No Doubt: Band rocks steady all the way to Hawai'i
By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Entertainment Writer
 |
| No Doubt, the darling of the pop/ska/rock-steady set, heads for Honolulu for a sold-out show.
No Doubt 7 p.m. Saturday Blaisdell Arena Sold out |
Lead vocalist Gwen Stefani's schedule, I was told early on, was extremely hectic and not open for an interview. No surprise, as Stefani is all but set to finally get hitched to Gavin Rossdale of British rock band Bush later this year with two wedding ceremonies in Los Angeles and London to accommodate each pop star's family.
Guitarist Tom Dumont, drummer Adrian Young and bassist Tony Kanal, I was informed, would likely be available, but would have to be found and cornered. A daunting process, which takes the band's hard-working and tenacious Interscope Records publicist all of three weeks to finally put together.
"I've got this little project going on where I'm trying to do remixes of all of our songs from the ('Rock Steady') album," says Dumont from his Los Angeles home, explaining what he's been doing with his summer vacation. "Not to be released, (but) just for me to practice trying to learn how to do remixes. It's just a creative outlet, I suppose."
He's done two for each of the "Rock Steady" CD's three hit singles: "Hey Baby," "Hella Good," and "Underneath It All." This, between catching up with home improvement projects and long undone household chores.
"They're OK," he surmises, when prodded about the remixes. "They're mostly kind of unfinished. I'll kind of put together ideas for remixing, and get through the first and second chorus and just kind of drop it."
Dumont, 34, exhales a deep laugh. "I've been basically staying at home, going out to barbeques, staying for dinner at my girlfriend's and surfing, which I'm glad to do a little bit of."
Kanal, 32, bows out of his same-day interview, but a call comes in the next day from Young, the band's formerly (Dumont promises) oft-birthday-suited and still (at least until Stefani weds) sole married member.
"Well, I was just in the middle of feeding my son (Mason), who's 6 months old," says Young, 33, from his Long Beach home, when asked what he's been up to of late. "I've got my wife here so I said, 'OK, take over. I've got to do this interview.' One of the things I do (on break) is spend a LOT of time with them. I'm enjoying it so much." Young pauses. "And I play a LOT of golf."
No Doubt's short rest is well-deserved, considering the band has hardly had a vacation since releasing "Rock Steady," its fourth and second-best-selling album ever. Released late last year, "Rock Steady" has so far sold almost 2 million copies.
Although that total is still nowhere near unseating the band's breakthrough album "Tragic Kingdom" — which sold more than 12 million albums worldwide on the strength of the band's sun-kissed Cali-ska hits "Just A Girl," "Spiderwebs," and especially "Don't Speak" — the new album does represent its own kind of breakthrough for No Doubt as a band.
Not only is the dancehall- and dance-floor-friendly "Rock Steady" album the most quickly whipped up and critically well-received of No Doubt's 15-year career, it also finds the Orange County-born band, for the most part, happy and perhaps more importantly, still firmly together.
No small accomplishment, considering the future of No Doubt seemed all but uncertain to just about everyone (including the band) when "Tragic Kingdom" made its members — and especially Malibu blonde, pouty-lipped and covergirl-ready lead chanteuse Stefani — instant media superstars.
Explains Dumont of Stefani's overnight celebrity, "For so many years before, we had been the four or five friends in the garage playing the local gigs. We'd never experienced (celebrity). And all of a sudden here was this new thing." Knowing Stefani's commitment to No Doubt, Dumont says the boys in the band immediately got over a brief "naive fear" that their lead singer would depart for solo glory.
"(But) the other side of it was just what was happening to us on a day-to-day basis," says Dumont. "Like where Spin Magazine said, 'Well, you can be on the cover, but only Gwen. Not the guys.' It just feels bad. We understood why ... you know, they'll sell more magazines. And we did it because it was good for the band and good for all of us. But it felt a little weird, you know?"
Instead of ingesting angst over Stefani's celebrity, Dumont says the band chose to appreciate the "Tragic Kingdom" hoopla as a brief sugar high.
"The way we were seeing everything was ... success is going to be very fleeting," explains Dumont. "We were going to be done with (by) tomorrow anyway." And so the band toured for two-and-a-half years behind "Tragic," which kept its members away from songwriting and the recording studio. Five years — a lifetime away from notoriously fickle music buyers and the music industry in general — would pass before No Doubt released its follow-up "Return of Saturn."
"When we got home, we spent a year writing the record," Dumont remembers. "I'll admit that's too long, and, yeah, we were experiencing some pressure and some growing pains. We just wanted to give it a great effort. We figured if we at least put a great effort into it, that if it sank we would at least feel proud of what we did."
Instead, the long process of putting together "Saturn" created an album that found Stefani's trademark confessional lyrics a tad too serious, and the band's production work too tightly wound for fans who were expecting the bouncy fun and loose grooves of "Tragic."
"Saturn" wound up a critical and commercial disappointment, spawning tepid sales of just under 1.5 million copies and minor chart hits from "Ex-Girlfriend" and "Simple Kind of Life."
