Section:GDN 12 PaGe:11 Edition Date:190827 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 26/8/2019 12:25 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian
Tuesday 27 August 2019 11
How we made
Klaus Eichstadt
Songwriter/guitarist
I was in my last year of high school. Glam rock
and pop rock were huge. Bon Jovi and the
Scorpions were doing all their big ballads and it
seemed like every frickin’ song was about love
or sex. Y’know: “Chicks are rad, sex is rad.”
I used to mess around with my parents’
piano and I just started playing that main riff.
I was already friends with Whit [Crane, singer]
and we’d hang out with this other guy, Farrell
T Smith. He was Mr Negative. Farrell hates
everything. He’s like: “Man, I don’t wanna
go to the beach because you get sand in your
shoes.” So I started imagining him and I came
up with that fi rst line: “I hate the rain and
sunny weather.” I got my Tascam four-track
cassette recorder, made this little song – and
then it sat on the back burner for four years
until we needed a longer live set.
I wanted the guitar solo to have that blues
vibe, a little bit of Chuck Berry and CC DeVille
from Poison. Writing it was easy, but then
I had to re-create it. It’s so simple that, if you
make a mistake, it’s very obvious. Every now
and then, I’d miss that last note live and it
was like: “Oh man, that was my moment
and I screwed it up!”
The record company wanted to choke us:
“Please put hot chicks in your videos!” But
we weren’t that kind of band. We made the
video on a beach in Isla Vista, in California.
There were these two stray dogs running
around and pissing on the drums. The
director – Thomas Mignone – had this crazy
idea to have all these fl oating blow-up sex
dolls. They fi lled them with helium, but it
turned out the plastic was too heavy, so they
had to buy a bunch of balloons and tie them
on to the dolls. The string broke on one of
them – and I heard a news story about planes
coming into the local airport and spotting this
blow-up doll up in the sky.
When you get overexposed on one song, it
defi nitely has a backlash. We got a lot of fl ak
for being this obnoxious joke band. But at the
same time, hits open up doors. Everything
About You made us almost a household name,
almost overnight.Whitfi eld Crane
Songwriter/singer
I was young and I looked up to Klaus. When he
played me the demo of Everything About You
on a little analogue tape, I was excited that he
was showing me something because it meant
I could maybe be in a band with him. Back
then, I was more than cynical – I was downright
negative – and every line made me laugh.
The song had humour. We were, like, the last
“smile” band to get through the door before
grunge came and decimated everybody.
But I remember thinking: “It’s not heavy
enough.” I wanted to be in Black Sabbath or
Judas Priest. Everything About You didn’t
necessarily sound like that. There was
another song on the album called Mr Record
Man that I made Klaus sing, and Everything
About You went through a moment in time
when I didn’t want to sing it either. But
Klaus said, “Will you please just sing it?”
and I’m like, “All right, all right ...”
I wrote the rap outro because we wanted to
be Red Hot Chili Peppers – of course we’ll never
be that cool. It sounds like I made that rap up on
the spot – and I think I did. I wasn’t experienced
enough to know where I wanted to take the
song’s vocal. I was a good live singer, but I was
scared of the microphone and the studio.
When we made Everything About You,
the record label weren’t expecting much of
us, which gives you a lot of freedom. For the
song’s intro, before the music starts, we got
the comedian Julia Sweeney do a spoken-word
sketch as Pat, her character from Saturday
Night Live. I don’t know where the “shave and
a haircut” riff at the end of the song came from.
We were always a weird band. We still are.
But once the song blew up, the label wanted
to grab hold of us and turn me into Bon Jovi II- that’s when there was friction. Back in 1995,
I wouldn’t play Everything About You live,
because I wanted to prove myself as a heavy,
badass rock’n’roll singer. Now it’s interesting
to see the joy our old songs such as Everything
About You bring. It’s a song that has gone
around the world and pays the bills, thank God.
Interviews by Henry Yates.
Whitfi eld Crane tours the UK , 4-18 September.
Everything About You
by Ugly Kid Joe
‘We used helium-fi lled sex dolls in the video. One of
them broke loose and planes could see it in the sky’
I bet it’s an eye-
opener for men,
because they
don’t normally
see what it’s like
for women
‘Just sing it!’ ...
