Back To The Top

If you still think Chevelle is just the name of a car, you are probably suffering from a potentially serious medical condition called being dead. Assuming that is the case, allow me to catch you up. Chevelle is a rock band comprised of Sam, Pete and Joe Loeffler — three talented Midwesterners who also happen to be brothers. After releasing a successful college radio album in 1999 titled Point #1 and touring with the likes of Sevendust and Static-X, the band got stuck in an arduous, 11-month-long court battle with their record label. For a while, they were unsure if they would ever be able to play music professionally again, but everything eventually got settled. Not long thereafter, Chevelle signed with Epic Records and released Wonder What’s Next, a frustration-themed LP boasting the hit single "The Red" among its 11 aggressive tracks of tension-draped guitars and affective vocals.
In lieu of description, many times, Chevelle’s music ends up getting compared to Tool without the artsy pretensions, though even that is a stretch. "I think the similarity to Tool comes from Pete’s screaming," offered Sam Loeffler on the subject, a few hours before a recent sold-out show at The Boardwalk in Sacramento. "If you compare them side by side, they’re really not anything like each other, but people will say what they’re going to say and that’s okay because Tool is a great band and they’ve influenced a lot of people."
He did note that the comparison was becoming less and less frequent with the release of Wonder What’s Next, which he credits to the different way they went about making new album. "On the first record, we worked with [producer] Steve Albini and he’s an engineer extraordinaire," Sam said. "He’s not a producer and he’ll tell you he’s not a producer. We went in and recorded our first takes without any effects and without any real development of the tones, which was great — I think we did exactly what we needed to do.
"With the new record, we had a better idea of what we wanted things to sound like, so we put more thought into the guitar tones, the drum tones, the drum sizes and the bass tones,” Sam continued. “We even put a lot of time into writing enough lyrics for a song. Pete would go back and we’d go through those lyrics and say, ‘Should we add a verse here or change this chorus?’ and that kind of thing. We just put more thought into the songs, I think that was because we had more time to put in. We demo’ed and demo’ed so by the time we got into the studio, we knew exactly what we wanted — we just had to fight with GGGarth [Richardson, producer] to get it."
"I think that rock producers are probably overrated," Sam added with a look that seemed to be saying, ‘We paid someone a lot of money to argue with us.’
"Rock bands," he continued, "by definition, aren’t produced — that’s one of the reasons they’re a rock band. They’re not a boy band. You don’t need to take a rock band and say, ‘Here, this is what we’re going to make you sound like.’ When you find a rock band, you find them because you like what they sound like. I don’t know what GGGarth’s job was, honestly. I think it was just safety."
Currently, things are going very well for Chevelle, but the journey to this point hasn’t been without its conflicts between the band members themselves.
"Brothers are going to fight and bands are going to fight," said Sam. "Joe actually quit for a while — he was sick of doing it. It was at a bad time for us when our record label was going under and none of us really wanted to be with it. We didn’t see each other for at least six months…except at family functions. I guess we all just [eventually] relaxed and decided that we were willing to do it again. It’s a lot better since we tried doing it again. We’ve been getting along pretty well. I think we bite our tongues a lot more — that definitely has changed. It feels like at any time you could say the wrong thing and the whole thing could blow up. Hopefully, we’re all adults and that won’t happen."
Between losing a band member for six months and dealing with a record label that apparently decided to screw all of its bands as it went out of business, it seems accordingly appropriate that frustration is a theme on the current album. But frustration is something that band is trying not to harbor, and they don’t want it become a constant in their music.
“The reason this record was written about what it was written about is because that was what we were going through at the time. It’s a pretty big frustration to have somebody saying, ‘I’ve got my thumb on you and I’m not taking it off,” revealed Sam. “Still, there is some happiness in this record too. In one review, somebody wrote, ‘I think this band needs to let some light in.’ I think they missed the point. There are a lot of songs that are bitter — ‘Wonder What’s Next’ is a pretty bitter song — but ‘Send the Pain Below’ was written about how, even though everybody has things in their lives that don’t work out, you’ve got to take those things and make something positive out of them. Some people miss that stuff. I think that the next record will be influenced by a lot of the things that this one was — there’s always frustration in anything you do, especially in things you have passion about."
On the subject of the future of Chevelle, Sam offered, "If this progresses the way we all hope it will, we will be a fairly large band in a few years. I hope that happens, but I see why people get done when they hit that point because it takes all of your energy. You have no time to make a life or family. You either put your time into this and do it really well or put your time into drinking and doing whatever drugs you can find and you end up burnt out at the end."
Though obviously hoping to progress professionally, Sam made it clear that he had no delusions about Chevelle’s career lasting forever.
"Honestly," he said, "I don’t want it to. I’m sure I will burn out on it because, especially at this level, it’s an ulcerative condition. I’m constantly getting pummeled with problems and things that need to be fixed. Also, my relationship wears on me because it’s so important to me. It’s simple — if [my fiancé] has a problem, I can’t be there to help. I can only imagine how much harder it’s going to be when I’m married. Still, we’re all in such a great place now, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I take it for granted."

Bookmark: