"They Do It Their Way" - Simon Stinger Buzzes to the Top

"Making The Band". "American Idol". Never before in American culture has prime time television so completely manufactured and dictated what the public will buy. Bands who began with a shared vision and persevere for the love of music seem destined for the pop history books. Not so for Bay Area band Simon Stinger, a group that defies classification as much as the system they seem to be poised and ready to buck. Founded by the dynamic duo of vocalist Alicia Perrone, and bassist Victor James, this electro-pop/modern rock hit machine has kicked many obstacles to the curb in their quest for the right stuff. After years of hits and misses with band members, managers and producers, Simon Stinger has finally found that elusive combination of musicianship, material, drive, and business savvy to reach their collective goals. With Croatian born drummer Elvis Katic, new addition guitarist Mary Cary, and their outlandish costumes and dancers, they now present a unified front of high-energy, cutting-edge entertainment. The marriage of unusual sonic and visual stimulation is what sets this band apart ... even though the music stands up well alone. Producer Sylvia Massy Shivy (Prince, Tool) is producing their third CD. A CD sampler, Here's Your Heart Back, is available now at gigs. Marketing guru Tim Morse is hard at work behind the scenes, finding investors, lawyers and corporate sponsors to finance bigger tours and product availability. Their website is getting between 1500 and 4000 hits a day, and label executives are pursuing them for soundtrack placement ... all without a record deal!

Simon Stinger is a band that will have you questioning your sexual orientation, or perhaps expanding it. The guys are hot, the women even hotter, they can sing/play/shake their asses off, and the chemistry between them is electrifyingly contagious. Watching a Simon Stinger show, one gets the distinct urge to remove layers of one's own clothing. There's so much happening all over the stage, both choreographed and spontaneous, you need to see them more than once to take it all in. Cary's crunchy guitar parts, layers of textured sequencing, the tight rhythm section of James' bass playing, and Katic's flashy, yet solid drumming underneath, bring to mind the best of 80's rock and funk with a new millennium sensibility. The petite Perrone purrs and growls with the attitude of Ann Margaret, the chops of David Bowie and the soul of Prince ... yet has a voice completely her own. The comparisons to bands like Missing Persons, No Doubt, Berlin and Garbage are inevitable, but there is more going on here. It only takes one spin of any Simon Stinger CD to realize you probably haven't heard anything quite like this ... at least not at the same time. It's pop, rock, electronica, funk, punk ... with clever, in-your-face lyrics and James' tight harmonies under Perrone's unique vocals delivering hook after memorable hook. It's a pretty safe bet that songs like the funky "Trip On You", the fiery "Romeo and Juliet" and the punchy "Dead On" will stick in your head after a time or two, no matter what you're into. So what has kept this band from dominating the airwaves, concert arenas and the masses?

The answers lie in the twisted road to the current line-up.Like Jagger and Richards or Lennon and McCartney, this pair seemed destined to bring their gifts to the other's table, even though their backgrounds were different as night and day. Bassist/songwriter Victor James was born in Alturas, CA, near the Oregon and Nevada borders. The youngest of five children and the only boy, this descendant of outlaw Jesse James was already living the rock'n roll dream by age fourteen. His first band was an MTV Basement Tape winner and he was in two MCA bands after moving to Seattle. " Kiss, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Berlin, were all big influences. I loved Rick Springfield!" James sheepishly admits. After burning out on the Northwest music scene, he moved to the Bay Area. "I was gonna give up and sell Amway!" he quips. His partner-in-crime, Alicia Perrone, a Berkeley, CA native, was the only child of a strict Italian father, a music teacher who became the dean of her high school, spawning the SS song, My Dad's The Dean. "It was hell," the flame-haired vocalist exclaims. "If he saw me talking to a guy in a leather jacket, I was through! I was constantly being called out of class. Friends would hide me behind cars and cover me with their jackets if they saw him coming. My mom tracked me down at my first Day On The Green and dragged me out of the stands! I was constantly alone in my room, singing along to Olivia Newton-John records. I was totally into that whole Michelle Pfeiffer/Fabulous Baker Boys torch song thing. But I loved funk music, the Gap Band, stuff like that."

Perrone managed to get out from under her parents' watchful eye and go to college, singing in cover bands and starting her own. Six days after her father passed away from a brain tumor, she met James, who had arrived in the Bay Area two days before. Her guitar player approached James at a movie theater and invited him to audition for their band. Within three weeks, James got rid of the rest of her band and London Digs, the first incarnation of Simon Stinger was born. "We were the big Berkeley Square band, A BAM Magazine favorite," James explains. "We had already changed our name to The Heathers when BAM wanted to interview us. On our way there, we found out a New York record company had left us a message saying that they'd sue us if we didn't change our name. We drove past this overpass being built and there were these giant cranes that loaded cement. The side of the crane said, "Simon Stinger". We said, 'That sounds like a spy name!'"

Tired of paying recording studios, they bought a 1/2 inch 16-track analog studio and recorded a four-song vinyl 7" demo. "We got 256 radio ads from this demo, something we couldn't duplicate with any of our CDs that were produced by other people!" James recounts. "We hadn't even played a show as Simon Stinger when record companies started calling!" "This demo blew open so many doors for us and we were so not ready," Perrone chimes in. "Jeff Saltzman, Elliot Khan, the guys who made Green Day ... they came to our first show! And we sucked!" Having no distribution, no Internet, they spent the next two years playing a lot of shows - and kicking out band members. Three years into it, three guitar players and drummers had come and gone. "Honestly, we were really hard to work with, we had the whip. Who wants to practice five nights a week?" the singer admits. " But we never had musicians that understood our music. They'd bring in punk, metal, R&B ... and then accuse us of being control freaks because we didn't want to use their songs."

