Altered State 1991 L.A. Times

 

 

Progressive Ideals Aren't Altered State's Only Province * The band's `Step Into My Groove' is a striking example of how to craft a catchy, market-oriented rock single.

 

 

Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.

Author: MIKE BOEHM

Date: Sep 26, 1991

 

 

 

If things go well for Altered State, rock fans will soon be bouncing along to a sexy, upbeat bit of poppy, funky psychedelia called "Step Into My Groove," the first single from the Orange County band's debut album.

 

With the song starting to emerge on radio, the four band members flew to London last week to make a video for "Step Into My Groove" with British director Howard Greenhalgh. Whether Altered State finds itself in wide demand depends in large part on how the honchos at MTV view the results.

 

The band's album, "Altered State" (Warner Bros.), offers an interesting collision of savvy commercial instincts and higher alternative-rock ideals.

 

"Step Into My Groove" is a striking example of how to craft a catchy, market-oriented rock single. Singer Gregory Markel's reverberating, multitracked voice whooshes in at the start, intoning a chorus hook-"Groove, groove, groove, step into my groove"-that is almost addictive.

 

The fact that the production technique on Markel's voice is borrowed from a proven million-seller (Queen) enhances the song's prospects for grabbing listeners quickly. A snaking guitar line, courtesy of Curtis Mathewson, adds an exotic but insinuating element. And the song's rhythmic foundation closely parallels the funk-meets-rock big beat of another proven seller, INXS.

 

"Do What You Want" is also a near-ringer for that bankable INXS sound, while "Surrender Now" echoes such trendy British romantic pop acts as Gene Loves Jezebel and the Mission U.K.

 

The alternative side of Altered State comes out in dreamy, deliberately paced songs heavily steeped in such sources as Pink Floyd and the psychedelic, studio-experimentalist phase of the Beatles.

 

Gathered recently for an interview in the living room of Markel's bright, airy Huntington Beach apartment, the four members of Altered State said they weren't worried that "Step Into My Groove" might peg them as a mainstream commercial act, making it harder down the line to establish the more progressive side of the band's personality.

 

"I'm not concerned with how we're identified, so much as being identified, period," said Mathewson. Along with Markel, drummer Chip Moreland and bassist Riz, the guitarist is well aware that it could be easy for Altered State's album to be crowded out under current music industry conditions.

 

Major record companies have been signing a glut of new talent at a time when the means of mass exposure-from video to radio to major touring slots-have never been more limited. New acts get poured into a constricted funnel, with only a lucky few emerging out the other side.

 

The members of Altered State know that the groove they have stepped into-a career on a major label-sometimes requires that lofty artistic intentions be tempered by bottom-line considerations. Left to its own devices, they said, the band probably would have leaned more heavily toward the adventurous side.

 

"The three of us"-Markel, Mathewson, and the band's third songwriter, Riz-"are inclined toward making stuff that only our relatives want to hear," said Markel who, at 28, has the handsome blond look of a young Roger Daltrey. "We usually need to be reeled in. We never heard anybody say, `C'mon guys, you need to take some chances.' "

 

"Nobody ever said, `You guys are getting too commercial,' " added Mathewson, 24, a slender man with rust-colored hair, narrow, gunslinger eyes and a more guarded disposition than his free-talking band mates.

 

"The record company just wanted to make sure there was a proper balance of accessible and adventurous songs on the record," Markel said in the airy, whimsically ironic voice he affects occasionally when saying something he knows sounds pretentious or calculatedly diplomatic. Usually, though, he is an earnest, direct speaker. "It was hard to get `Like Father' (a dark, intensely personal song with echoes of John Lennon's `Mother') on the record, and the fact we had some more accessible songs on the record made that possible."

 

"It'll probably be an ongoing struggle, walking that razor's edge between art and commercial (considerations)," Markel added. "It's a reality for any band on a major label these days. There's going to be compromises until you're in a position to be autonomous." Perhaps, Markel mused, that sort of wrangling between alternating impulses of adventure and accessibility will prove a help rather than a problem.

 

"If we stay on one side of the fence too long, maybe we get bored with ourselves. We've had more than one discussion about the brilliance of the White Album (the Beatles' 1968 double album that ranged from hum-along accessibility to avant-garde experimentation). It wasn't all one mood or one theme. It moved around in a way that modern logic has come to say you shouldn't do. That diversity has always appealed to us."

 

You won't find any "Revolution 9"-type journeys to rock's outer limits on "Altered State." Even the band's least conventional songs remain highly melodic.

 

"Ghost Beside My Bed," about a spectral vision or waking dream that Markel experienced, captures a moment of luminous mystery with passages that alternately recall such predecessors as Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" album and Todd Rundgren's "Black Mariah."

 

The album's two dreamy love ballads, "Heal Me" and "Outside," both have yearning choruses as indelible as the album's more obvious bids for hits. "One Small Boat" brims with exuberance as the band imagines an ideal state of social and interpersonal cooperation; on "Like Father," a stately, ominous number with echoes of King Crimson's "In the Court of the Crimson King," Markel goes beyond regret as he lays bare the feelings brought on by the death two years ago of his emotionally distant father.

 

It's his best lyric, setting out in brief his dashed dreams of reconciliation ("I thought for sure that well before the end / You'd hold me in your arms, your boy again"), his lingering anger over affection denied, and his fears that a cycle of emotional dysfunction could be a family inheritance passed from father to son: "Your parents must (have) done a job on you / I wish you knew my biggest fear is (that) mine did, too."

 

"I've made the transition now between anger and understanding," Markel said. "I don't think I would have written the song as angrily today as I did then. He died with a lot of things unresolved that should have been resolved. It's a typical story."

 

From the doubt and pain of "Like Father," the album rises to an affirmative, if still embattled, ending on "Until the Music Ends," in which Markel vows to give his life meaning by committing it to truth-seeking through art: "I'll reach inside the hole / I'll kiss the open wound / I'll walk the way of fire that hides the truth . . . until the music ends."

 

He sounded just as lofty explaining the song during an interview as he does singing it on the album.

 

The idea, Markel said, is similar to "a thing Joseph Campbell said about artists in society and their visionary and interpretive capabilities. For me it just takes a high level of Samurai-like commitment and discipline and willingness to sacrifice yourself psychologically and to not be afraid to get a few wounds here and there. (`Until the Music Ends') is about taking a deep breath and diving in. It's something I dedicated myself to doing a long time ago."

 

Markel has a tendency to let his discourse run toward the abstract as he alludes to Campbell's notion of the artist as shaman, or to theories on the nature of human consciousness. But when he senses himself reaching a rarefied peak in the conversation, he'll scamper down quickly by tossing in a laugh line from "This Is Spinal Tap."

 

The singer said he moved to Huntington Beach from Palm Springs nine years ago. "Nothing was happening there, I had a friend who told me about the beach, and I decided to make my misfortune here."

 

He sang in two Southern California bands-Living Daylights and Prime Movers-but says he was fired by each one. As he scuffled, Markel kept himself afloat with a job as a singing waiter at an Anaheim dinner theater.

 

Deciding to form a new band, Markel hooked up with Mathewson, who had grown up in a wealthy Newport Beach household.

 

Mathewson said he took up the piano at 5, "just to have something to do while my parents socialized." By his teens, he was walking around the campus of an Arizona boarding school, playing a guitar plugged into a portable amplifier he kept in a backpack.

 

"It was something to do," Mathewson said with a shrug. He explained that he had been sent to boarding school because "I was a problem child. They suspended me because I lit my hair on fire in a classroom."

 

Uh, why'd you do that, Curtis?

 

"Complete boredom."

 

"I saw his junior high school yearbook," Markel said. "Every single (classmate) made some reference to how strange he was. But they liked him, because he played guitar around campus."

 

After four months together, Markel and Mathewson recruited Moreland, now 25, to play drums. A cheerful sort, Moreland had grown up in what he describes as a solidly middle-class home in Whittier before moving to Fullerton. They emerged as Show of Hands-a name eventually abandoned because it also belonged to a Los Angeles folk-rock band that recorded for I.R.S. Records.

 

Focusing on writing and recording, rather than trying to create a profile on the club circuit, the band was signed two years ago to Warner Bros. on the strength of its demos and a private live audition.

 

Working as a trio with producer Tony Berg (his other recent credits include two good examples of intelligent pop-rock, Michael Penn's "March" and Squeeze's latest, "Play"), Mathewson, Markel and Moreland had finished the album by July, 1990.

 

Two more orders of business had to be settled-finding a name (they had hoped to use Acid Test, only to discover that it, too, was already taken), and a bassist. They eventually found their fourth man when Mathewson ran into Riz in an Orange County bar.

 

Riz (it's a condensation of his given name, Rodolpho Ivan Zahler) was no bassist, but he had fronted his own local band as a guitarist and had released "Self Portrait," a one-man independent album issued in 1986.

 

"Things weren't going too well when I ran into Curtis," said Riz, who at 25 has the urbane, slightly ironic air of a fellow who wouldn't be out of place spending his days in a Parisian cafe. "He said they needed a bass player. I lied and said, `Yeah, I can play bass.' "

 

Over the past year, Altered State played about 15 shows in local clubs under assumed names, trying to mold what had been a three-man studio ensemble into a four-man performing unit. The pseudonyms, said Markel, were employed "in case we were horrible."

 

Given the band's name (not to mention its earlier incarnation as Acid Test), given its psychedelic sound and influences, given the strange, blue moon-maiden on the album cover, and the distorted, fun-house mirror portraits of the band members inside, the question arises: Might mind-altering drugs have anything to do with this?

 

The answer, said Markel, is that there is more than one way to alter one's mental state, and drugs are not among those that the band advocates.

 

"We don't do drugs," Mathewson said. "But we create an environment in the studio, with candles and incense, to make creativity happen. I don't want it to sound too cosmic. It was nice to have."

 

"People would be surprised that my drug experience is very limited," Markel said, adding that the same applies to the other band members. Markel said he has had one adult experience with a psychedelic drug-psilocybin-undertaking it only after considerable research, as a reasoned, planned-out experiment in altered consciousness.

 

"I followed a well-known expert's guidelines. I had someone check on me. I kept an audio log. I created a specific environment. If people aren't ready and they aren't educated, these experiences can be tremendously devastating. I'm not a proponent of these experiences at all. It's not a prerequisite to life."

 

Instead, Markel said, listening to music is his favored method of mental transport.

 

"Just putting on certain records does that for me. They challenge my way of thinking, and often, as hippie-ish as it sounds, they raise my consciousness."

 

He has the same hopes for Altered State's own album. "The band is definitely not about drugs. It's about altered states of consciousness, which lead, hopefully, to healing or enlightenment."