“It’s so unreal right now,” says Beastie Ulery, the vocalist for the San Diego rock band, Soulcracker. “We are [are starring] on a national television show, but we’re struggling to eat every day. I’m having a tough time paying rent. I just applied for a job delivering prepaid phone cards. Our drummer, Bob [Hamel], is delivering Pizzas.”
The show – which airs every Sunday night on VH1 from April until June -- is called Bands on the Run. It is a fifteen-episode, reality-based television series that pits four unsigned rock bands (Harlow AD, Josh Dodes Band, Flickerstick, and Soulcracker) against each other on a national road tour. It is the Survivor of rock and roll.
The competition is decided by ticket and merchandise sales. The winning combo not only receives $50,000, $100,000 in equipment, and a promise to film a rock video, but draws national attention to their group as well. But celebrity always comes at a price. Each phone conversation, every ill-advised innuendo, every emotional glitch, all drunken soliloquies and midnight gropes are not only fodder for the cameras, but their purpose.
Now, Soulcracker anxiously awaits the series premier, wondering, if they have irrevocably embarrassed themselves before family and friends or if anyone will ever take them seriously again.
“We don’t ever want to be ‘TV’s Soulcracker,’ says Beastie, over eggs and coffee at the Old Town House restaurant in Ocean Beach, “And it is risky for a band to be judged by their persons rather than the music. Take Marilyn Manson. People judge him by his music and his image. But they never see him taking a shower or brushing his teeth. . . . They see, exactly what he wants them to.
“We’re concerned with what our peers will think of us,” he adds. “Especially, musicians that we respect. . . . When we were promoting our shows on the VH1 tour, and people asked us what we sounded like, we would say, ‘Police meets Weezer.’ But the more I said that the more I realized, ‘ Weezer is going to hate our guts.’”
“Are you worried about what your mama will think when she sees you on VH1 acting like a dopey rock star?” I asked.
“There are things I do on stage and songs my mom takes offense to,” he replied. “But she knows I’m a good person. . . . If she sees me grabbing a girl’s boobs, she won’t like watching it, but she’s not going to change her feelings about me.”
To ensure the suspense of the competition, VH1 required all participants to sign confidentiality agreements. Soulcracker can neither confirm nor deny whether they won the grand prize. Lately, however, there does seem to be a twinkle in their eyes and bumble bees in their socks. And in the pilot episode Soulcracker shines. They are shown waking up early and working the San Francisco streets: slapping bumper stickers in strategic locations, talking to strippers, singing for karaoke crowds, setting up and playing on a city sidewalk, calling radio stations.
The other bands’ primary form of promotion is sabotage: Flickerstick strips a Soulcracker flyer from a telephone pole; Harlow AD crashes a Flickerstick performance.
When Soulcracker argues the finer points of music, friendship, promotion, growth, the other groups linger over two topics: bitch and moan. When one of the Harlow women suggested a flaw in the contest rules and not within themselves, Sutton picked up a megaphone and shouted, “Go and eat some babies you sick witch.”
“I’m afraid people will see the show and say, ‘What nerds. All they do is work,’” says Ulery in post-omelet reverie. “A lot of people really want to think it’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And to a certain extent it is. But if you want to be successful in the entertainment business, you have to be almost flawless. That’s what the series is about: unsigned bands working hard to get people to come to their shows. And it’s exactly what we do in real life too; travel around and play in crappy bars.”
In this way, Bands on the Run is very much a reality television show. In other ways it is not.
“There are times you are just acutely aware of the camera. For instance, you’re sitting in the hotel room, not doing anything, and a camera walks in. Suddenly you feel a need to perform; you feel compelled to have a discussion. Not that we’re not going to discuss things the way we normally would, but that we are going to force the conversation.”
Note
that Beastie said, “When the ‘camera’ walks in.” As if it
had legs. Certainly, that kind of relentless exposure can blunt your notion
of a camera. In the chaotic religion of reality television, cameras are deities.
“The whole thing was so surreal,” he continues. “Like, one day, I was walking down the street to use the pay phone, the camera chased me. He was walking in front and back-pedaling, filming as I used the phone. It was so. . . exciting. I remember cracking up because, it’s just little old me using this little old phone.”
“Did you ever come to embrace the cameras?”
“We got cocky and started telling the crew how to set up shots. Everybody in our band fancies ourselves as a film buff . . . the longer the thing went on the more we thought we knew what we were talking about. I remember there was a big billboard of Ricky Lake on a street corner. I thought, ‘I can lift Ramsey and he can put a Soulcracker sticker on her big fat smile. So I told the cameraman how to position himself to get the best shot.”
The waitress arrived with our check. The bill was $12.34. Beastie removed, almost proudly, a handful of nickels and dimes from his pocket.
“Yup, I’m a big time TV Star,” he joked.
“What was your first thought the first time you encountered the camera?” I asked.
“‘Remain calm,’” he answered as he counted his feeble coinage.
“There is this technique the band uses frequently when we’re doing interviews or [taking meetings]. We call it LAMA. It stands for: Listen. Acknowledge. Make a statement. Ask a question.
“I learned it in a sales training presentation for some corporate job. It’s a great way to conduct yourself, even if it did come from corporate America, . . . . I LAMA chicks all the time.”
“Did the band crack under the pressure of perpetual cameras? Are you guys stronger or weaker from it?”
“It was difficult while we were doing it. I remember getting annoyed with a certain member because of the way he was promoting the band. He was pushier than I liked. I’m more of a LAMA guy. . . . I think you should invite someone to your show rather than demand they be there. I took some pot shots at [my band mate] and I feel terrible because ‘We’re supposed to be in this together.’ So when we got back home it was like, ‘Thank God, we’re back to normal.’ Now we get along just like we did before we left.”
“Was there tension between Soulcracker and the other bands?”
“Definitely. There was an incident where I insulted one of the other bands,” he answered. “I said to a group of hard rock fans that this particular band was a light-rock, corporatey sounding band. . . . One night three members of their group, who I won’t name, and one of their friends knocked on my hotel door. They asked if they could talk to me outside. I was tired and said, ‘Can we talk tomorrow?’ They said, ‘No, it’s kind of important.’
“They must have each approached my door with one fist balled and hitting it into the other hand, because they had such evil in their eyes.
“They said, ‘So we heard about what you were saying about us and we just want to know if you think that’s cool. Had I not done my best to discuss it rationally it probably would have become violent.”
The band is home now. The series is running and Soulcracker fans are gathering to watch it and whipping themselves into a mini-frenzy. Most say it’s a lock; Soulcracker will win this competition, and they are about to become huge.
Beastie is not so certain. He says the record companies are actually using that time honored, record label cliché, “Sorry, we don’t hear a single.”
“We’ve already met plenty of important people in the record industry,”
he explains. “But they still don’t care that we have a television
show. They don’t care that millions of dollars are being spent on our promotion
-- that’s millions of dollars a record company won’t have to spend
if they sign us. They’re waiting to see the public’s reaction. Record
labels don’t like risks. . . . . I’m not saying Hollywood types are
all evil. But, you just hear how great you are all the time, and I still can’t
pay bills. Don’t tell me how great I am. Help me out here.”