GClips

The Rockville Centre-based (and fiercely indie) band Taking Back Sunday is poised for unparalleled success

By Glenn Gamboa

If Taking Back Sunday’s career were a John Hughes coming-of-age movie instead of, well, you know, real life, it would be three-quarters complete.

It would be at the part where the kids from the wrong side of the tracks realize they don’t have to play games to get ahead; they just have to be themselves. It would be at the part where the nerdy dude takes off his glasses and changes his clothes and everyone realizes he’s a hunk. It would be at the part where nice guys finish first.

On Tuesday, Taking Back Sunday’s second album, “Where You Want to Be,” hits stores with huge expectations. The Rockville Centre-based quintet turned away advances from every major label to remain on the Chicago-based independent Victory Records, knowing the decision would make it harder to get its music on radio and its videos on MTV.

The decision meant that singer Adam Lazzara, guitarist Eddie Reyes, guitarist-singer Fred Mascherino, drummer Mark O’Connell and bassist Matt Rubano wouldn’t see a big payday for a while. It meant that they would have to keep touring constantly and that their accommodations would remain modest. Lazzara would continue to share a tiny apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with a roommate. The band would keep practicing in the basement of O’Connell’s parents’ house. Mascherino wouldn’t get to fulfill his dream of getting his own bus to ferry around his wife and two kids on tour like the guys in Blink-182.

But it also meant that they would get to make the album they wanted without any interference from anyone – and for Taking Back Sunday, that was reason enough.

“Nothing wrong can happen now,” Reyes says during a lunch break from filming the video of the band’s new single, “A Decade Under the Influence.” “If it sells five copies, I would be happy because I love the album. I hope people will like it, but I don’t know anything about being the Next Big Thing.”

“For us, the pressure is off,” Rubano adds. “Now we get to go perform and be us.”

‘A really great coup’

Here’s the Hughesian twist, though: If all goes extremely well this week, Taking Back Sunday’s “Where You Want to Be” could become the No. 1 album in the country, a feat that is next to impossible for a band on an independent label. According to Billboard’s director of charts, Geoff Mayfield, only one indie-label album has cracked the Top 10 this year – “Vans Warped Tour: 2004 Tour Compilation,” which, coincidentally, includes Taking Back Sunday, along with other Warped heroes, such as New Found Glory and Good Charlotte.

“This would be a really great coup for Taking Back Sunday, since their first album was only on the chart for one week,” Mayfield says. “It would be a great accomplishment for them and Victory.”

Signs that the unlikely coup is in the works are piling up. The band’s “A Decade Under the Influence” is getting considerable airplay on alternative-rock stations. The producers of “Spider-Man 2″ tapped another album track, the anthemic “This Photograph Is Proof (I Know You Know),” for the blockbuster’s soundtrack. Orders for the new Taking Back Sunday album from mass-market retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target, which generally don’t stock albums from independent labels, are already in. MTV has put the album on “The Leak” – the prime position on its Web site, generally reserved for blockbuster releases, that lets fans listen to the whole album before its release.

Conservative estimates from Victory Records have opening-week sales at around 125,000. That would be enough to put it in the Top 5 on most weeks. A major event – such as MTV’s decision last week to put the video for “A Decade Under the Influence” into “Buzzworthy” rotation on both MTV and MTV2 – could push sales even higher.

Reyes shakes his head at the prospect. After more than a decade of playing in one Long Island band after another that was on the brink of success, he doesn’t dream of becoming a rock star any more. He just wants to keep playing music.

“I like being the underdog,” he says. “I always want to be the underdog. I never want to be on top. Music isn’t a competition. There is no ‘best band.’ There’s just playing and not playing. I want to keep playing.”

For a band that has dealt with its share of complexities, from Lazzara’s hip injury in 2002 to the contentious departure and replacement of two members, the world of Taking Back Sunday is pretty simple. They just keep playing.

If Taking Back Sunday’s career were a Sam Raimi superhero sequel, it would be at the part where Peter Parker is leaping across Manhattan rooftops from sheer joy, screaming, “I’m back.”

It would be at the part where they realize they love what they do and they won’t let it go.

When Lazzara sings “Drop everything. Start it all over. Remember more than you’d like to forget” in “This Photograph Is Proof (I Know You Know),” he isn’t singing about Spider-Man. He’s singing about the band, which a little more than a year ago was on the brink of calling it quits when guitarist-singer John Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper left over a host of personal issues.

