Stroke 9 is a San Francisco-based rock
band whose career thus far has followed the
indie-rock work ethic to the letter. They formed in
high school, released two albums themselves,
booked their own national tour, and eventually made
so much noise that they got signed.
It's what comes next that will be really interesting:
the band's Cherry/Universal debut album, Nasty
Little Thoughts, is loaded with 3-to-4-minute
harmony-loaded pop-rock songs which are so
addictive that stardom seems like a foregone
conclusion. The group is a tight and powerful rock
band, but wisely never lets anything get in the way of
melodies like the ones in "Little Black Backpack,"
"Letters" or "Washin' and Wonderin'." The album
was co-produced by ex-Talking Heads keyboard
whiz Jerry Harrison (Live, the Verve Pipe, Kenny
Wayne Shepherd) and Rupert Hine (Duncan Sheik,
Howard Jones, The Fixx), who gave the band a
radio-ready sound without sacrificing any of the
energy.
"The first thing with our music is always the song,"
Luke says. "In high school I was into a lot of English
new wave - The Smiths, Love And Rockets, New
Order - and then I had a big classic rock phase. I've
just always been attracted to melodic music."
Yet what comes across as much as the band's
irresistible melodicism is their almost preternatural
chemistry, musical and otherwise, which stems from
the fact that three out of the four band members
have been best friends for a decade. They formed
the band in high school - Marin Academy in San
Rafael, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San
Francisco.
Drummer Eric Stock came on board two years ago.
"At first it was kind of weird coming into such a
tightly-knit bunch of guys," says Eric, who joined the
band shortly after an American tour with Modern
English. "But, now I feel like I've know them all my
life." "Yeah, we're together all day, every day and
we're still best friends," John says. "People tell us
that it really comes across when we're playing live."
This band was their high school senior project. "We
had a class called 'Rock Band' that we made a
six-song tape for at a local guy's studio, and that
was our senior project. Yes, we got graded," Luke
laughs. "I can't remember what we got - probably a
'See me after class'!" At the very least, it didn't
prevent any of them from graduating. All four
members went to different colleges, yet each
summer they'd "fall back into the band" and
recorded their self-released debut album, Boy
Meets Girl, during the summer of '93.
Doubtless to the delight of their parents, they
decided to do the band full-time after graduation,
and in the fall of '95 retreated to the windy hills of
Bodega, north of San Francisco. "It's where Alfred
Hitchcock's 'The Birds' was filmed, y'know, with
that little church on the hill, so it was kinda freaky,"
Luke says. "But it's a beautiful town where we were
completely isolated, so all we did was play music."
Out of that summer came their second self-released
album, Bumper To Bumper, which has sold over
10,000 copies to date.
The next step, rather ambitiously, was Stroke 9's
1996 North American Tour. They didn't have a hit
single, they weren't opening for an established act,
and hardly anybody outside of California had heard
of them - but they hit the road anyway. "So we
bought this book called 'Book Your Own Tour',
booked about 50 shows over two or three months,
bought an old ambulance and just hit it. It was a
blast, but we were naive - nobody had heard of us,
so to support ourselves we'd go to malls and ask
kids to listen to our album on our Discman. As a
result, we'd usually sell between 20 and 25 a day
doing that and make like $200."
If nothing else, the tour and the above-mentioned
aggressive marketing techniques proved to the band
that they were onto something. Their reputation
began to spread as they continued to gig heavily
throughout their home state. They're also not above
the occasional strategic exaggeration. "Technically,
we've played with some really big bands!" says
John. "There's this little upstairs lounge at the
Fillmore that we've played at acoustically while a big
band plays in the main room, so you could say
we've opened for Tom Petty, the Wallflowers and
the Counting Crows!"
Regardless, the hard work paid off and the band
inked with Cherry/Universal Records in early '98.
"Cherry was there first, they really understand us
and know what we're about," says Greg. "It's nice to
be with a label that appreciates all the work that
we've done ourselves." True to form, the band
wrote the new album in a small house not too far
from the place in Bodega where they wrote their
second album.
In case you hadn't already noticed, yes, Stroke 9 is
the band from the recent Ron Howard-directed film,
"EdTV." "They had originally wanted a punk band
for that scene," says Greg, "but they saw us and dug
us, so we wrote a very aggressive song and got into
the film."
Nasty Little Thoughts sounds like a hit album all the
way through, and the first single, "Little Black
Backpack" sounds like a summer smash. Stroke 9 is
well-poised to reap the rewards that the past
decade of dedication and hard work has earned
them.
History of the Band from the Official Stroke 9 Web Site
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