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By Peter Atkinson Hindsight being 20/20, Local H frontman Scott Lucas reckons maybe a bigger fuss could have been made about the band's two-man make up back in the day. The White Stripes and, to a lesser extent, The Raveonettes and quite a few others have gotten plenty of mileage out of this line-up oddity of late. But Lucas didn't want Local H's guitarist-and-drummer arrangement to be thought of as a gimmick, even though it certainly helped set the duo apart from the other alterna-rock acts that were flooding the market in the mid-'90s. "It was probably a mistake not to harp on that. Maybe it would have gotten us some more notice, but things were going pretty well as it was at the time," Lucas said. "And we wanted people to pay attention to the music, not the fact that there was just two guys making it." Indeed, the band had a modest hit with "Bound For the Floor," from 1996's As Good As Dead, and a good head of steam leading into the follow-up, Pack Up The Cats. But the day the album was to be released, the band's label, Island, was bought by Universal. "After that, all the people who were excited about the album had to worry about their jobs, so we got no push for anything," Lucas said. Cats all but disappeared and Local H has bounced around from one indie to another ever since, playing to a loyal enough audience to keep the band - Brian St. Clair plays drums - afloat. The duo's latest album, Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?, was issued April 6 on the fledgling Studio E Records, run, primarily, by people who were big-label merger casualties. /P.J. Soles' punk-pop-meets-arena-rock rabble is the most musically involved and elaborate - and, as the title would indicate, rich with references to the kitsch culture Lucas so enjoys - Local H has done. And Lucas figures now may be the time for the band to expand when it goes on tour. "I've never been a purist, we've always made albums without worrying about how we were going to pull it off live," he said. "So far, we've been able to do it as a duo, but it's been getting harder and harder. "I don't want to hear half the stuff coming from tapes, like you do with a lot of bands, so I may have to put together a full band. In a perfect world, we could do something like the Talking Heads did on the Stop Making Sense tour - open the show with just me onstage and keep adding people as it goes along. By the time it's done, there's like 10 people up there. That would be cool." On the web: www.localh.com |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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