Branching out

Buffalo Tom go underground

by Brett Milano

This time last year, Boston's Buffalo Tom were preparing to take an indefinite leave of absence. The good but not great reception they'd gotten from the album they'd put out the previous year, 1998's Smitten (A&M), was a factor, and then in the wake of the Seagrams/PolyGram merger (which essentially eliminated A&M by paring down its roster and putting the remaining artists under the control of Interscope), the trio were in label limbo. Besides, it had been a decade since Buffalo Tom had debuted, with a homonymous album on SST, and though the band had sustained a moderate level of success throughout the '90s, they'd reached a plateau somewhere just shy of the elusive national-hit single that can turn a regular-guy rock band like, say, the Goo Goo Dolls into rock stars. It wasn't quite the end of the line, but you sensed that the end might be close.

And then something strange happened -- Buffalo Tom scored the biggest hit of their career. The song was a cover that they'd recorded two years earlier for the Jam tribute album Fire & Skill: The Songs of the Jam (see page 14 for Mark Woodlief's review of the album). The Buffalo Tom track, "Going Underground," had been chosen as the disc's single and shipped off to British radio stations, where it immediately went into heavy rotation. By the summer of '99 it was sitting pretty at #6 on UK charts.

"That's so typical for us," singer/guitarist Bill Janovitz notes over a beer at the Middle East. "It's Spinal Tap again, the fictionalized story of Buffalo Tom. You step out of yourself and that's what sells. And it was a very odd kind of success -- it's one thing to have a hit with a cover song, but this one wasn't on any of our albums, so it didn't help our catalogue sales. And the song was so atypical for us soundwise as well."

If you've heard the original "Going Underground," you can easily imagine Buffalo Tom playing it. The Jam's version is a loud and desperate three-piece rocker, just the kind of thing that Buffalo Tom specialize in. So the big surprise is that they chose to redefine the song instead: Janovitz's vocal is appropriately Weller-esque, but the instrumental setting is transformed into something softer and more sinister. Working with producer Wally Gagel, they built the track around drum loops layered with chorus harmonies (by Fuzzy's Chris Toppin), acoustic strums, and only a few hints of electric guitar. It's the step outside the usual Buffalo Tom formula that they didn't quite make on Smitten.

Janovitz admits that "Going Underground" wasn't the band's first choice, but "That's Entertainment" and "English Rose" had already been taken. And he says that they their first attempt was a more straightforwardly faithful version of the tune. "We originally recorded it at the Fort and played it very much like the Jam. We thought it was different enough, but it wasn't. It came out like a lot of tributes, like a slightly weaker version of the original. When we did the second version, Wally made a drum loop and Tom [Maginnis] played drums over it. What we did was strip away a lot of the angst and put the pop forward. And it's a real classic, Brill Building-type song with chorus, verse, modulation up to a key change. It amazes me that Weller was only 20 when he wrote it."

Of course, even Weller's diehard fans probably couldn't make out all the words, and Janovitz was no exception. "I didn't realize what the lyrics were before we recorded it, but it's a very '80s mishmosh of issues. Some of those lines are really dated, like `Nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes.' But there were a lot of bands writing call-to-arms songs at that time, like the Alarm were, and `Going Underground' is certainly in that spirit. When I was growing up, I always heard it as an English slice-of-life, like it was about going on the tube train."

Buffalo Tom have played "Going Underground" in concert only a few times, toward the end of their last American tour and in a London gig while the single was hot. "It was funny, when we did it in London there was no discernible reaction -- it was mostly just people yelling for songs from Birdbrain and our first album. It was the diehard fans that came out, so we didn't wind up attracting teenage girls like we were hoping."

Although it would be good to report that this left-field hit has given Buffalo Tom a new lease on life, the band are still going on hiatus, which is usually a gentle way of saying they're breaking up. But Janovitz isn't certain: "Personally I have no intention of breaking the band up. There's no reason to. We all like each other. But after 13 years and six records, we needed to step outside the cycle. And I can't say with 100 percent certainty that everyone will still want to get back together after the next couple of years."

Aside from playing solo shows, which he has done from time to time over the past couple of years, Janovitz now has two other bands going. The Bathing Beauties began as a for-fun outlet for Janovitz, Fuzzy's Chris Toppin, producer Paul Kolderie, and former-Juliana-Hatfield/current-Tanya-Donelly bassist Dean Fisher. They originally intended just to perform cover tunes in a country vein. But the Beauties, who played a couple of weeks ago at the Abbey Lounge and will be playing again Thursday (February 3) at the Middle East at a benefit for Helium drummer Shawn Devlin, have started writing their own songs and recording demos, two signs that they've begun to take the band seriously.

Janovitz has also put together a full-time rock band (name yet to be determined) with former Letters to Cleo drummer Tom Polce, former Jen Trynin bassist Josh Lattanzi, one-time Gang Green guitarist Mike Earls, and latter-day Buffalo Tom keyboardist Phil Aiken. They're currently working on songs that otherwise would have been on the next Buffalo Tom album, and Janovitz imagines that they'll probably record an album's worth of material later this year. He looks at it as a chance for him to try some things that he didn't have a chance to do with Buffalo Tom. "It will allow me to go outside the paradigm. Buffalo Tom was a democracy, and some of the songs that would have pushed us in another direction didn't get agreed on. I know that sounds negative, but it's just the way bands work -- to move an inch we had to aim a yard."

Bassist/singer Chris Colbourn is more optimistic about the band's future. In fact, he's hoping to talk Janovitz and Maginnis into playing some shows when Beggars Banquet releases a Buffalo Tom singles compilation late this spring. As for the feeling that they're on the verge of a break-up, "Hey, I've felt that way since Birdbrain came out in 1990, but I'd never say never to anything. To me it's still the ideal relationship to be working with these guys, because they bring so much to the table. We've been playing the same music since we were kids, and that's what I think we'll continue to do."

Although Colbourn has a lot of material stockpiled, he's saving it for the band. The one major outside project he has planned is incidental music for a production of Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana to be produced later this year by the Peabody Theater Company -- the same troupe that Fuzzy wrote music for last year. But he's not itching to do a solo album, even though his song "Rachael" was Buffalo Tom's last hit. He has, however, been very understanding about the feeling in the band that it was time to take a break in the wake of Smitten and the expiration of their contract with Beggars Banquet.

"That whole year surrounding Smitten was just too difficult because people had things going on in their lives, there were babies being born [Janovitz and Maginnis both had children last year]. Other than that, there was nothing positive about it. But I see our co-op going on; the music business has never been a big part of it anyway. The other guys feel that you need to distance yourself before you get back on the high wire, and I'm totally in support of that. But we're still really young, and we're at the point where we still have a long way to go."