"The great thing (about 'Saturn') is that we found something out about ourselves in the process, and we corrected those errors, I think, on 'Rock Steady,'" Dumont says. "We took the approach of not working ourselves to death and not being too precious about everything. That was the goal (of the album) — to return to something that was fun and a little lighter and a little more upbeat."
No Doubt also launched the album's production process by setting a single goal: The writing, recording and release of the fourth CD would take no more than a year — from Jan. 1, 2001, to Christmas.
"On a bad day, if nothing was coming out, we'd stop writing and go out to dinner and then go to a club," Dumont says. "On 'Return of Saturn,' we didn't. We'd just keep pushing ourselves and killing ourselves." Dumont pauses to laugh. "And on a good day, things flowed out really easily."
Young declined to describe the "Rock Steady" experience as "more fun" than previous No Doubt recording efforts, "but it was definitely loosely put together. There was no ... rigid map or game plan at all. It was definitely just, 'We'll see where this takes us.'"
Keeping a loose vibe is the main reason, both say, "Rock Steady" counts six different producers, including Nelee Hooper, Sly & Robbie, William Orbit, Ric Ocasek and Prince among No Doubt's co-production conspirators.
"We were writing quickly and we really didn't want to take forever to do it," says Dumont. "And we couldn't find one producer that had a number of months ready to go right way. But we were able to find producers that could work with us for a week or two weeks. Then we just made a wish list." And traveled as far as Jamaica and London to meet producers, record in multiple studios, and, well, party. A lot.
In the end, No Doubt's experiment in the art of "anything goes" not only came in on schedule, but created an album that brought a few lapsed No Doubt fans back into the fold, attracted a bunch of new ones, and gave the band some newfound confidence about itself and the method of its recording madness.
"I feel really proud of the success of this record," says Dumont. "It feels really good. There's kind of an assured confidence that we all have right now about the band. We're not cocky, but we feel confident. And at the same time, there's the uncertainty of the future ... not knowing if we're going to make another record next year or who knows when."
Stefani, 33, has recently hinted at taking what might wind up being a long break after the "Rock Steady" tour and her marriage, to become a mom.
Asked if he would feel comfortable with what No Doubt has accomplished should the band decide to call it quits with the album, Young's reply is quick.
"Yes," Young says. "It's never bad to stop on a high note. Look at bands like The Police or The Clash or The Smiths. If those bands came back to tour, it would just be enormous. And they ended on a high note. They didn't scale down to playing in the bars that they started at."
Just don't count on No Doubt to end its ride over something as trivial as how many magazine covers Stefani appears on without the band, or the amount of solo time she spends with the likes of Eve or Moby.
"The experiences that I share with Gwen, Tony and Adrian, I don't share with my girlfriend, or my parents or my brother," Dumont says. "It is kind of a sibling thing where we're attached to each other regardless of if we're fighting today or not.
"We're not the kind of people that give up so easily. And we have the kind of personalities that we can live together in a bus for two months straight and still be friends. We communicate well, discuss problems and argue. But at the end of the day, we are good friends. And we're really lucky."
• • •
... Hawai'i:
"Honestly, we got really excited with how fast (the concert) sold out. We were blown away. It's certainly a little stroke of confidence for us." — Tom
"The only thing that sucks is the flight. Everything else is cool. ... To rock out and sort of get a bit of the island vibe is cool." — Adrian
..."Rock Steady" producers and almost-producers:
"I really wanted to work with Dr. Dre, but we never got into the studio with him. Timbaland was another guy that I was curious about to see what would happen, but his song didn't make it on the album. (Even so,) it's a cool song and I'm sure it'll see the light of day sometime." — Tom
"Working with Prince wasn't really working with Prince. Gwen worked with him in Minneapolis to sing on ('Waiting Room') but we didn't. He basically sent us back to California, and we worked on the rest ourselves. It was kind of a mail-order from there. We were at Paisley Park, kind of, waiting to play, but never did." — Adrian
... Adrian's nudity:
"He's much less apt to take his clothes off now. He was told by someone that he could get busted with ... a crime that would put him on the records as a sex offender, and that stopped him immediately. But he always just did it to get us to laugh, basically." — Tom
"There's definitely a general sense of, like, 'Think twice before you do anything stupid or crazy.' I didn't think much of that before." — Adrian
... kids and family:
"Adrian is the biggest partier in the band and kind of the wildest guy, but ... he's really disciplined and takes his (family life) very seriously. Honestly, he's probably a better dad than I'll be." — Tom
"(Mason) is everything to me. It's the three of us against the world. I was comfortable with (fatherhood) the first day. I feel like this is exactly what I need to be doing and what I want to be doing." — Adrian
... the guys' partying and groupie action documented in "Hey Baby":
"Gwen likes to party and stuff, but she mostly observes, and I think she's amused by our shenanigans. But that song is, like, straight up, her point of view on the whole thing. It's not that bad. We're not like Led Zeppelin or anything." — Tom
"I'll be honest with you. If I was single, I wouldn't think there was anything wrong with, you know, continuing to slut around the world. I think that's a great thing." — Adrian
