Declaration of faith

Little Red Rocket hold on after a bumpy ride

by Jonathan Perry

It would be easy to mistake "I Believe in What You Do," the first track on Little Red Rocket's sophomore album, It's In the Sound (Monolyth), as a strength-in-the-face-of-adversity allegory. The song sounds like a thinly veiled commentary on the band's misfortunes at the hands of a major-label merger that saw them dropped before they could record a single note. You know the story: promising indie-pop band -- in this case, Little Red Rocket -- with strong grassroots ties (Birmingham, Alabama) record strong indie debut ('97's Who Did You Pay, released on Tim/Kerr records) and get snapped up by big-time major label (Geffen). Said indie-pop band have visions of sugar plums -- perhaps even platinum records -- dancing in their heads. Then comes post-grunge, and industry downsizing. Along with scores of other one-time indie bands who have seized the corporate carrot dangled in front of them (Luna, Grant Lee Buffalo, and, closer to home, Gigolo Aunts and Fuzzy come to mind), Little Red Rocket are told to take a hike, in the wake of a massive Universal Music Group merge and purge in 1999.

Fast-forward to the buoyant, hopeful-sounding track that leads off the new disc, which came out earlier this year on Boston's Monolyth label. A swinging horn blows a reveille intro to "I Believe in What You Do" as singer/guitarist Orenda Fink (the foursome use "Rocket" as a stage surname, as in "Orenda Rocket") slides into the lyric: "Darker days are here again. . . . It's the same all over town, everyone is worried at how they sound. . . . These darker days are trying to find you, you just have to beat them right back down."

"That was one I started actually writing for a friend that had nothing to do with music," Fink explains from her adopted home of Athens, where she's joined on the phone by band co-founder Maria Taylor, who also plays guitar and sings. "For that song, I got inspiration from [other] people who were going through shit too. On this album, I think that we basically just wanted to touch on universal issues that everyone could identify with, like love and hope and despair. We've been through a lot the last few years, and we just wanted to say that life can be great and you can be happy, and that whatever you're going through, you're not alone."

Little Red Rocket -- who are scheduled to swing through the Northeast on a tour that brings them to Providence on June 23, Worcester on June 24, Portland on June 26, and (after a quickie flight to LA to audition for VH1's Band On the Run series) Boston on June 30 -- sound happier than they've been in some time. Happier, certainly, than they were during the "darker days" that left their future in doubt.

The songwriting alliance between Fink and Taylor was forged the way most good partnerships are -- by chance, friendship, and chemistry. The two met at a fine-arts high school in Birmingham where Fink was majoring in theater and Fink in dance. One day, Taylor spotted her future partner playing acoustic guitar and struck up a conversation. "The dynamic was just there immediately," she recalls. "It was strange because we weren't even friends and we didn't even have any of the same friends. But we clicked right away."

The pair began playing as an acoustic duo, honing the breezy, Brill Building retro-pop harmonies that would later become a signature on It's In the Sound. Soon after going electric with a since-departed rhythm section (the current line-up includes bassist Jackie Ferguson and drummer Scott Sozebie, who also plays with Fink in the Athens experimental space-prog outfit Japancakes), Little Red Rocket released Who Did You Pay, which garnered a slew of positive reviews. Barely six months after they had formed, the band found themselves signing on the dotted line for Geffen. Who knew that's when things would go downhill? As if a music industry shake-up weren't enough, thuggish rap metal and pre-teen fluff were becoming ascendant as the suburban pop du jour. Little Red Rocket's major-label debut never even got off the launching pad, and the band languished in limbo. It was, as Fink and Taylor recall, a mostly frustrating, often demoralizing time.

"The worst part of it was just wasting two years -- we literally wasted two years," says Taylor sourly. "We did some demos, but for the most part we were put on the back burner while Geffen dealt with priority bands. So it was a blessing in disguise that we got dropped. Their way of keeping us on hold was to keep saying to us, `Send us a song,' and then they'd tear them apart or tell us why they would never be a single."

