You might have caught Wheatus playing Maxwell’s a couple of weeks ago or heard their single “Teenage Dirtbag” on K-Rock. The hit song is also featured in the teen romantic-comedy Loser, and the video has become a regular on MTV’s TRL (Total Request Live). And now this two-year-old band that was recently singed to Columbia is ready to finally release their self-titled debut CD on August 15, right before they go on a national tour.
While still in their introductory period, Wheatus has had to endure a period of adjustment, including the replacement of their bass player. The band’s former bass player Rich Leigey, featured on the album and in the video, has since been replaced with Mike McCabe. The lead singer/songwriter and guitarist Brendan Brown recently met with the Current to talk about what’s been going on with Wheatus.Louise Thach: So how did you come up with the name Wheatus?
Brendan Brown: We told a couple of people that’s what David Lee Roth calls his d***, and that was something that we were told by somebody after the fact. But what Wheatus really means, I think we’re going to keep a secret for now. It’s something near and dear, and we want to be able to talk to fans about it on the road and have it be, kind of, just the one thing we have to talk to them about. It’s not interesting enough anyway; it’s just a strange little thing from when I was two years old.
LT: So what happened to your bass player?
BB: Rich was never really on the same page musically. He doesn’t have the same influences that we have, which are varied. He’s very much toward the punk rock, modern rock thing. It was always kind of a struggle to explain to him the idea of the song. We have a rule in the band that anybody can write songs, but the person who writes the song has to dictate how all the parts go because that’s the best way to respect the person’s initial idea. So trying to convey my ideas to him was always very, very difficult, because he didn’t really get it, or didn’t really want to get it. And then, towards when things started getting more hectic, he kind of wanted to go on vacation a little bit more, and would book golf outings and stuff, so it was kind of hard. And then he told Phil that I was crazy, that my leadership of this whole thing was in some sense a measure of insanity, that I lied to the band about how the label feels about us and they see right through me and that I can’t produce, and so on and so forth. I questioned Rich, I said ‘If you really think that, then why would you be a part of this?’ And he said, ‘Because I have something to gain now.’ So at that point it was scary, because we’re about to embark on something where we have to be so trusting of each other, and he was telling me that he was really not into this, but he was along for the ride too see where it goes. We don’t have any room on board for anyone like that, because there’s a lot of weight to be towed; there’s a lot of work to do.
LT: So it was a collective decision for him to go?
BB: Our band agreement dictates that we have to have a unanimous vote, and we actually have to vote again in a couple of days to make sure that we all agree. I can’t do it alone. I’ve seen the website, and a lot of people think I fired him myself, and that would be nice but I don’t have the power to do that. Our band agreement dictates that I must have agreement from the other members of the band as well. So there’s a lot of misinformation going on that website, which I haven’t really been responding to, because Rich and I left on terms that we would keep what happened to ourselves. The day after, the website was like lit up with all kinds of negative s***, so I was like, OK, I guess there goes that.
LT: Are you sure Rich was supplying that information?
BB: The information that’s on the website is mostly only stuff that he knows, and I didn’t talk to anybody about it until you actually. I haven’t discussed it with anybody in an interview or anything what actually between Rich and myself, until I saw all this information on the website about how this supposedly went down, so I figured I’d tell somebody. I don’t know if anybody cares. I mean, people think that we’re successful now or something, but we’re really in debt. We owe the record label a lot of money. We’re all just kind of struggling to pay rent; this tour that we’re on are almost all free shows. We’re just about breaking even.
LT: But you’ll get out of debt once you start selling records.
BB: Well, we would have to sell 1.2 million records to get out of debt, and we didn’t even have a big advance; our advance was like $80,000. It was really small. We made our own record, literally, in the basement. And there’s been this representation of us on the website like we’re this big corporate rock band, and we’re so rich and all we care about is fame, while I’m out here in parents’ house reorganizing the basement because that’s where we rehearse, you know. We’re not rich, like come and see it, I guarantee you, you will change your mind.
