Different strokes

Guster and Wheat

Cellars by Starlight by Jonathan Perry

It could have been a page ripped straight from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For nearly an hour they had waited outside Tower Records on Newbury Street, hundreds of Guster fans lined along Massachusetts Avenue and wrapped halfway down Boylston Street. Each was clutching a coveted yellow ticket that would permit entrance to the in-store performance celebrating the release of the trio's major-label debut, Lost and Gone Forever (Hybrid/Sire), and the autograph session that would follow. The first two fans to gain entry to Tower's inner sanctum -- a pair of teenage girls barely quelling the giddy squeals of delight burbling up from within -- bounced up to the lip of the stage, front row center. Then a few more rushed in and took up their places. And then 10 more. And another 20, 30. Sixty. And more still, until every square inch of space, every sliver of a spot anywhere within view of the stage, was gobbled up and gone. The whole thing took about two minutes. Then Guster came on and kicked into "Barrel of a Gun," Lost and Gone Forever's brisk first single. That's when the shrieks began.

Guster aren't Springsteen, or even Britney Spears, but the rabidness of their fan base was, and is, an amazing thing to behold. Although the formerly Somerville-based (they've recently relocated to New York City) band's light-but-earnest sugary brand of pop hasn't won over many of the local rock cognoscenti, that little detail hasn't fazed a fiercely loyal audience who most likely will pack the joint when Guster visit the Orpheum Theatre on October 30. "I think it bummed me out at first that we were selling out the Paradise and Avalon and weren't being recognized as a great Boston band," singer/guitarist Ryan Miller said shortly before Guster were scheduled to perform at Woodstock this past August. "But then we sort of felt, well, we're not a Boston band. We're a Northeast band. We could be a national band."

Apparently those several hundred in-store attendees -- not to mention the folks at Hybrid/Sire -- thought so too. If their Tower appearance a week ago Wednesday is any indication, Guster's fans (some of whom got their start as "Guster Reps" selling the band's two self-released CDs to other fledgling fans) come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They were overwhelmingly young, a mix of clean-cut baseball-cap-clad frat boys, well-behaved college girls who obviously thought the guys in Guster were cute (well, they are), preppie twentysomethings who probably had Squeeze's Singles -- 45's and Under in their CD collections, and shaggy, scraggly-bearded kids who looked as if they'd spent their last few summer vacations trying to scare up an extra Phish ticket.

Come to think of it, Guster do have a touch of the jam band about them. That element may have something to do with the mildly funky, rhythm-driven sound the group conjure thanks in large part to Brian Rosenworcel, a drummer/percussionist who eschews sticks and prefers to play with just his hands. In addition to Rosenworcel, the trio -- there's no bassist -- consists of Miller and singer/guitarist Adam Gardner. Not that anybody cheering for an encore didn't already know exactly who these three were. Heck, the new disc had been out for only 24 hours and it seemed the crowd already knew the tunes by heart.

These days, that's an especially good thing for Guster. The release of their heavily hyped, Steve Lillywhite-produced major-label debut ups the ante for a band who got off to an inauspicious start busking in Harvard Square and hawking homemade tapes for $5 a pop. This was after the three friends, who first met during freshmen orientation week at Tufts University, were summarily rejected for a campus Battle of the Bands competition. But now, eight years later, it seems Guster are reaping the rewards of years of grassroots fan-base building (band members claim they sold a combined 65,000 copies of their first two discs, '94's Parachute and '96's Goldfly, on their own, numbers that didn't go unnoticed by the bigwigs at Hybrid/Sire). After they'd signed with the label in December of 1997, Hybrid/Sire re-released Goldfly last year. One song in particular from that disc, "Airport Song," became something of a hit on Modern Rock Radio. Guster performed the tune on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, then got drunk and watched a tape of themselves on a huge outdoor TV screen in Manhattan. It was just another little triumph that the band celebrated on their own, far from the Boston scene they were never much a part of.

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Just as the lads in Guster have kept their eyes on the stars (or, at least, that Jumbotron in NYC) and have bent over backward to make their moniker a household name, Wheat don't even want you to know that they're a band. But a band they are -- and a very, very good one at that. Although the Boston outfit's lovely 1997 debut, Medeiros (issued on the Chicago-based Sugar Free label), was one of the finest local releases of that year, the disc received as much attention for what wasn't on the album as for what was. No band credits. No photos. And no, the title of the disc didn't appear anywhere on the outer packaging.

