The Washington Post (June 15th 1997)

Girl Without A Doubt

Halfway through No Doubt's feminist-lite hit "Just a Girl," vocalist Gwen Stefani invites the boys in the Worcester Centrum audience to sing along: "I'm just a girl . . . I'm just a girl in the world."

The boys comply, so Stefani gloats -- "Haa-ha!"

"Now what about the girls? What about all the cute, sweet, innocent, sexy girls?" she asks. Her voice is sugary and almost Betty Boop.

"Okay, girls, ready? It goes like this: {Expletive} you, I'm a girl!' "

The filled-to-capacity arena explodes with shrieks and giggles. The girls are self-conscious and red-faced as they repeat after Stefani, but they're also as defiant as you can be when you're 12 years old and have come to your first-ever concert with your mom.

So what if the editors of Rolling Stone voted No Doubt the third-worst band of 1996? Does it really matter if its music has been dismissed as bubble gum pop and its frontwoman is regarded in many quarters as a videogenic ditz?

No Doubt's third album, "Tragic Kingdom," has sold 7 million copies, making it one of last year's top sellers. With only brief breaks, the band has been touring for 2 1/2 years, graduating from opening act to headliner, from the 5,500-seat Patriot Center for its last local appearance in December to the 25,000-seat Nissan Pavilion, where it performs June 18.

All that touring has helped raise the band's profile. So has incessant MTV exposure and magazine covers displaying sultry photographs of Stefani. As the band becomes more successful, its audience keeps getting younger. Now thousands of prepubescent and teenage girls want to be like Gwen. They dress like her, copycatting her hair, her makeup and the shiny Indian bindi that dots the center of her forehead. Wherever she goes, Stefani is followed by girls who scream and swoon as if the year is 1964 and she's the Beatles.

Stefani, 27, is a glamour puss, but she is also a product of the Anaheim, Calif., punk and ska scene that spawned No Doubt. She performs in baggy men's tuxedo pants and clunky Doc Martens; her ankles are constantly bruised because she cavorts around stage in such heavy boots. In the "Trapped in a Box" video, she crowd-surfs.

One of punk's enduring legacies is its anti-star democratic ethic, and the teenage girls who adore Stefani do so because she acts like them. She talks like them. She still lives at home with her parents. Stefani has ordinary interests -- makeup, boyfriends, pizza -- and ordinary concerns, such as the size of her rear end.

"Gwen is someone that girls can look up to and feel like they know," says No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal. "She is very Everygirl."

Even now, as Stefani lives the charmed life of a pop music celebrity -- she's dating a rock star, Bush vocalist Gavin Rossdale, and recently acquired an agent to handle film offers -- she still clings to ordinary aspirations. Again and again, she insists that more than anything else, she wants a family. "All I wanted to ever do was get married and have babies, have a house," she says. "So it's weird that I'm in a rock group."

The "just regular folks" pop icon may be a cliche, but Stefani seems genuinely down-to-earth. A few hours before the Worcester show, she passes the time in the dressing room reserved for opening act the Vandals, pals from back home in Anaheim. She's wearing a white ski cap, a scruffy long skirt and a scruffier striped sweater. Everyone is cutting up about diarrhea, one of touring's less appealing perks.

Stefani pulls off the ski cap and shakes loose her dirty, mussed hair. Then she pulls a bobby-pinned clump to her face and sniffs.

She grimaces. "It smells like my dog." A Loser Band'

The pop-music universe has become so fragmented and fickle that Stefani's ascendancy should not be interpreted as meaning too much. But it's safe to assume that the perennial PMS of Alanis Morissette and other angry white females has lost some of its cachet.

Stefani co-wrote most of the songs on "Tragic Kingdom," much of which is about the breakup of her relationship with bandmate Kanal. But unlike Morissette, Liz Phair, PJ Harvey and the entire riot-grrl set, Stefani keeps her fists unclenched. When she came up with the lyrics to "Happy Now?" ("You had the best/ But you gave her up/ 'Cause dependency might interrupt"), she called Kanal and recited them for him.

"You break up with your boyfriend that you've been with for almost eight years, and you're writing about him, and he's in your group and he's going to play the song that's about him," she says. "And then you travel with him on a bus 24 hours a day. It's a really weird situation, but we've made it work."

Kanal has complained that whenever the band plays the breaking-up ballad "Don't Speak," he feels as if everyone in the audience is staring at him. "He was the bad guy in everybody's eyes, and I was the victim," says Stefani, "which is not fair."

Stefani thinks that people read too much into her lyrics. For one thing, she's matured since the breakup, which took place three years ago. "I was a different person then. In that kind of situation, you are totally insecure, you totally are a frightened female," she says. "You don't know what to do with yourself, and you just feel like you have no purpose."

But there's something else: Stefani didn't anticipate just how strange it would feel to publicly relive the pain of something so personal. "When the record came out, it was senseless to deny the whole relationship thing, because almost all the songs were about that," she says. "Later, we started thinking maybe we should have been more quiet about it. But how could we know the band was going to get big?"

No Doubt started out 10 years ago as a bunch of high-school friends who were into the same music: "Two-tone" British groups like Madness, the Specials and The Selecter that revived Jamaican ska during the late '70s and early '80s. At that point, No Doubt included Stefani's older brother, Eric. (He has since left the band, but not before co-writing many of the songs on "Tragic Kingdom.")

Half the band worked at the local Dairy Queen. "The managers would leave and we'd all eat," Stefani says. "But I hated it. I got so fat when I worked there. And the benches had wood slabs, and these bars. I had to scrub them with a toothbrush to get the fudge off."

Within a year, the band's original vocalist committed suicide. The replacement left to support his pregnant girlfriend. Stefani, who had grown up singing along to "Annie" and "The Sound of Music" soundtracks and sang backup for the band, became the lead singer by default. She was 17.

For the first few years, No Doubt struggled like hundreds of other obscure bands. It evolved from playing ska covers to bouncy, quirky pop that revisits '80s new wave. In 1991, it was signed by Interscope Records, but the debut album flopped. The band put out a second CD itself, recording half of it in a studio Eric Stefani built in his garage.

Over the course of a decade, it grew accustomed to being a "loser band." The success of "Tragic Kingdom," whose title refers to another Anaheim attraction, has taken some getting used to.

Part of the problem is that both the media and the band's audiences are fascinated with Stefani, but less so with the rest of the band -- Kanal, guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young. "At certain interviews, people were really rude to them," Stefani says. Photographers would crop band pictures to delete everyone but the lead singer. Magazines sell better if their covers are adorned with a lone attractive female rather than an entire band.

"At this point, it's something that the rest of us have accepted," says Kanal, "whereas when it first happened, the impact was pretty awful. We kind of expected it -- the lead singer always gets a lot of attention and a female always gets a lot of attention -- but we didn't expect it to be as intense as it was."

Being the only female band member has its difficulties, such as the awkwardness of changing in coed dressing rooms -- "Okay guys! Turn around!" But there are other tensions that set Stefani apart from her bandmates, and they have intensified with No Doubt's increasing popularity. "They've never been like typical rock guys before, but this tour seems a little different because there are just so many girls," says Stefani. "I think there's a fairy princess that goes around and picks all the big-breasted girls and brings them backstage. Then I'm expected to want to hang out with them, and I'm just like, uch."

Even when she complains, Stefani sounds relentlessly cheerful. "I'm like, where do I fit into this? . . . I'll just stay in my dressing room and be depressed and not have any friends. That's like the newest problem, but I think I'm over it. I was feeling really upset about it before I got my period, but I feel better now."

The sexy-frontwoman gig comes with its own set of occupational hazards. Before No Doubt appeared on the Grammys last winter, Stefani spent weeks fretting about the pounds she had put on during the band's European tour. "I finally said . . . I don't care. This is me, and I'm just going to have fun.' I felt like I looked fine, but then my mom and some other people told me that on KROQ, which is the big station at home, they were saying that I looked fat. On the radio! Like, how sad is that?

"You know, it's confusing for a girl because you want to feel sexy, you want to look sexy," she says. "But it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that people take you halfway seriously as a human." Thank Heaven for Little Girls

Meet 'n' greet gantlets follow nearly every No Doubt show. After the Worcester set, Stefani sneaks away for a quick workout -- "the torture of my life" -- and the rest of the band begins the first session without her.

Everyone keeps asking when Gwen will arrive, and when she finally does, a squealfest ensues. One girl rushes over. "Can I, like, hug you?

Stefani smiles. "Uh, yeah."

"Gwen, you're my favorite person in the whole world."

"Gwen, can you sign my T-shirt?"

"Gwen, I think you are soooo beautiful."

Stefani's littlest fans can't really articulate why they are so entranced with her. A slight girl swimming in an oversize No Doubt tank top explains that she likes Gwen because she has posters of Gwen in her room. Not long ago, says Stefani, "this little tiny girl" asked if she could sit on her lap. Stefani acquiesced, and the girl sat there, deliriously happy, and then burst into tears.

Once No Doubt became the darlings of MTV last year, Stefani couldn't go to the grocery store anymore. "I end up doing an autograph signing," she says. "This is fun, you know, but not when you're, like, buying tampons."

Every time Stefani returns to her parents' house in Anaheim, word gets out, and a parade of fathers brings their daughters by with cameras and pen and paper for autographs. "I call them trick-or-treaters. I don't open the door anymore and I can't answer my parents' phone," she says.

"It really blows my mind that I could be a role model. It's a little scary because you think, I just am myself, I don't have any answers to any problems.' "

But, in a way, Stefani thinks she sets a good example. Because she grew up in a conservative Catholic family, she explains, she's not likely to emulate the aggressive professional sexiness of performers like Madonna. "I just never felt the need as far as talking about my sexuality, feeling sexy, or wanted to express sex in any way," she says. "I would be too embarrassed. It always seemed like such a private thing to me."

Every night, when young girls bring Stefani presents and notes, she marvels about how sweet they are. "Then I feel really guilty because I might say the F-word during the show.

"But I don't think it's so bad because . . . I'm saying it for a purpose," she says. "The reason that I'm saying it is to say, Do what you want, no matter what sex you are.' I think that's probably not so bad for a little girl to learn."

She giggles.