Never Forget Melody

03/06/1998 2:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Dave DiMartino

After five years together, two popular indie recordings, and a year and a half long tour to support their latest RCA release Villains, it seems that East Lansing, Michigan locals the Verve Pipe are finally seeing a well deserved success. That doesn’t, however, mean compromise. Sure, they have spent the last year working with Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison, getting a lot of play from radio stations across the country, MTV, and VH-1, and even touring with Kiss, but making the transition from an indie label to a major label hasn’t seemed to have changed this hard-working Midwest band. "You come to a point in your life when you’re putting up posters of Kiss on your walls and trying to figure out their songs, to the point where you’re backstage in catering, eating peach cobbler actually talking with Paul Stanley about the Beatles."

"It’s [playing on The Tonight Show] going to be one of the highlights of the year for us to do something like this," said lead guitarist/vocalist AJ Dunning and percussionist/keyboardist Doug Corella. The Tonight Show isn’t the only thing keeping them busy, though. They have been shooting a video during the past couple of weeks, and they return to the studio at the end of the summe, after their long tour. Thankfully, they haven’t been completely busy since they got off the plane in Los Angeles two days ago for their Tonight Show performance. The first day, it was non-stop business as usual. However, they did get to take a day to kick back and enjoy: "Yesterday was a day of relaxation and nothingness which was awesome to have. It’s nice not to be run around by the nose when you have a real tight schedule," said AJ.

Even with the phenomenal sales of their first two indie releases (combining over 40,000 copies sold), it still comes with the territory that there are going to be a lot of differences making the adjustment to a major label like RCA. Despite the horror stories that a lot of music industry people will tell you, AJ and Doug sought to set the record straight. "There are a lot of differences. Probably the main one is that we don’t have to worry about the business. We’re able to go and do what we do. We now have the time to sit and write as opposed to having to fill out mailers, call clubs to confirm bookings, and taking care of sales for records," AJ said. However, he stressed the importance of these menial tasks by stating that "it is vital for bands to learn that and do it, so they get a taste of it. If they are fortunate enough to get picked up by a label, then they will have an understanding of what the label has to deal with."

Compromise has always served as a topic of frustration for transitional bands. In the case of The Verve Pipe, however, it wasn’t really a major issue. "To a degree. Musically no," AJ said reassuringly. "Where the compromises lie are with some of the business things. For the longest time, it was just the five of us and then the five of us and our manager, and then the five of us and our crew. Then, you’re signed to a label and it’s like you have been wed into a large family." Doug added, "as far as the support is concerned, we are just ecstatic with the amount of support we’ve been getting from the label. We’ve been on this tour for a year and three months now and they are still there, backing us up. You can’t ask for more than that."

On their headline shows, The Verve Pipe play at venues with anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 seats, and lately, they have been doing a lot of 65,000 people radio shows (including the HFStival in Washington D.C. and the KROC Weenie Roast in Los Angeles). Last year's Weenie Roast festival "was great. We got to watch Kiss for the first time. We got to tour with those guys. We did a week and a half of shows with them in the states, and then we did about a month worth of shows with them in Europe." The Verve Pipe, all being in their late twenties, early thirties and growing up with Kiss, thought that an incredible opportunity like this was a complete trip.

Even though there seems to be a current frenzy in the music industry about what the next "big thing" is going to be (some have said Silver Lake, others have said techno), The Verve Pipe doesn’t seem absorbed with any passing trends. Like everything in history, they believe that music is something that goes full circle. Doug noted that "every now and then when you have people like Beck to stand out of the circle and accumulate it all and do something great with it, people will take that angle and roll with that for a while and see what happens." However, AJ and Doug both agreed that music, as opposed to passing trends, is something that has to be melody-driven. "There is a certain amount of whatever that you can pull from being young, or having an attitude, or being fashionable, or being completely left of center, it will eventually work its way back to the importance of melody," AJ said.

Moving to the future, The Verve Pipe said that after they finish their fourth release, they will most likely be back on the road again. "This year has been nice for us. With the amount of work that we did last year, we are really trying to get into a groove where we can do five to six weeks on the road and then come home and take a week off. It’s a nice pace, it will keep us from being burnt out, and it allows us to maintain some sense of family life or social life." Socially, AJ and Doug shared that unlike a lot of other bands, they are fortunate enough not to have any real big problems like drugs. As a matter of fact, AJ stated that they were all actually a bunch of "dullards." But being that everyone in the band has a very unique personality, however, it seems understandable that their biggest problem is communication and space.

As far as musical influences, and what The Verve Pipe listens to on the road, they are extremely eclectic. Besides being huge XTC fans -- interestingly, they recorded a cover of XTC’s song "Blue Beret" on a bootleg tribute album -- they also listen to a lot of jazz, 50’s doo-wop, Buddy Holly, Judas Priest, Radiohead, and even Barbra Streisand. "Everything comes back to melody," Doug said. "I mean all of these great songs and musicians are melody oriented."