© Copyright Clive Young
From Gig Magazine, December, 2000.NINE DAYS: ESCAPE FROM COVER BAND LAND
This Long Island Quintet Paid The Bills As A Cover Band Until They Went #1By Clive Young
It's no surprise that Long Island has an inferiority complex. Despite its massive size, the Island lives in the shadow of the Cultural Mecca of the world, New York City. And consider the Island's contributions to society: Howard Stern, Joey Buttafuoco, Geraldo Rivera, Jessica Hahn, Joel Rifken, The Baldwin brothers--it's a cultural bludgeoning. The area's musical legacy is just as bad, with a chronological slippery slope that starts with Billy Joel and heads downhill fast, thanks to Vanilla Fudge, Twisted Sister, Debbie Gibson, Mariah Carey, and, um, Marcy Playground. Maybe it's something in the water.
Bands from the Island find themselves in a peculiar position, then: Although they're 30 minutes away from every record label in the Western World, they're virtually invisible to the majors, who apparently believe, 'How could any good music come from this suburban vacuum?' Frustrated at being ignored and cast aside, Long Island musicians who play their own songs get an added kick in the head, because very few of the hundreds of bars and clubs there book original music.
"Everyone looked at each other and thought, 'Well, maybe this isn't happening.'" As a result, the Island is nicknamed "Cover Band Land" by local musicians, and the cover scene is startlingly competitive, filled with groups that have been around for years and have sizable followings. Many of them feature truly gifted players--people who might have played to packed arenas if the local climate had supported original music when they first started looking for gigs. But the desire to play music for a living on Long Island means playing covers, and most local players are happy to do it--they play four or five times a week, make a decent wage, and get to sleep in their own beds every night.
Which brings us to Nine Days, a group that chose to use Long Island's predilection for cover bands as a tool rather than a goal. As a result, the band is on Sony/550 Music and had a number one hit with its first single, "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)." If you're in a cover band, it might be in your set list. A few years ago, a song like "Absolutely" might have been in vocalist/guitarist John Hampson's set list, too.
TAKING A FEW STEPS BACK
"People think we sprang from a cover band, when the truth is that the original band was around far before the cover thing," says Hampson, 28. "There's nothing wrong with playing covers--people want to make money, and some don't write songs and just want to play music. I don't have a problem with that--I just want people to understand where we came from. It's not like we were playing Smash Mouth one night and decided, 'We can do this.'"Hampson knew vocalist/guitarist Brian Desveaux from the local music scene and the two eventually teamed up in the early '90s, playing original music in a local group. Hampson recalls, "We had those 'just missed' opportunities where you couldn't quite land the record deal and couldn't quite make the jump into something substantial. We both said 'Lets take a few steps back. Lets learn to walk before we run and learn how to write songs.'"
That learning process began in 1994, with a year devoted to writing in Hampson's studio apartment while they worked day jobs. When it came time to flesh-out songs in a group setting, they would simply get some musical pals together and knock out the tunes. Through this musical networking, Nine Days slowly took shape--and Hampson found a new way to pay the rent.
"Vinnie [Tattanelli], the drummer in the band, had been playing in a cover band and he was looking to form another one, just to make money," says Hampson. "I started playing with him, jamming once a week in a bar. Vinnie, Nick [Dimichino, bass] and I would do the local 'jam in the bar, make 100 bucks on a weekend night'-type thing." For local musicians, this was hardly uncommon. Desveaux points out, "Back then, the cover scene in the Tri-state area was very big. You couldn't play anywhere unless you did covers."
Despite the covers-only atmosphere, Nine Days continued as a vehicle for original music, self-releasing three albums and scrounging for gigs along the way. Eventually the band landed a weekly gig at the Village Pub in Port Jefferson, which it played for two and a half years. As if to underscore the local vibe that original music won't draw customers, the band was second on the bill to another attraction, says Desveaux: "It started out as a Monday Night Football thing and we would play. Then eventually it just became our night; we drew a good crowd there for a long time."
As the band's following grew, Nine Days had to start playing New York City, too, in order to grab the labels' attention. Desveaux laughs, "It'd be two people in the audience--our lawyer and our manager. We played the Bitter End, and the owner loved us--I guess he saw something. We played there for five people and he said, 'Look, I want you guys back,' and we'd play once or twice a month. By the time a year or two passed, we'd have the place packed. It was hard developing a following in New York, but it happened eventually."
Between playing out, rehearsing and recording, life was becoming complicated. "Every time you got a gig, it was a matter of who had to cancel what job and who needed to get out of work to record," says Hampson. "It became a logistical nightmare, like probably every band goes through."
The answer to the problem, ironically, was to embrace Cover Band Land with open-arms.
