that spawned the band. It's just as well, according to Young: "I'd say, as a whole, the band is not excited about the first two albums."
The third, Tragic Kingdom (1995), was the charm. A hit single markedly un-influenced by reggae, Don't Speak, took off in early 1996 and became a veritable national anthem of teenaged breakup. That flamenco-tinged swooner, about real-life romantic travails between Stefani and Kanal, brought Abba-sized recognition to the quartet, in particular Stefani, whose punky magnetism had attracted most of the cameras and the breathless prose even before the band's fame officially became staggering.
The video for Don't Speak dramatized the media's tendency to break bands down to their photogenic front-person, and suddenly everyone knew No Doubt as the cool group with the sexy singer whose heart had been broken by the dark, handsome bass player. To go with its catchy music, No Doubt had catchy drama, and the band members spoke freely about its effects on the personalities and the music, while still holding together as a band.
Job tension, breakups and all, No Doubt vaulted from clubs and California theaters to much bigger venues. A pair of smaller hits from Tragic Kingdom followed: Spiderwebs, all dizzy ska, and Just a Girl, with its new-wave bop. Don't Speak had been such a towering hit, however, that No Doubt headed into a sabaatical trailed by questions about its ability to repeat the coup -- drama and suspense even between albums.
Return of Saturn came out in spring of 2000, nearly five years after the release of Tragic Kingdom. Commercially, it did not have identical impact. But its appealing mix of pop atmospherics and playful style-hopping established that the band could take on more new sounds and still come out sounding essentially No Doubt. Stefani had not stopped singing about her disillusion over Kanal -- the proverbial trooper, unflappable as he could be standing one spot over and hearing all those reproachful lyrics directed at him. But reviews were positive and attention did not wane. If anything, No Doubt engendered even more affection from fans and the press. With its media-friendly appeal and likable, approachable air, and music that never completely disappeared from radio, this was a band that people wanted to succeed.
"If that's true, I think it's probably consistent with the way things are in this band," says Young. "There's a reason we've stayed together for 15 years. We treat each other well within the band. Generally, as a band, I think we're pretty good people, and I think it comes across. We're not dysfunctional in any way. There aren't any drug habits. ... There's nothing too crazy or major that seems to come our way."
Stefani married rock singer Gavin Rossdale last month, a happy hereafter. Meanwhile, Young says, the primary challenge of being in No Doubt remains musical.
"It's been like that since day one," he says. "We have internal checks on every section of every song. We're putting them together to the point where it's, `That part sounds too much like this part. This section sounds too much like that other song.' We have to vary it up a little bit, and not just for copyright infringement."
Young says that everyone in the band feels strongly about that point, that in popular music at large there is so much casual thievery, the band works hard not to cannibalize itself or its peers.
The variety Young cites also requires him to be adept at several styles of drumming. For Rock Steady, he had to learn a new technique: playing along with machines. It's not as easy as it sounds, staying level with sequencers and electronic tracks while giving the rhythm a personal, human dimension.
"We want the tracks to be supporting and us to be rocking," he says.
It's an approach Young is still perfecting on the road, as several songs from Rock Steady, including the lead single Hey Baby, are played live with so-called "click tracks" that provide extra layers of sampled sound and instrumentation. It's another departure from an old-school band like Rush, which is monastic in its zeal to play every single note of its studio records absolutely live on tour, without pre-recorded assistance. The only fast rule Young says he has for drumming in arenas is "hard as I can."
As it plays to enthusiastic crowds, No Doubt has become something of a lost ideal, a band that brings intelligence to music with mainstream appeal. Those two notions have seemed mutually exclusive, even hostile, in a period marked by polar swings from prefab teen- pop to chest-beating rap-metal. But Young thinks No Doubt's favorable standing is more accident than ambition.
"We don't have that high of an opinion of ourselves, like we're carrying any torch for rock music," he says. "We just do what we've always done. We make songs and records, and our first two records weren't as interesting or on as big a scale as the last three happen to have been. But we have definitely just been doing our thing."