The Gigolo Aunts by Dr. SEED From The Noise (1997)

If not for the fact that they write gorgeous pop gems, Dave Gibbs and Steve Hurley deserve a round of applause for sheer resilience. In the past two years, the Gigolo Aunts' remaining two founding members were dealt a series of blows that would have led most bands to throw in the towel. First, their label, RCA, fired all of its staff, leaving the band without any support. Then their drummer, Paul Brower, left, and after scrapping what was to be a monstrous follow-up record to 1994's Flippin' Out, lead guitarist Phil Hurley quit. Shortly thereafter, through a series of legal battles, they left RCA. It might have seemed to anyone else that the Aunts (pronounced "ants") were falling apart. But Dave and Steve felt they still had songs in them and that the band had yet to make its crowning achievement. So the two whipped together a stellar new unit, one fully primed to rock the world again. The band is currently hunting for a new label, but in the meantime, they'll be releasing an EP on Wicked Disc, that was recorded raw to 8-track with new axemaster Jon Skibic (formerly of 6L6) and drummer Fred Eltringham.

When I recently met with the Aunts at the Middle East, I found four upbeat, witty guys talking as enthusiastically about their band as a brand new group just poised to make their first record. I thought I'd let them tell their story in their own words. Here goes:

NOISE: You guys started in Potsdam, NY, in the mid-eighties. What led you to come to Boston?
DAVE: We had gone as far as we could go in upstate New York, and we were trying to pick a city. I'd lived in Boston before and I liked it here. A lot of our favorite bands were from here. Bands like Miracle Legion, Dumptruck, Mission of Burma, Throwing Muses.
STEVE: Growing up in Potsdam, you couldn't get hardly anything that wasn't on a major label, but some of the few indy things to get big enough for us to get our hands on were from Boston. It was just a good scene.
DAVE: I really, really love Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. And I love the Cars. (mumbles) Aerosmith...
STEVE: There was also the word that Boston had a lot of clubs. We thought it might be cheaper to go someplace else, though. I remember we went to Northampton to check it out and we asked people in music stores and they said, "Don't move here!" Boston was the place.

NOISE: How did the city treat you in the following years?
STEVE: At first, horribly. We were really wimpy, green, gangly guys from upstate New York. Strangely, we had gotten signed really fast. A label out of Hoboken put out our first record. But it was music that only made sense in the context of upstate New York.
DAVE: It only made sense in the context of our neighborhood in upstate New York.
STEVE: We just had to keep slugging it out. After awhile, people started to embrace us.
DAVE: I think that when we moved here we were just a little too late for the jangle rock scene, but that was sort of all we could play, because we couldn't play very well. Everyone else at that time was going back and saying, "Y'know what, Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith weren't so bad after all." Stooges and all that stuff...it was a lot heavier, and we were going, "Y'know what, the Smiths and the Housemartins are pretty cool!"
STEVE: We were coming from someplace that was all cover bands, and all the cover bands played Bad Company, Journey, Zeppelin, and so on, so it was almost like "punk rock" to be really jangly and wimpy.
DAVE: 'Cause that stuff had never been out of vogue in Potsdam. The only reason we got accepted is because we got better after we practiced a lot. I mean we sorta sucked when we first got here. The first review we ever got was Brett Milano saying "This band would be pretty good if they just practiced a lot."
STEVE: If they slugged it out on the club scene.
DAVE: Yeah, when I was reading that, I was like, "No Way!" (laughs) I don't know. We practiced a lot. I love Boston, I like all the bands here. I like the fact that there's kind of a healthy rivalry amongst little Boston cliques and scenes. It's pretty cliquey but I don't think in a bad way.
(We go off on a music-industry tangent, then Dave says: "You gotta edit all this stuff out. Hearing musicians talk about the industry is the most boring shit in the world.")

NOISE: How did Fred and Jon get into the band?
STEVE: Fred?
DAVE: Don't talk about your Olympic swimming career. No one likes to read about that shit either.
FRED: I was playing with Jack Drag, and (ex-Aunts guitarist) Phil was in Jack Drag at the time. One day we were rehearsing and Dave was fixing an amp or something, we were sharing a space, and Dave said, "We have this song and I wanted to see what it sounds like with a different drummer, 'cause Paul isn't quite getting it." So he's like, "You wanna come over and jam?" So I just did, and...
DAVE: It was love at first sight.
FRED: It was love at first sight, yup.
DAVE: You know like on the Monkees when Davy Jones would look at the pretty girl and their eyes would kind of sparkle? That's exactly what it was.
STEVE: It worked out well, because Paul was at the point where he was ready to move along. He ended up getting married and settled down in Maine.
DAVE: Becoming a real estate tycoon.
STEVE: He got back to nature in a big way and he's very happy about it.

