Band from Little Rock makes its Honolulu debut

By Anthony DeBarros
USA Today

Evanescence — Ben Moody, Amy Lee, Rocky Gray and John LeCompt — makes its Honolulu debut tonight at the Pipeline Café. Wind-Up Records Evanescence 7 p.m. today Pipeline Café $20, an all-ages show 526-4400

Give much of the credit to 21-year-old singer Amy Lee, whose vocals burn through the band's grinding metal hit "Bring Me to Life" in a way that's less Lilith Fair and more "Barracuda"-era Heart.

In March, the single hit No. 1 on the modern-rock charts, making Evanescence the first female-fronted act in the top slot since Courtney Love's Hole in 1998. The song is now No. 8 on the mainstream top-40 chart. (The band is heading for Honolulu for a concert tonight at the Pipeline Café.)

"There's not really anything like that happening right now," Lee says of the song, which appeared first on the "Daredevil" movie soundtrack. "I think our music is listenable ... but at the same time it's not marketably smart. So the fact that they would play it on the radio, and people would call in and the phones would go nuts in every town, that just makes me feel really, really good about our youth."

Lee and guitarist Ben Moody — the core of Evanescence — would hardly call their good fortune overnight success. The pair have been plugging away since meeting at a camp when she was 13 and he was 14. The oft-told tale is that Moody spied her across a room, playing a Meat Loaf tune on a piano.

"I don't think it was more than a month before I brought him a cassette tape of me playing the guitar and singing a song that I wrote," she says. "I was like, 'Make this cool.' And he was like, 'OK.' "

The two fast became songwriting soulmates, spending hours with piano and guitars at the home of Lee's parents in Little Rock, Ark.

"That's all they ever did; they never left the house," says her father, John Lee. (A well-known Little Rock radio personality, he named his daughter after the '70s Pure Prairie League hit "Amie.")

"One day I said, 'Look, you guys are getting nowhere with this. You've got to learn some Skynyrd, you've got to learn some Eric Clapton, and you've got to learn some Bob Seger, and you've got to get out there and play some weddings and make some money. And they looked at me and they went, 'Dad, this is art.' ... They looked at me like I was a total idiot, and now I know I was — a total idiot."

The pair recorded demos, releasing EPs and, in 2000, the indie album "Origin." Wind-Up Records, best known as Creed's label, signed the group in 2001.

Though the band's rise has been meteoric, it hasn't been without controversy. Wind-Up recently pulled "Fallen" from the Christian bookstore market after Moody was quoted in an Entertainment Weekly story casually dropping a profanity and saying "Jesus Christ" in a way many Christians would consider inappropriate. The band had been linked to the Christian market early in its career, a connection driven partly from interviews such as one Moody gave to the Stranger Things Webzine in 2000. In it, he openly talked about his faith and said, "The message we as a band want to convey more than anything is simple: God is love."

Asked about the flap, Lee takes a deep breath. "We certainly don't want to alienate anybody," she says, and adds that she has been advised to stay off the topic. "If anybody picks up our CD and listens to it and likes it, we love them. ... So I just hope this whole thing hasn't made anyone think that we're against any particular group or anything. That's the whole point, that it's for everyone. We don't want to put it in a box."

Lee is much more willing to talk about the band's fans, who she says have welcomed her into the hard-rock boys club with respect. Well, mostly. At a show recently in Hartford, Conn., a group of guys began chanting for her to doff one of her trademark corsets and bare her breasts.

"I said a bad word, and I cursed at them," she says. "And I said (to the audience), 'Who in here doesn't want me to show my (breasts)?' And the place went crazy. And I said, 'I am sick and tired of seeing girls get up here and show their (breasts).' ... The whole crowd went crazy, and they were ragging on (the taunters). I felt so much better.

"There are a lot of girls who come up and go, 'Thank you for just being a girl and not just selling your body.' "