After Nolan and Cooper split, Reyes, Lazzara and O’Connell had to start all over. They decided last summer to keep the band going by adding Mascherino, former front man of the band Breaking Pangaea, and Rubano, O’Connell’s childhood friend who is also a former hired gun, touring with the likes of Lauryn Hill and Macy Gray. But they weren’t sure it would work.

“Dumb luck – the same way everything happens for this band,” Lazzara says about landing a spot on the “Spider-Man 2″ soundtrack. “We wrote the song, and it just seemed to fit in with their story, too.”

As the new version of the band sits in an alley outside Autumn Bowl, the skateboarder paradise in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, during a break in the filming of the video for “A Decade Under the Influence,” O’Connell is singing a hardcore punk song he wrote when he was a teenager. The chorus is “I killed my mailman. Where’s my mail?”

Goofing around

Like most bands, the members of Taking Back Sunday spend a lot of down time together, either traveling on a bus between concerts or in between video and photo shoots. They break into skits from “Chappelle’s Show” or Will Ferrell skits from “Saturday Night Live.” They perfect stupid human tricks, like tossing grapes or walnuts into one another’s mouth. They’re also good at comedy. When Lazzara ties his hair in a ponytail with a napkin, Rubano looks at him and doesn’t miss a beat.

“OK, this may be the best joke I’ve ever come up with,” says Rubano, trying to keep a straight face. “That’s really big in Williamsburg – Colonial Williamsburg.”

He waits for the laugh. “OK,” he says, smiling, “Maybe I will stick with music.”

They talk about almost anything – from Reyes’ upcoming wedding to what they would be doing if they had more “normal” lives.

“If I wasn’t a drummer, I’d probably be a mailman,” O’Connell says, finishing his song.

“Music is all I know,” says Lazzara, who moved to Amityville from Wilmington, N.C., in 1999 at age 18 to play bass in Taking Back Sunday because he was a big fan of Reyes’ previous bands. “I don’t know what else I would do.”

Weeks later, Lazzara stands in an empty supply closet eating apple slices and peanut butter off a plastic plate. It’s quiet there – well, as quiet as it gets in the middle of a daylong rock festival at Jones Beach – and it gives the singer a chance to rewind a few moments in the band’s fast-forward life.

Twenty minutes earlier, Lazzara and his bandmates had been mobbed by a bunch of screaming fans after an autograph session during K-Rock’s Dysfunctional Family Picnic 8. Normally, Taking Back Sunday tries to sign autographs for everyone – for hours, in some places. But this time, there were too many fans a little too excited for the band to stop safely.

An hour before that, Lazzara was on stage, hanging upside down from the rafters to sing the final lines of “Cute Without the ‘E’”: “All of this was all your fault.”

A week before that, the band was in the middle of its first tour of Britain, where Lazzara got to perform in cities he had always dreamed of visiting. “The amazing thing is that our dreams keep getting bigger,” Lazzara says. “The sky’s not the limit.”

In the tiny Jones Beach dressing room, Lazzara’s bandmates are sitting on couches with friends and family, unwinding after a draining set. For the first time that afternoon, they look relaxed. When they took the second stage earlier, they were anxious. Reyes fussed with the skinny tie around his neck. O’Connell bashed his drums extra hard. Rubano bounced around to work off some extra energy. Mascherino scanned the crowd for friendly faves. And Lazzara bounded onto the stage with a bit more energy than usual, skidding to a stop at the edge of the stage to channel rapper 50 Cent, screaming, “Long Island, we love you like a fat kid loves cake.”

Yes, the appearance at Jones Beach is a hometown show for the band. But the thousands packed into the second-stage pen near the main stage weren’t exactly fans. The bulk of them were there to see one of the dozen other bands at K-Rock’s Dysfunctional Family Picnic 8, making the show another in the band’s ongoing quest to win over new fans.

That’s what makes the K-Rock appearance so important. Not only does it put them in front of a new audience, it means the influential New York station (WXRK-92.3 FM) will add “A Decade Under the Influence” to its playlist – making it one of only three indie-label songs on the station’s current list (the other two are Slipknot’s “Duality” and Brand New’s “I Will Play the Game Beneath the Spin Light”). Within days of the song’s debut, it becomes one of the station’s most requested songs, besting new releases from Linkin Park and The Beastie Boys.