NOISE: When was this?
DAVE: It was almost two years ago. We had come off a really long tour and he just didn't want to be in the band anymore. He wanted to get married, go to Maine and be a survivalist. It was very mutual: he wanted to leave, and we wanted to have Fred. No animosity. It was the same thing when we got Jon. Phil wanted to leave, because he really wanted to live in Seattle. He'd been in the band for a really long time, but we weren't in a financial position to fly him in for rehearsals. So he moved out. We had a short-lived career as a three-piece.
JON: Wow, I wish I had seen that.
DAVE: No you don't!
STEVE: So we started looking for another guitar player. Dave came in one day and said, "the guy from 6L6 called me." I said, "6L6?"

NOISE: What happened with 6L6?
JON: Well, I was with them for two years, and everything was cool. But then the band was getting into a slump, I felt. I was trying to make the band more like Come, to move it in that direction. We all had different ideas about where we wanted to go because we didn't want to stay in the same place, or at least I didn't. So we were in a kind of slump, and then I heard that the Gigolo Aunts were looking for a guitar player. The only person I knew from the Gigolo Aunts was Phil. I remember I'd met Phil, and I'd seen the Gigolo Aunts twice. So I auditioned. I called this number and got a recording which had all these weird influences like "We want George Harrison and--"
DAVE: Tom Verlaine.
JON: And someone from the Byrds, right?
DAVE: I think it was Tom Petty. Or no, Tom Verlaine. "The bastard son of Tom Verlaine, George Harrison, and Jimmy Page."
JON: Well, all those people I'm not.

NOISE: But the bastard child perhaps?
JON: No. Ace Frehley is who they wound up with.
STEVE: When Jon came in it was evident really quickly that he was the best one.

NOISE: So you tried out other people?
DAVE: We narrowed it down by phone calls first. We set it up so that Fred, Steve, and I had our equipment on one side of the room, and then there was a hot seat on the other side, so they'd have to face us and play.
JON: And it was freezing.
DAVE: It was freezing cold. We had these guys come in--
STEVE: They're gonna be really insulted, so--
DAVE: Well one guy auditioned with his back to us the whole time, standing in front of the amp, so we couldn't hear anything and we couldn't see anything. Another guy flew up from Athens, Georgia, to try out, and we thought that was gonna be really good, but we discovered after the first five minutes--
STEVE: That it wasn't gonna be good.
DAVE: But Jon came in and jumped all over the place and did these scissor kicks and stupid shit, and I laughed so hard--
JON: Spinned on my head, and--
STEVE: Jumping up and down was I think what did it.
DAVE: He also auditioned naked.
JON: The thing is that I just had fun, you know? I can play guitar, you know? I've played along with records my whole life.
DAVE: So we got Jon and that really changed the way the band sounded. With Fred and Jon along we kind of toyed with the idea of changing the band name, but in a weird ego way neither Steve nor I wanted to change it. I want to have at least one Gigolo Aunts album to come out exactly the way we've envisioned it, and we're finally at a stage in the band where, for what the two of us hear in our heads, the band can move exactly, and make it better, so we kept the name. We played a bunch of shows under a different name to work out new songs and work Jon in.

NOISE: How would you say the sound differs?
DAVE: It's a little more "Rock 'n' Roll" as opposed to "Rawk."
STEVE: It swings a bit more.
DAVE: It's got a little more boogie to it.
JON: Which is kinda funny 'cause I came from a real heavy band, and now it's not as rock.
DAVE: The way Jon plays with Fred is a little more rock 'n' roll.
JON: Fred plays way behind the beat, and I play along with Fred 'cause I play behind the beat, just 'cause I'm lazy.
DAVE: (sarcastic) And me and Steve do so much blow, and we're so wired all the time--

NOISE: That's on the record.
DAVE: No, cut that in case my mom reads this.
FRED: The songs are still the same. The songs are still good.
STEVE: Yeah, the songwriting is not much different.
DAVE: The songwriting is the same 'cause it's the same two songwriters, me and Steve. But the way we work things out--it's a little faster now. A lot faster from the inception of an idea to the song
JON: 'Cause there's two studio aces in the band.
DAVE: I'm very happy with it. I hope the EP that's coming out doesn't disappoint any of the people who liked our last record. I don't think it will. I think if you liked the last record you'll probably like this one.
STEVE: It's different, but I felt that if it wasn't as good we would've stopped. If we felt that it was no good anymore we would've stopped.
(A brief lull)
DAVE: Could you, like, twist this shit into something that makes us look glamorous, sexy, dangerous, cool, and smart at the same time?
STEVE: I feel that way inside.

