Two
years ago, the Chronicle ran a piece on a certain Austin modern rock quintet. It was
titled “Sincola Sells Out!,” and at that time, the still-young band was already
considered fair game for potshots from former fans, scenesters, and of course,
local music ‘zines, because they’d joined the list of bands who just weren’t
Austin anymore: the villainous musicians who had thrown aside their art just
for the sake of playing to crowds of more than six people. Sincola’s particular
crime? They had signed a deal with Caroline Records, an indie label owned by a
major, and they were going to make records for them. Worse yet, they had
previously dared write and record an EP for local indie Rise Records that
people seemed to like, and local radio stations were wont to play the song
“Bitch” from it. This meant that Outsiders began to come to their shows, daring
to order beers from the same bar as the Regulars who had “been there” for the
band (on the guest list, most likely, but there nonetheless) from the
beginning. All this despite the fact that the band was barely known outside of
the state.
“It’s funny,” points out singer Rebecca Cannon, “that in Austin, a lot of
bands are considered sellouts even though that particular band is only known in
the region or in Austin and even though they’ve sold out, they’re still out
delivering pizzas! Those sellouts!”
By the same time the following year, the naysayers had changed their tune. Oh,
they were still saying nay, but in a different manner. You see, at that point,
Sincola had gone from sellout to wipeout. It was obvious. The signs were all
there. The album, What the Nothinghead Said, had come out, but there was
no fanfare. Why wasn’t the band touring? Could it be that they had bombed out
like everyone had predicted? They dared try for fame and ended up in the “Where
are they now” file, right? Well, no.
“I think there was this perception that Sincola got everything handed to them
on a plate,” says drummer Terri Lord, “but the truth is we really had to work
through a lot of stuff.” The most incapacitating “stuff” at that particular
juncture of the band’s career was Lord’s spine. No, she hadn’t lost her
courage. A long history of back problems culminated in her immobility just as
the band’s Caroline debut was released. So, instead of embarking immediately on
tour, the band was forced to wait while Lord first tried non-surgical methods,
and later went under the knife — two months after the album’s release. Things
were at a standstill.
Well, not completely. For one thing, at the time of …Nothinghead‘s
release, the band still didn’t have a booking agent — a situation they were
able to correct during Lord’s convalescence. The band also used its downtime to
write songs at Lord’s bedside (“Happy M.F.,” the UK choice for the first single
off their current album, was written while she lay “flat on my back with a
guitar”). When the band finally did hit the road that summer their reception
was good, but by then a comparatively long silence after the album’s release
had diminished the group’s buzz. Combine that with the fact that the record
“didn’t come out as it could have,” according to bassist Chepo Pe�a, and
the first album was a comparative disappointment all around.
Today, Lord says it was perseverance that got them through the experience —
something that, along with frustration, the band has been through before and
since. Consider their shaky beginnings; before assembling the current, steady
lineup (Cannon, Lord, Pe�a, and guitarists Greg Wilson and Kris
Patterson), the band went through several drummers and had to replace original
vocalist Kasey Smith. Consider also the last couple of months; the release of
their second album, Crash Landing in Teen Heaven, seemed earmarked for
another series of disasters. After the album’s May 14 release date, Sincola was
set to join the 3X5 package tour, which put together several three-band bills
that would tour the country hitting the same venues as the previous leg of the
tour. Unfortunately, the tour fell apart after the first leg of bands hit the
road.
This time though, the delay seems to be a positive. The band had been worried
about having to rush a video out between dates, fearing it would turn out a
sloppy mess. Instead, they now have a date for the video (June 19), a producer
(Paul Anderson, who’s worked with Poe and others), and the time to do it right.
Meanwhile, their new album’s getting better reviews than the last (as one
Chronicle music writer is fond of saying, by putting out the Rise EP
first, their Caroline debut was technically their “sophomore slump”) and is
doing well on the Gavin and CMJ music industry charts: on the
former, Crash… is 27 with a bullet, and on the latter it debuted as
the third highest add at 147, hopping up into the 50s in the two weeks since.
Getting a replacement tour assembled is not something that has them worried
either, as the chart support generally translates to club interest, and they’re
currently looking at possibly joining former Cult leader Ian Asbury’s band the
Holy Barbarians on their upcoming tour. There may also be some gigs with Aimee
Mann; Lord says that their booker told them with an absolutely straight face
that they wouldn’t know for sure “til Tuesday.”