Fink agrees that it was liberating not to "have to write for somebody else's agenda" but claims the band learned some hard, perhaps inevitable, lessons: "We're not completely trashing all major labels. I think a lot has to do with who you're working with, and I'm not saying that Geffen was all bad. But I do think it matters who your A&R person is and whether they know what you're about and support that."

Instead of breaking under the burden of battered hopes, Fink and Taylor decided they needed to reinvigorate the band. A change of scenery and some new faces seemed like a good idea. "I think our friendship has helped us," says Taylor. "We knew that we were friends and wanted to continue to make music together and wanted each other in our lives." And despite their accelerated history, Fink points out that Little Red Rocket were still very young and largely unknown outside the Southeast. "We were still so underdeveloped that we never thought not to do this -- I mean, what else would we do? Work at a burger place?"

The move to Athens paid off. Back to being a duo, Fink and Taylor recruited Sozebie to play drums. He in turn brought along friend and musical collaborator Jackie Ferguson to play bass. Before long, the new line-up had a clutch of songs that ranged from buzzing, guitar-stoked jawbreakers like the Veruca Salt-ish "California" (which is being serviced to modern-rock radio as the first single) to the sticky summer languor of "Lies," a standout track on the new disc that splits the difference between, say, Luscious Jackson and Boston's Star Ghost Dog.

Enter Huge & Jolly Management -- a formerly-Athens-based husband-and-wife team comprising Hugo and Carol Burnham. Carol had for years worked in marketing and publicity; and prior to his A&R career, Hugo had drummed for the Leeds agit-prop punk legends Gang of Four. "We caught them at a little club in Athens," Burnham recalls over the phone from the couple's new company headquarters in Amesbury. "They had such great songs, and they were such good people, that we said to them, `Look, we're not going to wait around for a record deal to happen. We're going to make our own record. If you only define yourselves as a band that has any value if you get a record deal, then you'll never do it.' Because that's not the goal. It's a goal, but it's not the goal. Writing songs, playing songs, being musicians, that's ultimately what being a band is about." Without further ado, Burnham dispatched Little Red Rocket to the studio.

Eight days and some 100 hours later, having subsisted on what Taylor jokes was a diet of "sugar, alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes," the band emerged with an album of varied pop pleasures ranging from the pump organ and martial percussion-driven "Spell" to the baroque folk pop of "Italian Song" to the sugary psychedelica of "Ocean On the Sky." Besides sharper, more memorable songwriting overall, the disc embraces a variety of aural textures that hadn't been as evident on the band's debut. "That's where we had started to go musically, and with this album, we had the freedom to do it," Fink says. "We heard piano and strings on these songs, and in Athens, you can get anything you want."

Burnham sent a copy of the intended album to Monolyth Records president Jeff Marshall. The two men had been friends since 1988, when they had worked together in signing the Heretix to Island Records. In fact, Marshall had first crossed paths with Little Red Rocket a couple of years prior when as booking agent for Bill's Bar he gave them a slot at the Lansdowne Street club. "I thought they were cool, I knew what they were about, but after they came up here once, I lost track of their career. When this record came to me, it was completed. We heard the final mixes and we were blown away." Marshall signed the band to a three-album deal (Monolyth has an option for the next two), even though he realizes breaking an indie-pop band in a national music market in the year 2000 isn't the easiest of tasks.

"I think, definitely, the radio market is more difficult for us now," he acknowledges. "You're fighting a tide with rap metal and Britney Spears and 'N Sync. Radio is so consolidated right now." Yet Marshall says there's also the band's own tenacity and initiative to consider. "After they got dropped, they could have done what so many other bands have done and said, `Fuck it, what are we going to do now?' But instead, they've done the opposite and dug in their heels. And I think they've become a better band because of it."

Little Red Rocket perform at the Green Room on Friday, June 23. Call 351-7665.