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[Cellars]
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Person to person
The Damn Personals and the Brett Rosenberg Problem
BY BRETT MILANO

Shortly after advance copies of their new Standing Still in the USA started getting out, the Damn Personals received a call from their Big Wheel labelmates, local emo kings Piebald. "They said, 'I can't believe your record is so fucking serious,' " admits Personals singer/guitarist Ken Cook. That might not sound like a ringing endorsement, but it was exactly the compliment the band were looking for.

There was a time when the Damn Personals were known for being really cute, playing really loud, and getting really drunk on stage. None of which ever hurt a band's draw, but it can become hard to live up to — especially when you start taking your songwriting damn personally. The new disc is one clue that this group have grown up a bit; another was their recent set at the Rumble, where they made the semifinals. Playing harder and tighter than in the past, the Personals moved beyond their garage/Mod roots into power-pop harmonies and arena muscle. (They also displayed the best attitude. When I ran into Personals bassist Jimmy Jax after the Gentlemen were announced as semifinal winners, he noted, "They're a great band — they just hosed the Damn Personals, so they've got to be.")

"We'd had enough of that drunken buffoonery — 'Oh yeah, the Damn Personals — they get drunk on stage and they break stuff,' " explains guitarist Ant Jones when he and Cook meet up with me at the Middle East, where they'll be playing record-release parties June 28 and 29 (call 617-497-0576). He's drinking a whiskey, but, hey, there's no gig that night. Piebald's recent Rock Revolution EP — their shift into a bigger arena-esque sound — was one thing that made the Personals stand up and take notice; another was a recent package tour where they opened for Jimmy Eat World. "It really sucked being the least professional band on the bill," notes Cook. "And having all your friends say, 'Dude, change your guitar strings already.' "

Hence the polish on the new album, which was produced by Lilys collaborator Mike Deming, with an approach not far from the last couple of Lilys records. It's pop, but the songs are allowed to take some left curves instead of zeroing right in on the chorus ("Sleeping on the Floor" is a three-minute song with two minutes of intro, so it builds plenty of tension before the band finally crash in). The arrangements focus on the more eccentric parts of the Personals' sound — Cook's falsetto leads, the back-and-forth guitar jabs. And they still don't mind the occasional in-joke. Some time back, Cook points out, they heard a band play through a bad sound system, heard them announce a song called "Talkin' in Your Sleep," and thought it was called "Fuckin' in NYC." So he went home and wrote a song with that title, and it opens the album.

"It's our Sgt. Pepper, man," he says, cringing at his own reference. Adds Jones, "At least, we figured we better write some real songs this time. We had Mike Deming producing, and we didn't know if we'd ever have him again, so we thought we'd try all the songs that would probably flounder if we were left to our own devices. The other thing is that Mike [drummer Mike Gill] is now playing really well. He'd never played drums before he joined this band, so at first he wasn't playing well and he wasn't playing badly — he couldn't play at all." The album's loose-knit concept, about the weirdness of life on the road, seems a likely one for a young rock band, but Cook says it dates back to his brief stint in the film industry. "I have a really major hang-up about the time I lived in Los Angeles, seeing the personality shifts people had out there. So yeah, this album is less about girls and more about geography. It's a frustrated mid-20s record."

Meanwhile, the band are a little less eager to shake their reputation for sex appeal — after all, they're the first local underground act to make the pages of Tiger Beat since Evan Dando's heyday. Jones takes credit for that coup, but only because he wound up drinking with the magazine's editor at an all-night loft party. "It was an issue of Tiger Beat with a glossy picture of Britney Spears on the cover, and inside there's a blurry, black-and-white photo of us. Even the people at Tiger Beat were in on the joke of putting us in there. But it's all good — girls are a good thing."

SOME PEOPLE take pop music way too seriously. They get attached to their favorite artists, play their own music with more than a little earnestness, and stick their own personal details into their lyrics without shame. Fortunately, many of those people end up writing good songs. Brett Rosenberg fits in that category.

"It's less about being pop and more about moving people," he explains. We're at the Middle East, and he's about to go on stage to play the release party for the new Brett Rosenberg Problem CD, Destroyer (on Hi-Fi); the upstairs room is packed, and members of other bands grab him between answers to offer congrats. "Pop is just the language through which you can move them. To my mind, the most offensive thing that anyone can do in rock music is to tell the truth. So I'm always looking for that little bit of truth to focus on."

Rosenberg's earnestness was hard to miss when I first saw him play, a couple of years ago. He seemed to have his heart and his influences in the right place but hadn't yet written his first killer tune (at the time he was also playing guitar on the side with Dave Aaronoff & the Details; now he's doing the same in the Rudds). But he's loosened up, grown more comfortable, and gotten better at slinging hooks. All three developments are clear on Destroyer (where at least two songs, "Shame on You" and "My Girlfriend's Daughter," sound like obvious singles — the latter gets extra points for a song angle that someone had to think of sooner or later). And they're clearer still at the Middle East release party, where the Brett Rosenberg Problem take on more of an R&B swagger (complete with surprise "In the Midnight Hour" cover); Jam or Figgs comparisons wouldn't be far off. By now the band, with Geoff Van Duyne on bass and Jason Sloan on drums, have turned into a mean little unit. The same line-up performs, with Van Duyne as frontman, as Army of Jasons; the arrangement gives both Rosenberg and Van Duyne a chance to call the shots.

"We sucked back then," Rosenberg says when I bring up the first times I saw him. "When I started out, I was way too interested in proving to people that I was good. Now I guess I feel more like rocking." But he still isn't sure whether some of the best songs on his disc are great or awful. "Take something like [the disc's power ballad] 'Orange Line' — that's the kind of song that you don't wanna like. It's way too personal, overly repetitive, and bone-crushingly sad. It takes a lot of balls to write something like that, but somebody's got to do it."

As for telling the truth, he's got no problem there. Not only does he write a couple of songs about a crush that didn't pan out, he puts the woman's name in the titles ("Another Kelly" and "Kelly Haas All Over Again"). Has such frankness been a help or a hindrance in his love life? "It does make them pay more attention, even while it puts them out of bounds permanently. In Kelly's case, all she asked was that I tell everyone she's a nice person — and now, when you do an Internet search on her, my album comes up." Does the romantic turmoil help him as a songwriter? "No, it's the other way around — it helps me as a person with romantic turmoil to be able to write songs about it."

One thing's for sure: Rosenberg is one of the few rock musicians in town who can name an album Destroyer and not mean it as a Kiss reference (instead, he had the clip-art cover of a destroyer ship, and he liked the idea of nice music with ominous packaging). His real musical inspiration is more surprising, and definitely less trendy. "I think we can all learn a lot from Billy Joel — I personally believe that what everyone says Bruce Springsteen is to America, Billy Joel really is. If he didn't play piano, he'd probably be revered by hipsters everywhere" — all this while ignoring his interviewer's obvious disbelief. "I really wanted this album to be like Glass Houses, where all the songs are different and they all sound like singles." For better or worse, the Billy Joel influence isn't that easy to catch, but maybe it does make sense. The tracks on Rosenberg's disc veer between pop and punk, modern and retro, but it's all still rock and roll to him.

Issue Date: June 13 - 20, 2002
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