So, what does this all mean? Only that it looks like it’s almost time to
restart the “sellout” backlash. And that’s not bad for a band whose members,
two years after that first article, still have their day jobs, have yet to
really break nationally, and seem perfectly happy with the way things are going
for them. Oh, and there’s another thing that may have inspired the original
backlash against Sincola — their look.
Individually, there’s not much about any particular band member that would
make your jaw drop if you passed them on the sidewalk. Together though, any
major label A&R whiz with a PowerBook and a yearning for the perfect
“alternative” act couldn’t have done a better job of assembling a band. On the
left of the stage there’s the big, grinnin’ Hispanic dude (Pe�a), on the
right, the nebbishy, quiet white guy (Greg Wilson aka Wendal Stivers),
and in between there’s the big blonde (Lord), the tomboy (Patterson), and front
and center there’s the strange, big-eyed waif in her garage sale clothes
(Cannon), flailing earnestly through each song like she’s auditioning for her
first high school play. “We are cartoon characters,” admits Lord, and
it’s not surprising if the uninformed might mistake the quintet as a
prepackaged Monkees for the Nineties.
The band is also somewhat baffled over one local writer’s accusation that they
are now “playing the lesbian card”; though Lord and Patterson are longtime
companions, the band has yet to use their songs as a platform to deal with the
issue of sexual preference. Lord says she was happy to see a noticeable gay
crowd at a recent Houston show after a local weekly described them as having a
“mix of gay and straight” members, but doesn’t consider Sincola a “gay band” by
any means. Cannon further points out that her personal sexuality takes a back
seat to her role as front person for the band in that she sings lyrics that may
have been written by any member. “In one song I’ll be singing from my heart;
during another, I’ll be singing from Greg’s heart,” says Cannon.
When it comes down to it, Sincola is just another combination of local
musicians who fell together from the same Austin music family tree. Lord has
the longest pedigree, stretching back to the Raul’s era with the Jitters and
continuing unabated through innumerable others from Virgin Machine to the Mind
Splinters to Power Snatch to… well, you get the picture. Guitarists Wilson
and Patterson first came together as members of Hundredth Monkey, and when
Wilson decided to move to Seattle for better prospects, Patterson found herself
calling Wilson from a roadside pay phone on the eve of his departure to insist
that he stay in town and form the band that would later become Sincola. Singer
Rebecca Cannon, she of the Peter Lorre eyes and the onstage reserve of Pee-wee
Herman, comes mostly from Drama Club, but for a while played trumpet for
Stretford.
And what about the band’s sound? Have they sold out by changing their music to
make it more “accessible”? In a word, no. Unlike the case of say, Charlie
Sexton, whose debut album marked a significant change in style from what his
hard-core fans were accustomed to (and for that matter sold a zillion more
copies than Sincola is even hoping for), Sincola has changed their overall
sound little if at all since they first began to play. “If anything,” says
Pe�a, “I think we’ve got more of a kick in the ass [sound] than we used
to.”
Pe�a probably has more to gnash his teeth about than any of the other
band members; he also plays with the Peenbeets and Gomez, both of which rate
high on Austin’s “no-sellout” approval chart. Besides the behind-the-back
chatter that inevitably occurs, he gets it full frontal as well, and grows
especially irritated at those who assume Gomez is his band and Sincola
is his job. “Why are you telling me this?” is his standard reply. “I
wouldn’t be wasting my time on this band if I didn’t like it… it’s not like
`I’m just doing this for the money.'” (“What money?” chimes in Patterson.) As a
rule however, the band shrugs off the disses it gets.
“You know, we’re going to get criticized a lot,” posits Cannon, “and it’s
because we get a lot of attention and we are still together, but in the grand
scale of Sincola, it’s okay. In a way, our whole attitude is tougher because
for a couple of years we always got good press and everything was just great
and now we have to work really hard and it doesn’t let us slack off — it’s
made us get better and we can’t slack off and say they will like us.”
Which is a good attitude to take, because in the cycle that is the music
industry, that backlash is probably going to come back around again — maybe
several more times. n
This article appears in June 14 • 1996 and June 14 • 1996 (Cover).