Star Tribune (Aug. 8th 1996)
Having fun with retro sounds is no problem for No Doubt
No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani is rock's It Girl of the summer.
No Doubt's video of "Spiderwebs" shot to No. 1 on MTV. No Doubt's album, "Tragic Kingdom," has climbed to No. 10 on Billboard's best-seller list. And, on teen nights at First Avenue, girls show up wearing baggies and a ponytail a la Stefani. "Walking on the main floor last Sunday, it felt like I had to wade through No Doubt," said a First Avenue staffer.
"It's definitely weirder in airports now," said No Doubt drummer Adrian Young before the band from Anaheim, Calif., went onstage at soldout First Avenue Wednesday. "People ask for autographs. Especially Gwen - she gets too much attention. I wouldn't want that much attention every day."
"I don't know what I'm going to do when it's all over; I'll have to go into a mental institution because I'll have to get used to not having all this attention," joked Stefani, wearing baggy pants and cat's-eye sunglasses over her bleached blond hair.
When will it be over?
"Two weeks, probably," Stefani said with a laugh. "Five minutes nowadays."
Fun, not frustration
Entertainment Weekly dubbed Stefani the anti-Courtney Love, the first mid-'90s female alterna-rock star who isn't angry. "We're not a mid-'90s angst band, and if it's uncool to not be an angst band and cross over to pop music, so be it," said Young, who just cut off his cool devil's horns hairdo because he was bored with it. "We just have the sound that we've had for nine years."
No Doubt prefers fun over frustration, preferrably to a ska or reggae beat. In other words, No Doubt could be renamed No Problem.
Except for Entertainment Weekly, which rankled the band. The magazine slagged Stefani, with her exposed belly button, sequined eyelashes and fire-engine-red lipstick, as Betty Grable for the mosh-pit set. Like Entertainment Weekly doesn't use sex to sell copies, Stefani grumbled Wednesday on No Doubt's tour bus.
Stefani is no riot grrrl, but No Doubt's breakthrough hit, "Just a Girl," is a satire, not a celebration, of dependent females. If it wasn't evident on the album or the video, it was obvious in concert as she pouted like a little girl before shouting an expletive.
Retro and fresh
Clearly more of an actress than an activist, Stefani (sporting a Mary Richards hairdo onstage) and her band are a throwback to early MTV, to an era when girls just wanted to have fun. Part street-tough Cyndi Lauper and part California-styled Debbie Harry, Stefani favors a Pogo-ing party beat, by mixing new-wave (B-52s), ska (Madness) and corporate-rock (Pat Benatar). In concert at First Avenue, it was retro and fresh at the same time.
The teen-dominated audience loved it, Pogoing to the beat and singing along when prompted. The '80s potpourri was probably a new sound to many of these young ears. Tom Dumont's guitar provided the ska rhythms, while trombonist Gabriel McNair and trumpeter Steve Bradley added extra energy and ska accents, which were more prominent onstage than on record.
Hootie, No Doubt
"Tragic Kingdom" has sold 1.2 million copies, including 87,000 in the past week. Young had hoped to sell 100,000. "I don't know who's buying our record," he said. "There's a lot of people next to their Hootie {& the Blowfish} record; they must have ours."
Even though No Doubt has been around for nine years and made four albums, there wasn't much depth to the sextet's 16-song, 80-minute set at First Avenue. There were two instrumentals, including a silly sendup of "Star Wars" before the encore of the Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."Members of the opening acts, Goldfinger and X Members, joined in the Beatles party and two of them - including X Members singer Gabby, who appears to weigh more than 275 pounds - got into stage diving.
Even though Goldfinger and X Members are more punk than No Doubt, the cominbation of cartoon punks stage-diving during a Beatles song seemed a fun and fitting conclusion to this evening of new wave-meets-the mosh pit.