When Everclear released its 1995 sophomore bow and major label debut, “Sparkle and Fade,” the then-trio of guitarist/vocalist Art Alexakis, drummer/vocalist Greg Eklund and bassist/vocalist Alex Montoya had no idea how drastically the album’s success would alter the trajectory of the band.
Riding the success of the wildly popular single “Santa Monica,” the album went platinum in the U.S., Canada and Australia and also firmly positioned the Portland trio in the grunge/post-grunge zeitgeist.
While both Eklund and Montoya departed the band in 2003, Alexakis and his current four-piece Everclear line-up are commemorating the album with a 30th Anniversary Tour alongside opening acts Local H and Sponge that will be coming to the Paramount and Irving Plaza.
When the sexagenarian singer-songwriter was reminded that the 2015 20th Anniversary Tour seemed like yesterday, he agreed with a laugh before unpacking how much his determination fueled the second album into becoming such a gamechanger.
“Hey man, you get older and it starts moving faster and faster,” he chuckled. “I felt like it was the best record I could make. I didn’t know how much success it was going to have. I know a lot of people felt ‘Santa Monica’ had a chance, but I was excited about all the songs on the record. I thought there were a lot of cool contextual songs on the record and a lot of punk rock. For a second record, when most people experience a sophomore slump, I felt like we brought it.”
Having recorded the bulk of the album at Sound Studios in Madison, WI, Alexakis and the rest of the band were confident about the quality of the material, especially “Santa Monica,” the record’s eventual second single. It was a sentiment that Perry Watts-Russell, the band’s A&R representative, agreed with, although he didn’t understand how the song title wasn’t mentioned once in the lyrics.
While he felt it was the best song Alexakis had ever written, he still felt it was unfinished. Despite the disagreement, the songwriter agreed to lengthen it while also penning an additional nod to Watts.
“Perry said he liked everything and wanted to know how many more songs I had,” Alexakis recalled. “I told him I had about three more and I wanted to play him this song I wrote last week. He asked what I was calling it and I said, ‘Santa Monica.’ I played him the song and he said, ‘One thing. You don’t sing the words Santa Monica in that song at all.’ I said, ‘Nope, I don’t.’ I told him it was about comfort zones—places that make you feel both comfortable and uncomfortable and that’s Santa Monica to me, which is why I’m naming it that. He said we could talk about changing the song title later and I told him, ‘No we can’t. But go ahead and try.’ He told me to play it again and he said it might be one of my best songs ever, but it wasn’t finished.”
Alexakis added, “I told him it was finished and we all said it was finished and we thought it was pretty perfect. I told him we’d record it, he’d hear it and it would make sense. We recorded it and he listened to it and said he was even more convinced that this song was going to be one of the best songs on the record and almost definitely a single. But it wasn’t done yet. I told him to let me mix it, so I went to New York in the summer of ’94. I came out of it and he said he was convinced it could be a career-building, hit song, but it wasn’t done yet. We got into one of our few fights over the phone. A lot of bad words were used to the point of me saying, ‘[Okay] Perry, we’ll do it. But you know what? I’m going to write a song just about you that we’re going to put on the album called ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Whore.’”
For the current tour, the focus will obviously be on “Sparkle and Fade,” but Alexakis promises to weave in other gems from his band’s canon.
“We’re going to play all the songs from ‘Sparkle and Fade,’ but we’re going to break it up,” he said. “We’re going to do three songs, play a couple of songs from another record, do three more songs and just do that all the way through to the end. We’ll probably keep ‘Santa Monica’ for the end. But other than that, there aren’t going to be a lot of surprises. We don’t have time for that.”
Everclear will be appearing on October 19 at The Paramount, 370 New York Ave., Huntington. For more information, visit www.theparamountny.com or call 631-673-7300.