One of their guitar players, who moonlighted as a drag queen, enlisted some of his co-horts to join the band and they began touring as Simon Stinger's High Brow Cabaret. "Alicia and I always wanted a big, flamboyant stage show, but our band was always shooting down our ideas," James says. "We started getting a lot of recognition: lawyers, investors, and stuff." They were sent to LA and signed with a new label called Chicago Kid in 2000. The CD, Devil On My Mind, which included a cover of Devo's Girl U Want, started generating some real interest. One of the tracks, "Fringe Authority", was featured on the soundtrack for the Miramax Film, Diamonds, landing the band a cameo appearance. "The VP of Interscope was interested in signing us, but Chicago Kid vetoed a distribution deal unless the whole label was picked up, " James explains. "So we were stuck with no distribution for a whole year!"

Meanwhile, the band held the #1 slot on the MP3 alternative charts for 6 weeks, garnering them opening slots for the Goo Goo Dolls and Tonic, which led to a Jaegermeister sponsorship and more shows. After a year of tour bus living and a revolving door of band members, James and Perrone had had enough. The drag queens had left for "queener" pastures. Tension was in the air. "There was too much professional and personal politics going on, attempts to split our loyalty," Perrone explains. "We signed a contract giving Chicago Kid time to get us major label distribution and it didn't happen. We could have stayed on and maybe have distribution through Maverick now, but we're glad we left, because of how unhealthy the situation was."

For the first time since they met, Simon Stinger took a much-needed break at the top of 2001. They fired the problematic band members and decided to use hired guns. "What triggered this was a review we got after we played a gig with Exene from X," Perrone recalls. "The reviewer said she had heard all this great stuff about our drag queen show, and when she saw us, we were nothing special. That fucking killed me, because I knew she was right! We were back to playing it straight and that was NOT us! "

When a video opportunity arose, they decided to track down drummer Elvis Katic, who had come out to one of their shows and they had seen play a year before. Named after "The King", Elvis was a child prodigy who became a successful rock star in Yugoslavia until war broke out, forcing him to trade his drum sticks for a machine gun. He lost everything and escaped to Germany, playing on platinum albums under a ghost name, so he would not be deported. Intrigued by the American music scene, he moved to the Bay Area in 1999. "When I came to this country, everybody's trying to be like everybody else," the drummer explains with his "Luka from ER" accent. "Then this redhead comes on stage and starts singing and that guy starts shaking his ass and I think, 'Thank you, God, finally somebody was a born star!' His dedication to their vision was so immediate that he lost his job to play in their video and two days later became a full-fledged member. "Elvis was the only one who could understand us," Perrone enthuses. "We found our soulmate!"

Fledging managers and unreliable hired guns continued to plague the threesome for the next year. Their guitarist, Ry Kihn, (son of 80's star Greg Kihn), kept canceling shows to play with his dad and they lost gigs with The Tubes, Sugar Ray and Berlin. They showed up to catch Berlin's show at Slim's and met a journalist (yours truly) who handed them a copy of the SF Herald. Our favorite cover girl Mary Cary, the attractive guitar player and leader of the band Electric Peach was on the cover. They decided to try and hire her as a sub. Cary, a Marin County native and accomplished musician who's played lead guitar since she was 13, spent several years in LA playing in high profile local bands. She had nine callbacks for a Michael Jackson tour. " I was too tall," Cary says in a little-girl voice that belies her stature and savvy. She returned to Marin after the LA riots, playing guitar for Sega and Nintendo commercials and started the wacky, fun-based Electric Peach with older musicians she knew as a kid. She never felt comfortable as a lead singer, but the band pushed her out into the spotlight. After a five year run, the fun had run its course, and Cary broke up the band to go solo ... a few weeks before Simon Stinger approached her. "I was heartbroken about my band breaking up, even though I had been so frustrated creatively," Cary explains. "Simon Stinger sent me a package, with no charts or anything, but I loved the music! And they were so cute!"

Their first gig together, fraught with technical problems, was a bust. But when Kihn cancelled a high profile gig at this year's Exotic Erotic Ball at the Cow Palace, they called Cary again. "The curtain went up, and about two songs into it, I looked at Victor, and suddenly felt like he was some other part of me," Cary says in awe. "Then I went into a guitar solo and Elvis' head started going and then he played something off a lick I played, like a chain reaction chemical thing. I got goosebumps, my knees got weak, Alicia's singing and her body's going around and I'm thinking, 'I'm gonna have an orgasm, a music-gasm!' I'd never felt like this on stage with any band, ever! I couldn't sleep for a week!"

Simon Stinger has become a mutual admiration society. "I've never heard such amazing feedback for a guitar player in my life!" Perrone exclaims. "People keep saying 'She's born to play with you!'" "No one realized we even had a guitar player before," Katic concurs. "Now it's like, wow, look over there!" "We never had a guitar player that could write," James says. "We thought her Electric Peach songs were cute, but so not us. The first song she wrote for us, she nailed it. She kicks me in the ass, I'm having to learn all kinds of recording techniques, just to keep up with her." "I have a vision of Simon Stinger and Alicia's voice," Cary adds. "This band is doing what I wish my last band had done or what I wish I could do as a vocalist. The whole package is perfect now!"

Check out Simon Stinger at www.simonstinger.com

To read other articles by Kim Gold, click here!