When the first single from a young band’s debut album becomes a worldwide smash and signature tune it can send them into a headspin. Add to that major label conflicts and lineup changes, and you have a recipe for a one-hit wonder. Twelve years after ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, and with WHEATUS returning to Australia for the Fat As Butter festival, MAX QUINN spoke with vocalist, songwriter and founding member BRENDAN B BROWN about the turbulent Sony years, the band’s resurgence, and selling albums online.
I’m such a big Wheatus fan. It’s nice to talk to you.
It’s good to meet one of you – I don’t know how we go over in Australia. The single was so huge there – it went quadruple platinum in Australia. But then we never came back, primarily because it was so expensive to get there and there was also never really a demand. All of a sudden, recently we’ve started getting calls again. I never really got to know our Australian contingent.
How did this new demand come about?
Well, last year, right before we went to England to tour, ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ broke back into the UK Top 40. From there it started to happen. We started getting more emails from Australia. I think because you share a few television shows and stuff like that, I think some of that sauce got on you. Originally, ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ sold better in Australia than it did anywhere else in the world. So it was a surprise that things went quiet. But it’s getting more and more realistic now, so that’s really nice.
There’s a lot of conjecture on the internet about what happened to Wheatus after your first album that eventually led to you being dropped from Sony. Can you tell me what happened?
We dove into making our second record at the end of 2001. We actually recorded the first parts of it in Australia in the Blue Mountains. We worked our arses off on that thing. When it was finished, the record label didn’t want to release it. It’s a common story. They weren’t going to release the record, or any singles, or make a video or anything like that, and they encouraged us to go back into the studio to record a third album before the second album ever saw the light of day.
The only thing that happened to us at that point, that’s different to what happened to most bands, was that I said “no” to that. I said if they weren’t going to put my record out, I was going to go and get a day job. They were really upset when I said that – something to the tune of, “Well if you feel that way you can have your damn record and you can get the fuck out of here”.
So we said “yes”. We didn’t like being signed to a major label – it was weird. They seemed like this clumsy, gigantic bureaucracy that wasn’t particularly effective. They thought that we were excited to be signed to Sony, and initially we were. But when we found out what they were really like we got the hell out.
We got out of that record deal in 2004. We immediately started recording album number three, and we put it out ourselves. Currently, the songs from that record are the ones that are more requested at our shows. The kids who shout out for that record tend to be the more die-hard fans. So that third record is the one that made it possible for us to have the sustainable fan base that we have today. We’ve been self-managed all through the decade. We’ve put out four records since then, including the second record [ingeniously titled Suck Fony] which we finally got the rights to, and our Pop, Songs and Death EPs. They’re all on wheatus.com right now.
I love the business model you’ve created for selling your records online. How does it work?
It works like a charm. Once you’ve spent the money on making the record, it only costs $80 per month to have a website. Generally speaking, the idea is to have people donate a little bit more than that per month to listen to your music – you choose what you pay. For us it works.
We figure it’s a fair trade. You don’t have to pay to hear our music. If you like it, maybe you’ll pay next time. One guy gave us $600 for the record. The point is that people can make their own decision. They’re not held hostage by retail enforcement. It’s not fair to do that with art. You’re asking people for disposable income, and nobody has that these days. We’re in a rise-of-monarchy kind of period over here where even the middle-income people aren’t doing that well. Asking them to spend a bunch of money on music is a little bit ludicrous on its face.
People will pay what they can afford. If that’s nothing, so be it. You have to be prepared to be a working class musician. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Celebrity and riches are the exception to the rule. Most musicians are neither famous nor rich. But that doesn’t mean they’re not good – that they don’t do what they do every night, night after night, with the same amount of love. I feel like you should expect that people will come back to you if you treat them fairly, and that’s what we’re starting to see both with album sales and with concert attendance.
Is there ever a part of you that thinks that if only things had gone a little differently, you could be sitting on another mega-hit right now? ‘Story of The Eggs’, from Pop, Songs and Death, is the best thing I’ve heard from you.
That song has been going really well for us in concert. I wanted to make a song that told the story of Scott F Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby. He moved from the country to the city to write his novels, and he thought it would be wonderful, and eventually the dark reality of being in the city came, and he had to deal with it. It’s a universal truth that holds to this day. In the present day, I say to people that you’re only a New Yorker once you’ve lived here long enough to decide that you can’t take it anymore, but then you stay anyway.
Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel was not well received. The Great Gatsby was this great classic that is still taught today, but his other works were generally panned. But there was this little bit of glory left for him in this essay that he wrote late in his career called ‘My Lost City’. And I think that piece of music tries to reflect that journey of naïve wonderment, to complex darkness, to salvageable glory. Sorry – what was the question?
Could it be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?
I think that these days, in order for us to have the kind of popularity and notoriety and success and celebrity that that would require, we would have had to have compromised so much that a song like ‘The Story of The Eggs’ would be impossible. Your record label would never let you do it. The hits you’re referring to – at least in the way that I think you’re reflecting on them – that stuff came from a golden age of rock. It’s over. People are not interested in that kind of stuff anymore. And when I say people, I’m not talking about the kind of person who listens to Radiohead at night before they fall asleep. I’m talking about the kind of person who doesn’t have time for music and only listens to it in the car, or on TV every once in a while.
Back then, far more people were interested in complex, interesting music. Now it’s not the real thing. I don’t think we could have ever had a career where ‘The Story Of The Eggs’ could have been a radio song. We don’t live in that world anymore. We’ve been moving in one direction for a long time. Pun not intended.
Wheatus perform at Fat As Butter festival, Saturday September 22, 2012.