LT: So how did you choose Mike?
BB: Mike was Phil’s friend for a long time and had played in a band with Phil. And I was always asking Rich to play parts with his fingers instead of the pick, because I think the vibe is little bit more towards the finger style, and he refused. And Mike is a finger player, and he’s really gracious and excited about the roll of bass player, which is very different from the vibe that we’ve had in the past. And we’ve all talked about it, now we get on stage and we feel things are right and this is a family.
LT: So how did you convince Columbia to record the album on your own? BB: We were already in the process of doing it, and I told them that we we’re going to continue to do it regardless of what they wanted us to do. We didn’t have any faith in anybody to produce us because we had so many ideas, you know, I mean most of the drum sounds that I really like are from the ’70s. How do you sit there and explain [things] to some guy who’s way more important than you are and way richer than you are and is essentially there to take your money. We’d be like, ‘Look, we want to sound like this,’ and he’d be like, ‘I don’t have time for you to tell me what you sound like, let’s do this my way.’ And we were not interested in sounding like every other band. I’d actually rather not have been signed than give up control of the recording process.
LT: So why did you choose your parents’ house as the studio?
BB: We didn’t have any place else to do it. My grandmother was here all day walking around, and my parents both work, so they were never really home. We had to set up somewhere to record, and they gave us three weeks to finish it. We had the soundboard and the speakers in the living room against the wall, and we ran a hundred-foot snake through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement where we had the drum mics all set up. We were constantly stepping over s***, it was so cluttered, and the dog was running around, and the dog’s barking on the tape. We had to do a couple of vocal takes over, because of the dog, but we kept one of them in the second verse on “Hump’em and Dump’em.”
LT: You were all still working day jobs too. What were you doing?
BB: I was working at a computer company in Times Square. It was pretty awful. It was a very small, dreary office. We did Virtual Private Networking for the Wall Street district. It was pretty cool, but I was making $35,000 and living in New York City and that’s just not enough. Rent was like $1,500, and it was really hard to make ends meet. I wasn’t saving any money; I had like $50 at the end of the month or something like that. And while were making the record, I would jump on a train every night and come out to Long Island, record till about one or two in the morning, jump on a train at six in the morning and come back to the city, work all day and then do the same thing. The sleep deprivation factor was unbelievable, but we did it. We came in on our deadline, and that was something I was really hell-bent on, because I wanted to prove to Columbia Records that we were serious. ‘Cause none of do drugs or anything, and I didn’t want them to have the impression that we were like a lot of bands out there who think when they’re signed, it’s time to go on vacation.
LT: So after working right there, what is it like now to have your video televised on TRL in the middle of Times Square?
BB: It’s so funny, because a couple of moths ago, I was walking through there trying to get my way through the TRL crap so I could catch a train back to record the record, because you know what’s it like there, it’s a nightmare. I would walk down Seventh Avenue to Penn Station, literally right through that crowd.
LT: Do you consider yourself a little bit of that underdog teenage dirtbag that you sing about?
BB: People ask me what my high school experience was like, and it was really just nothing. There wasn’t anything going on. I would come home and I would play guitar all weekend. That’s all I did. I was always kind of threatened by social scenes, just ’cause I was never really part of one. I watched the whole thing through the window. I was really into the metal fashion, like I had my denim jacket with the AC/DC patch, and my Reebok hightops and stuff, and my hair was a mullet; I was totally a dirtbag. Then, when I got to college, I got a little bit more into who I was.
LT: So I’ve made people listen to your CD, and not only do they think you’re a chick, they think you’re a hot chick.
BB: I think I’m going to grow my hair long and dress in drag. We’ve been doing this thing when we play “Dirtbag,” I explain to the audience that everywhere we go, people think we have a girl in the band, so we invite anyone to come onstage and sing the girl part. In D.C. it was crazy, the whole place came on stage, and the same thing happened in Providence. It was nuts. They knock us over and forget we’re there.
LT: How have girls at the shows been treating you?
BB: They’re really nice. I have a fianc