A Band By Any Other Name…

Their songs are full of seductive whispers, they share vocals and instrument duties and their music is pure and simple pop joy. Imperial Teen makes music that simply cannot help but bring a smile to your face, even when they're singing about stalkers or solitude.

Imperial Teen formed five years ago, while Keyboard player Roddy Bottum was on hiatus from Faith No More, the band he was in for over 15 years. At the time Bottum's father was dying of cancer and he was also dealing with the death of two close friends (one of whom was Kurt Cobain). Bottum decided that he needed something to make him happy and a way to positively express his grief: a new band. Bottum and contacted longtime friend, Lynn Perko (of the defunct band Sister Double Happiness) with his idea and she recruited her roommate, Jone Stebbins to play bass. Stebbins’ only prior band experience was playing with Perko in an '80s all-girl high school punk rock band called The Wrecks. Bottum then brought in Will Schwartz to play guitar and share vocals. Schwartz was also a band novice and an art student when he originally met Bottum in Los Angeles.

After six months of playing in San Francisco clubs, the band went into the studio with Steve McDonald of Redd Kross as producer and recorded their first record, Seasick. Full of offbeat pop melodies, coy harmonies and fuzzed-out guitars, Seasick covered the topics like drug addiction desire and had two songs written by Bottum about the death of Cobain ("Butch," "You're The One"). Seasick's pop and grunge influences caused reviewers around the nation to coin the term "bubblegrunge" in reference to Imperial Teen. It is a label that is still used today, even though the quartet’s sound has changed in many ways throughout their five-year union.

This year after a several-year break due to record label mergers and producer switches, Imperial Teen released What Is Not To Love to rave reviews, calling them "catchy," "searing," "provocative" and of course, "bubblegrunge." While the music on What Is Not To Love continues in a pop-driven vein, it is—lyrically speaking—a more somber set of songs, said by Bottum to be written in reaction to the cutsie image people accused them of fitting after the release of Seasick. The first single off What Is Not To Love ("Yoo Hoo") was featured on the soundtrack of the black comedy, Jawbreaker, and the band made a video with the film’s star, Rose McGowan, ensuring them a place in MTV history.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Lynn Perko about Imperial Teen, and she explained the role Kelley Deal played when she and Bottum began the band, what it was like to tour with Courtney (Love, of course) and her feelings about the term, "bubblegrunge." Lets just say, she really doesn't like one of those things, read on to find out which it is.

Yes, just four really short dates.

No, we're going to play with some friends of ours in Chico called, Aislers Set -- that's it, we’re just using local bands otherwise. Will has been talking to promoters and he has some favorite bands he wants to play with.

We were supposed to be on that tour, and we went to the Cow Palace in San Francisco to check it out because we were supposed to be joining. That night Hole told us that they were going to leave the tour in just a few days and rebook a tour themselves and that we should come along for that one. So we toured just with Hole in all of May.

Oh, that was great. It was really fun, we're big fans of Hole, their new record really grew on us. It was a great experience, they're a great live rock band, and most of the time Courtney [Love] behaved herself—for the most part [laughs]. We played pretty big places, anywhere from 3500-5000 people.

She was a big influence, just because we thought it was great that she'd never really played guitar and all of a sudden she was going to go and tour with The Breeders, who were playing shows with 2500 people. We went and saw them. Kelley was doing the leads and she just looked like… Oh my god! She had that look of stress like, ‘I'm picking the notes out,’ and then she'd be done and she'd be like, ‘Whoo!’ We just really appreciated and strove to do that. If she can do it, we can do it—that’s the precedent that we used to switch instruments. Roddy had never played guitar in a band before and Will had never played guitar and Jone had never played bass and I had never really played guitar or bass either. But being that I was the best drummer—because I've been playing drums for a long time and that is a pretty crucial part of keeping things together—I decided to sit in on the drums most of the time. Roddy is the switch drummer, and then that's when I go out and play bass. As far as Kelley being an influence, she made us think about the fact that anyone can do anything, all you have to do is do it. When opportunity arises, take it.

We do trade off. In the beginning it was probably quite a bit more clumsy than it is now, but now we are slick [laughs], we've got it down. When we make the set list we think about it—we don't want to interrupt any momentum. We switch anywhere from two to three songs in a common set. Do you have both of our records?

Oh cool.

That is so excellent. That record was an interesting thing to do. It was different compartments of time and naturally, with time, things will change. From the first day in the studio to the last day of mastering so much had taken place in our personal and professional lives—there is a lot on that record.

That's really exaggerated, it's a good pull-quote. We recorded [Seasick] in about a week, but we took some time to mix it and then we went back in the studio and put two new songs on. It wasn't just like we sewed it all up in a whole week. We probably did Seasick—total time—in about two to three weeks.

It's really short and with this one—What Is Not To Love—we knew we wanted to take more time than we did on Seasick. We thought, maybe about six weeks. We wanted to embellish our songs in ways we had never done before and have the opportunity to experiment within the studio. Other things came into it too. Our first producer came down with viral meningitis and so that was real drag, and we had to stop and we waited for him, and then he couldn't do it so we had to find another producer. Then we weren't quite happy with some other things and we went with another producer. It wasn't like we were kicking back smoking cigarettes saying, "Oh, lets call in somebody else." We also had the time because our record label was going through this big switch—it’s a long boring story—from Polygram to Universal, so we were playing the waiting game anyway. We decided to take this time in an advantageous way, not just waste it. Because of that, our record had more time to breath.

Innocence and sex?

Yes, I agree. Because we collaborate musically we have set up a different situation—we don't have one head writing all the songs. This collection of songs on What Is Not To Love were written over a period of about two-and-a-half-years, and with the time we took in rehearsal and in the studio, they took on a different shape. In hindsight, one day we listened back and realized that there is a theme of women on What Is Not To Love. In many of the songs, women are mentioned or are the subject of songs, and the second song, "Birthday Girl," is about our friend Anna, who was in That Dog. There are things about love and innocence, and I hear a lot of solitude also.

Our label, Polygram, was chosen by the film company to put the soundtrack together and they just delivered a whole bunch of songs. The film company heard that song and asked if they could put it in the movie. First, of course, we saw the movie and thought it was funny and we said, "Sure." We used Rose McGowan in our video because the film company paid for it [laughs]. It was fun enough. It's a pretty sick, funny video.

I didn't mind it the first time I read it and then the 50^th time I read it, I was like, "C'mon!" I think we all feel that way. It is clever--bubblegrunge—it's a cute little play on words. It emotes a certain understanding of what we might sound like, but I always think that we're a punk rock / pop band. We write pop-y songs—I guess that's where "bubble" comes in—and "grunge" is because we're not a super-pop band and we definitely have that grunge aesthetic. But, those terms are tired, over-used and worn out. We've been together five years now and I think our music has gone through an osmosis and has come out different from "bubblegrunge."

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