Interview by Karla Ash
Black Lab: Surviving the '90s
Contrary to what you might think, Black Lab made it through
the '90s despite having debuted in the unusual tail end, right
before swing and ska suddenly became the taste of choice among
the flannelled ones. Channeling U2's stadium power and Live's
explosive passion, Black Lab had the voice and guitar punch to
top the Billboard charts. With alternative-rock hits such as
"Wash It Away" and "Time Ago," it seemed
inevitable. Then - poof! Modern Rock radio changed overnight
and Black Lab were abruptly forgotten. However, the band - despite
line-up alterations - weren't washed away by fickle radio programmers
and record labels. Leader Paul Durham explained what exactly
happened to the Next Big Thing that never was.
Karla Ash: It's been almost ten years since Your Body Above
Me. What happened between that and See the Sun?
Paul Durham: Well, Geffen went out of business, everyone who
knew us took jobs elsewhere, and I moved to L.A. to get out of
the deal with Interscope, who inherited our contract. I got a
protools rig, made some more demos myself, and got a new deal
with Sony, hooked up with this Andy Ellis character, whom I hired
to install software and ended up playing most of the guitar and
keyboards on the record. We made a pretty cool record together.
Ash: See the Sun is self-released. What happened to Black
Lab's major-label deal?
Durham: Our A&R guy got fired and all the bands he had
signed got dropped. Good times. Fortunately, I had built it into
the contract that if they dropped us we got our record and a
wad of cash from them.
Ash: Describe your creative evolution since Your Body Above
Me.
Durham: Basically, YBAM was a band record. I wrote the songs
and brought them in on acoustic guitar and the guys went to work
on them. This time around, I let my control freak flag fly and
did everything -- hired the drummers and bass players, ran the
protools rig and edited the shit out of everything. I got as
close to what I heard in my head as I could and had a lot of
fun without all the frustration of dealing with other people's
opinions. Andy helped a lot and really became a co-creator in
that his vision and mine went along the same lines. At this
point, I wouldn't want to work any other way.
Ash: There are some New Wave touches on See the Sun, such
as on "Perfect Girl" with the synthesizers. Was it
a conscious decision to have some '80s influences seep through?
(There's a part on "Perfect Girl" where you uncannily
sound like Michael Hutchence of INXS.)
Durham: Yeah, at the time I was making this thing it was all
about Creed and Britney Spears. I told Andy we couldn't interface
with that world and that we should just do what we wanted. We
sat down and talked about our favorite bands -- the Cure, New
Order, etc. -- and just decided to go for all that sweet '80s
stuff that we loved. I think our record company didn't know
what to do with it. The Killers hadn't happened yet and it was
all about Nickelback and they just looked at us and said "huh?"
Ash: How did Black Lab end up on the Spider-Man movie soundtrack?
Durham: We wrote "Learn to Crawl" for Aerosmith
at the request of my publisher for the soundtrack but they thought
it was too 'modern' (instead they covered the Spider-Man theme
song for the movie). I was playing it for our product manager
at Sony when the soundtrack manager came in and asked what we
were listening to. I told her and said, "Oh my god,
I want this for my soundtrack." So we took another $50,000
of Sony's money and blew it on a trip to South Beach to, basically,
tweak our writing demo, and it was all good - right up to the
point where they decided to release some stupid Sum 41 flop as
the second single instead of our tune. oh well.
To find more about the artist visit http://www.blacklabworld.com
