Dishwalla
by Nite Trax Radio
J.R. Richards is stumped. The singer and keyboardist of Santa Barbara-bred Dishwalla has assumed the inauspicious task of coming up with a one-two description of his band's sound -- a mildly daring hybrid of soul, classic rock and alternative pop. Suffice it to say that ideas ain't coming too fast and furious. "I know, Alice in James," he laughs at long last, pleasantly satisfied. "Some guy once said we're a cross between Alice in Chains and Rick James. You know, I think he had something there."
Okay, every cerebrally double-jointed reader try to imagine Rick "Superfreak" James fronting glam-meisters-gone-grunge gurus Alice in Chains. If you've managed to get your heads around that, why stop now? Go ahead, take another surrealistic leap and envision that sound unleashed on a relatively small, conservative seaside town best known for the folkie offerings of Toad the Wet Sprocket and, yes, the aggressively awful surf-rat metal of Ugly Kid Joe.
"A couple years ago, when we were just getting started, we didn't even consider what our hometown was going to think of us," Richards recalls. "We had more immediate things on our minds, like, how do we make all our different influences work well together without losing any of them? I mean, I was into '80s New Wave like the Cars and New Order; our drummer, George Pendergast, was into Mötley Crüe and Dokken; Rodney Browning, our guitarist, liked everything from AC/DC to Duran Duran; and Scot [Alexander, bass] was listening to old-school funk. Making all those styles jive to the point where each of us was happy with the results, that was tough; we were our toughest critics. Compared to us, the crowds at local places like The Underground and Voodoo Lounge seemed easy to please. I think they liked what we were doing."
Apparently so did producer Matt Wallace -- he of Paul Westerberg/Replacements fame -- who last year brought the essentially-unknown band on board his almost-completed If I Were a Carpenter tribute album. As luck would have it, they were suddenly sitting pretty alongside such notables as Sonic Youth, The Cranberries, Cracker, and Babes in Toyland. Not bad for a band named after an obscure Wired magazine reference to a pack of Indian entrepreneurs notorious for supplying the ghettos of New Delhi and Calcutta with bootlegged satellite dish transmissions (don't ask).
"We had just signed to A&M when we heard Matt was making the album," Richards explains. "I know, lately, it sounds kinda gimmicky to say, `I'm a really big Carpenters fan.' It's like a big fad -- everyone has rediscovered them. But I really am. When I was a kid, my parents listened to them all the time and I memorized the lyrics to a lot of the songs. And there was no way I wanted to miss out on the album, so we recorded an eight-track version of `Close to You' and got it over to Matt. He told us The Cranberries had already done that one, so we did `It's Gonna Take Some Time.' He liked it. The whole thing was totally unexpected."
But covering a celebrated tune by a legendary duo is one thing; making a solid long-player of your own material is quite another. It would seem that Dishwalla was thinking along these very lines, waxing their new debut release, Pet Your Friends, long before the dust settled on the Carpenters' tribute album. The album, eleven surprisingly accomplished, soulful grooves fired up with genuine fist-pumping near-arena rock, manages to balance out Richards' often over-the-top socially-conscious lyrics with smart songcraft and, thankfully, a sense of humor.
"I try to write meaningful songs," Richards notes. "There are some serious songs about families affected by alcoholism ["Haze"], and the ways children are taught to think of God ["Counting Blue Cars"], but music shouldn't always be too serious. It's rock and roll, right?
"That's where `Miss Emma Peel' comes in. I wrote that song for the character in The Avengers who I've had a crush on since I was eight. The way she'd beat the crap out of the bad guys without even messing up her hair or her leather outfit... she was totally rad. Man, I've been wanting to get that off my chest for a long time. That's the good thing about our music: we're the type of band that can deal with God and Emma Peel on the same album without missing a beat."