RUNNING FOR COVERS
"We realized that if we played three nights a week, we could make enough money to pay our rent," says Hampson, "and that's all we would have to do. Nobody would have to work a day job. We all decided to take the plunge, and started doing the covers three nights a week. We had plenty of free time--we rehearsed just about every day, and that's really what got the ball rolling for this band. At that point, all of us put our entire lives into it."Nine Days rarely played the same venues as its cover band alter-ego, Wonderama--which was essentially the band plus a female singer. Treating them as two separate groups, the musicians had management and a lawyer for Nine Days, but kept them away from the 'other' act, which was booked by Omnipop (Hicksville, NY), a local agency specializing in cover bands.
"In the beginning, it was great because we played a lot and it got the band tighter," Desveaux recalls. "We were playing four to six nights a week between those gigs and Nine Days. We showcased some of our songs at the cover band gigs, which was good, too." Hampson demurs, adding, "We resisted [promoting] the original band too much, because to a certain degree in some people's eyes, the integrity of anything original was diminished because of doing the covers. "
Meanwhile, Nine Days' popularity kept building. The band's following slowly grew in New York, while the Village Pub shows brought in 150 people every week. Soon there was a smattering of radio airplay as the act won WBAB's Homegrown Talent Search and WLIR's Best Unsigned Band competition. Then in the summer of 1997, it looked as if the band's ship had finally come in.
Through the old 'friend of a friend' network, the group signed a production deal with Pat Thrall, an engineer and aspiring producer, to record some demos at Avatar Studios (formerly The PowerStation) in New York. The band would race into New York at a moment's notice to record when the studio suddenly had unused time. Given the erratic recording process, it took nearly a year to record four songs.
Desveaux says, "It took too long and it stumped John and I creatively--we didn't write for that whole time because we were so frustrated. We did shop the songs and got a little interest, but a lot of the record companies said, 'There's something missing. You're great and all, but you don't have that hit.'"
After a year of pinning their hopes on the production deal, Hampson and Desveaux had missed the major label brass ring yet again. "That's when everyone looked at each other and thought, 'well, maybe this isn't happening,'" says Hampson.
BACK TO SQUARE ONE
While Nine Days' career was going nowhere, the cover band's popularity was exploding. "We played to a lot of big crowds," says Desveaux. Hampson concurs: "We weren't playing rinky-dink bars--we were filling clubs that held 1,000 people; it was good exposure."However, the cover band's success was anything but sweet. Although it had originally been conceived to support Nine Days, the cover group had now truly come into its own, and was gaining momentum and popularity with each new gig. At the same time, the dream of ever getting signed for their original music seemed to drift further away. After the production deal ran out, Nine Days took the summer of 1998 off from shopping for a deal. Without question, they were running out of steam.
Eventually, the bitter irony was more than Hampson could handle, and one day, he threw down the gauntlet: "I said, 'You know what? I can't do the cover thing anymore. It's killing me--it's no fun, I don't enjoy it, and I need to play music that I love because I don't want to be in a position where I hate to go and play.' Because that's what it started to feel like."
It wasn't an easy decision, he adds: "By then, we were making good money doing it and we were paying rent--none of us were living at home, so it was a tough thing to just drop out of that and try to go find a job. How were we going to make the band work? Luckily enough, we started to click with the record companies."
After the cover band ended, Nine Days continued to play that summer. One fateful night, the group opened a show for So-Cal one-hit-wonders Wank. As they set up for the gig, Hampson got into a tiff with his girlfriend, who walked off. Soon, Hampson saw her chatting with someone, laughing at a comment, and inspiration struck. The chorus to what became "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)" popped into his head, and he finished the tune later that night. "It was a song that sort of fell out of the sky and landed on me," he says now. "Thank God it did because it gave us a ticket to the big show."
ABSOLUTELY A HIT
Demoing the song themselves a few weeks later (along with "If I Am," the group's second single), Nine Days finally caught the record companies' attention for good. They signed with Sony/550 Music in early 1999, hit the studio with producer Nick DiDia (Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine) in June that year, and launched their first national tour in March, 2000 before "Absolutely" was even released to radio.As the song blew up at radio, the band that had played originals to 150 people in the Village Pub just two years earlier was suddenly on MTV, playing The Tonight Show, and spending the summer on a triple bill with Third-Eye Blind and Vertical Horizon. It's been an exhilarating experience for Hampson and it's also proof that he, Desveaux and the rest of Nine Days were justified to never give up hope.
"There were definitely a couple of A&R guys who were, 'No, there's nothing here,'" he says. "I won't name the person, but there was one guy in particular who's an extremely well-respected, very successful A&R guy at a very big company who listened to all our CDs, all our demos. He came back and said to our manager, 'At this point, they've been together for a few years and they're 26 years old. If they haven't written 'the song' yet, they probably never will.'
"Two months later, we wrote 'the song' and it went number one this week. So there's never one guy who knows everything."