NOISE: I'll do my best. But I want you to tell me more about the past couple of years and how all these changes in the band came about.
DAVE: Well, after Flippin' Out, we toured for a million years. It was released on three different labels. It took a really long time, fifteen months. Before Phil left, we went to make our second record for RCA, and right before that happened, Paul left. So we had Fred as a drummer. While touring, our manager left Gold Mountain, RCA lost their president, there has no captain at the helm, so everyone scrambled for their job. Then they got a new president who came in and fired everyone, including our A&R guy, our publicist, our video person, and our radio person. We were left stranded. The new president cut the whole RCA roster, but kept us, ZZ Top, and Dave Matthews Band.
STEVE: We were thought of as some kind of a priority act, but nobody knew why.
DAVE: We went to make a second record, and all of these elements came together to make it a nightmare. There was a lot of internal crap going on with the band. It was really a breakdown in communication. The songs were all there, but we had a problem, and between the producer and the four guys in the band, and our A&R guy who was really new to us because he wasn't the guy that signed us, no one would cast a definite opinion. So we made this record that was really grey. No one would say, "This is how it should be!" and fight to the death to get it that way. It was kind of like, "Well, if you think so, OK." So we made this record that's like a colossally huge sounding "rawk" album, and midway through we realized that wasn't what we wanted. We were really unhappy with it, so we pulled the plug right before it was done. For awhile last year, RCA kept saying, "We'll hire someone to remix it, we'll beef up some of the tracks, we'll take some things away," and we tried that only to find that the old adage, "You can't polish a turd" is true. Not to sound like a hippy, but the record didn't have a good vibe. It sounded alright, but it didn't feel good.

NOISE: And yet you liked the songs?
STEVE: It wasn't the songs really, it just--
DAVE: It wasn't good! We fucked up! We should have stopped three days into it but we had a bunch of guys from the label coming over to the studio, buying us dinners and drinks, and saying, "Aw yeah, it sounds great, it's gonna be huge, man," and we kind of go, "Uhhh... OK." We learned a valuable lesson: never trust anyone except yourself. It was tough to be objective. We were at this really beautiful studio, we were riding mountain bikes around, we were hiking, playing basketball, and doing stupid shit when we should have been making a rock 'n' roll record. Then, as soon as we realized that we weren't gonna release that record, Phil decided that he didn't want to be in the band. He wanted to move to Seattle full-time, and that was OK with us. It was hard to have someone leave, I felt really sad, you know, he's Steve's brother and a really good friend, and it was hard to have a guy that you've been with for ten years leave.
STEVE: The chemistry wasn't really working anymore.
DAVE: He wanted to do something different from what Steve and I did. So he left. But then we made a whole bunch of demos on 8-track, some of which are on this upcoming Wicked Disc EP, and we gave those to RCA, right when we got Jon into the band. We handed them over and said, "This is what we want to do. This is the sound we want. This is the kind of record we want to make. This is what our second record should have sounded like." We were as pleased as punch about it, and we gave it to them and they were like, "Huh?" They scratched their heads and really had no fucking clue what we were trying to do, because to them it sounded so radically different. That became our huge, evil, summer-long battle to get out of our RCA deal, because we had signed a non-drop contract. All this crap. To make a long story short, we got out of the deal right around the end of September. The publishing company flew us out to LA because we'd written some songs for some movies that did well, and out there we played some showcase gigs that went really well. We had a good time, wrote some songs out there, did some demos. It became apparent while we were out there that we wouldn't get another deal before Christmas. So Wicked Disc offered to release an EP of the eight-track demos.
STEVE: The eight-track demos sound great. They sounded better than what we had spent all that money on! We actually banged it out fairly live.

NOISE: So it was pretty spontaneous?
JON: Fast, fast, really quick. There's mistakes, but we don't care.
DAVE: We spent a $1000 making this little EP, and we spent a $150,000 making the album that will never come out. Hopefully the master tapes have been burned! Nah, we're gonna bootleg it ourselves someday and stick it out. But the EP sounds a billion times better. It sounds like what we wanted, whereas the album sounds like a mutant hybrid of Smashing Pumpkins and the sound of Hell.
STEVE: Those are kind of similar anyway.

NOISE: So have you found another label?
DAVE: Yeah, we're talking to a bunch of different labels now. One of them gave us a decent offer that we're really thinking about, and there are two others giving us offers. When we went with RCA, we could have signed to a bunch of different labels, but we chose RCA because they gave us the most money. That was a really stupid thing to do. Steve, to his credit, never wanted to sign with RCA.
STEVE: I wouldn't even go to the meetings.
DAVE: Steve didn't go to the meetings and didn't want to sign but we all sort of ganged up on him and signed because they gave us a lot of money. They gave us a deal we thought was really good. Now, we're smarter, we have a good-enough management company and a good enough lawyer, so we're not gonna make a stupid mistake again. The label is going to have to want us exactly the way we are, warts and all.
STEVE: It's a weird thing. It took so long to get untangled. I'm enjoying being untangled for a little while. I know you have to get re-tangled if you're gonna do anything, and that kind of sucks, but we want to play all the places we did before. It's funny, I remember people telling me this a long time ago, but now I know. Once you get signed to a major label, it's only the beginning of your problems.