Hope And Adams, Wheat's equally sublime sophomore effort (released last week on Sugar Free), does its predecessor one better. This time around, the band have put the title right there on the cover (perhaps as a concession to those who care about such things). Also for the first time, they appear ready to have embraced the novel concept of touring -- possibly, maybe, eventually -- in support of the album. In the meantime, they're scheduled to make a rare local appearance opening for Mike Watt at T.T. the Bear's Place on October 16. Finally, it seems singer/guitarist Scott Levesque is becoming a bit more comfortable with the attention being given his band, whose line-up also includes Brendan Harney (the two met while studying art at UMass-Dartmouth) and Ricky Brennan.

"When we released Medeiros, we weren't trying necessarily to do anything else except play some songs and maybe put out a record," Levesque says. "We didn't want to have to start making mailing lists and selling ourselves and all that shit. We just wanted to make an album that we would want to listen to."

That Wheat have now twice succeeded in making mini-masterpieces from their modest ambitions -- and that some of us have actually managed to stumble across them -- is a testament to the seductive allure and sheer quality of the trio's material. It's as if some music were so quietly powerful that it's destined to reach our ears. The music of Medeiros was just too good not to.

Hope and Adams represents the band's slightly more concerted effort to connect with a broader audience. This time out, Wheat enlisted Mercury Rev/Flaming Lips studio wiz Dave Fridmann to lend a production hand, and Fridmann emphasizes the band's dusky, twilit languor and Levesque's cryptic lyrics and laconic delivery. Sound familiar? Levesque knows where we're going here. "Pavement, of course, is just an amazing, amazing band," he volunteers before attempting to figure out -- or explain -- his own approach to songwriting. For him, that's not an easy task. He's partial to using the word "maddening" to describe the process.

"I think there's a kind of starkness to our music -- it's really insecure music," he says later. "I say insecure because it's wacky stuff to put down your thoughts. For me, Medeiros was a thought and a feeling and a vibe more than anything. Then there are times when you put things down and you say to yourself, `There's no way I should be able to get away with this.' It's difficult to know what you're going to say when you're writing a song. But every song that I love means something to me, and that's the magic. It's something you can't anticipate."

Like Pavement's Terror Twilight (Matador) or Creeper Lagoon's I Become Small and Go (Nickelbag), Hope and Adams is both an allusive and an elusive work replete with secret poetry and hidden innuendo dressed in a soft-focus sparkle. If the songs on Medeiros conjured summer in mood, the new one glows with the gold of autumn. What it all means, says Levesque, is up to each listener: "I think that there's a place for our records and what we do. But the only thing you can hope for is that somebody who hears your record will want to hang on to it. That's the cool thing about having no distribution -- people who want it really have to go out of their way to find it and get it." Levesque sounds peculiarly, genuinely proud of the predicament. Perhaps for Wheat, self-imposed obscurity is still its own enigmatic reward.

COMING UP.

Tonight (Thursday), the Allstonians stop by T.T. the Bear's Place, Seks Bomba are at Johnny D's, and Magic 12 and Mishima are at the Milky Way . . . Tomorrow (Friday), it's Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz at T.T.'s with Mr. Airplane Man, 34 Satellite, and the Candy Butchers; the Pills and Expanding Man are at Bill's Bar, and the Ghost of Tony Gold and the all-girl garage group The Glory Fades are at the Milky Way . . . Fuzzy headline a Saturday-night bill at the Middle East upstairs with Cherry 2000, Waltham, and Snares & Kites . . . Tireless troubadour Jonathan Richman hits the Middle East for a three-night stand starting Sunday . . . Former teen-pop sensation (and pal to the stars) Ben Lee is at T.T.'s on Monday . . . Robbie Williams's ego lands for an all-ages show at the shiny new Avalon Ballroom this Tuesday . . . And Cheerleadr, whose new Rock Album is out next month, join Half-Cocked and headliners Jimmy's Chicken Shack at Bill's next Thursday.