Ugly Kid Joe in
London in 1992PHOTOGRAPH: IAN DICKSON/REDFERNSin news clips. “Kate and Sharyn
wanted to go deeper into the women’s
stories ... We’d all become headshots
fl ashed on a TV screen, like victims
of a serial killer .” She hopes it might
serve as a comfort to women in
similar situations – and help men,
too. “If even one man walks out of the
theatre more aware of his own actions
regarding women and boundaries,
that’s progress,” she says.
Pines has reservations over Bitter
Wheat. “I’m not interested in his
perspective. The playwright Mathilde
Dratwa has written A Play About
David Mamet Writing a Play About
Harvey Weinstein and, between the
two, I’m much more tempted to see
that.” Should men be telling women’s
#MeToo stories at all? Of course,
says Featherstone. “We can’t start
censoring writers.” But she adds: “It
is ironic that the only two plays which
deal head-on with the predator are by
two middle-aged men.”
Rothstein thinks it is symptomatic
of imbalances in the industry.
“The fi rst major West End
production of the #MeToo story
is told by a white American male.
This fact alone is indicative of
a much deeper issue and the way
in which the system is structured.
It’s not that Mamet shouldn’t be
writing about this incredibly topical
issue. It’s that his play should not
be the only one that gets staged in
the West End. You need everyone’s
perspective , including those of the
survivors of abuse.”
Liv Warden’s play Anomaly ,staged at the Red Lion theatre,
London, in January , was about
a fi ctional shamed media mogul.
Warden made the decision not to
have him appear on stage. He is a
silenced character and his three
daughters, who have to deal with
the fall out of his misconduct, are the
focus of her plot. “When [Weinstein]
was arrested,” she says, “I saw
that he had a wife and two young
children. One of my fi rst thoughts
was about them and how this was
going to change their lives. I wanted
to show the grey area. There is not
the victim-predator divide here
and there are questions of why the
women connected with these men
didn’t say anything.”
But there are women in theatre
who feel men’s stories about
this subject deserve to be heard,
too, as long as they are delivered
responsibly. Priscilla Holbrook is
part of a production that dramatises
the lives of male sex off enders
in a rural American community.
America Is Hard to See , which was
staged at the Edinburgh fringe, is
set to music and lyrics composed
by Holbrook and is an investigative
theatre piece based on verbatim
interviews. “We see the victims
mainly through the men’s stories
but this does not minimise them,”
says Holbrook. What is essential for
drama about sex abuse, she adds, is
for it to be attuned to the prospect
of re traumatising those who have
experienced it. “You have to ask,
‘Does a piece of art re traumatise
or does it nudge you to a bigger,
expanded place?’”
A hotel room scene in Bitter
Wheat shows Malkovich’s character
attempting to have coercive sex
with a young actress. “It’s such
an important scene ,” says Burns.
“I bet it’s quite an eye-opener for
men because they don’t normally
see what it’s like for her – or they
profess not to. ”
Yet Berkoff and Mamet’s dramas
seemed so closely tethered to real
events that they off er little insights
beyond what we already know from
news stories. “When something has
been in the news, what does theatre
add to it?” asks Featherstone. In
recent years, she has seen “a new
anger and fearlessness in women’s
stories. And a sense of not needing
to be liked or even a desire to create
lik able female characters on stage.
The work that has been talked
about since #MeToo was already in
development before the Weinstein
case. He was brought down because
change was happening. ”
Lynette Linton, artistic director
of the Bush theatre, London, says
#MeToo was slow to embrace the
stories of wom en of colour. “ At the
beginning, its focus was American
white women,” she says.
These stories need to be told in
all their intersectional complexity
and fullness. Sexual harassment is
a subject that’s simply not going to
go away, says Burns : “I’m sure there
will be more women writing these
stories. Let’s not push them to do it
too quickly.”
Sexy Lamp is at Upstairs at the
Western, Leicester , 12-13 September.
Bitter Wheat is at the Garrick theatre,
London , until 21 September.Above, The Pussy
Grabber Plays;
below, Steven
Berkoff in Harvey
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