Getting excited

Lazzara says later that playing the single was the highlight of the set. “When I started singing it, it was so amazing – everywhere I looked people were singing the words, and it hasn’t even come out yet. I had to try not to start giggling. That made me so happy.”

Tony Brummel, Victory’s owner and founder, is happy, too. He expects “Where You Want to Be” to be the biggest seller in the company’s 15-year history, debuting in the Top 5. He admits it is harder for the band to get played on radio because it is not attached to a major label, which can offer access to bigger acts and more promotions in order to land a spot on increasingly limited playlists. However, he likes the single’s reception.

“We do know that some of the majors have been trying to block us in several instances at some stations, but our story and the music will prevail,” Brummel says. “It is all about the music and the people. Absolutely nothing has changed. This is what I have expected from the beginning.”

“A Decade Under the Influence” is catching on quickly at the stations playing it. Murray Brookshaw, program director at CIMX (89X) in Detroit, one of the nation’s leading alternative-rock stations, began playing the song weeks before it was officially released to radio stations. “We thought the song was awesome, and we knew our audience would connect with it,” Brookshaw says. “It immediately became one of our Top 5 [requests], and we put it in our ‘power’ category, which means we basically beat people over the head with it. The response has been overwhelming.”

The song already is No. 2 at 89X, behind multiplatinum hit machine Linkin Park. Brookshaw says the response is similar to what happened when the station became one of the first commercial stations in the country to play Dashboard Confessional, whose last album debuted at No. 2.

“This is breaking like a pop record,” says Ramsey Dean, vice president of marketing for Victory Records. “Though the music itself is not a Top 40 sound, it’s positioned as a Top 40 record.” Though Taking Back Sunday’s debut album, “Tell All Your Friends,” has taken two years to sell 400,000 copies, the company will ship that many copies of the new album to stores this week. Dean expects the new album to debut in the Top 5 and go gold, with sales of 500,000 copies, within a month.

“The image of the band has been larger than its actual sales,” Dean says. “They are the premiere band in the genre, and they still have this hipness factor about them. Now we’re trying to bring their sales in line.”

If Taking Back Sunday’s career were the Tom Hanks movie “That Thing You Do,” it would be at the part when things were just taking off, when the band’s song is first played on the radio and the guys are running around the furniture store giddily turning on all the radios and screaming.

Lazzara laughs when he talks about the first time he heard “A Decade Under the Influence” on K-Rock. “Mark called me on my cell phone, and his voice was really high and he was talking really fast and all I could make out was, ‘Ohmigod! Ontheradio!’” Lazzara says. “By the time I turned on the radio, it was almost over, but I heard it.”

Waiting their whole lives

O’Connell says that feeling, along with playing Jones Beach, still hasn’t sunk in for him. “I’ve listened to K-Rock my whole life,” he says. “When I was younger, I would daydream about playing at Jones Beach. The first time I heard it on K-Rock, it was about halfway through, and I just kept saying, ‘Oh, my god.’ I have been waiting for that my whole life.”

Taking Back Sunday’s members say they have been waiting their whole lives for “Where You Want to Be.” The album still has the emo-leaning feel of the band’s “Tell All Your Friends,” with heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics and screams from Lazzara and edgy yet catchy guitar-driven melodies from Reyes. The difference is that the new album stretches musically, including the guitar ballad “New American Classic,” the hardcore punk of “The Union” and a host of new pop-rock sing-alongs that teens will quickly memorize, from catchphrases such as “We’re gonna die like this you know, miserable and old” from “Number Five With a Bullet,” and “When it’s love, make it hurt” from “Bonus Mosh (Part Two.)”

Reyes strums the guitar in his hand as he thinks about how he has helped shaped the band’s new sound. “I just don’t see it when people say I have my own writing style,” he says. “I can’t even read music. I taught myself how to play guitar in my basement. The only style I have comes from me playing music that I feel.”

Lazzara is equally hesitant to talk about the band’s lyrics because he wants listeners to come up with their own ideas. “There are [emo pioneer] Lifetime songs that I love that I don’t want to know about,” he says. “I know what they mean to me. I don’t want to ruin anything for anybody by saying what certain of our songs are about. People can make their own decisions.”

[Newsday, 7.25.04]