Grammy Girl
Part 2
by Matt Ashare
Bonham was tested early in her rock career. Shortly after she began performing
in local clubs, she became the subject of a major-label bidding war that
erupted after Phoenix critic Brett Milano praised her four-song demo
tape in June of 1994. Two Island A&R scouts caught one of her sets at Toad
a few weeks later.
"I think I was prepared for it, even emotionally," says Bonham, who turns 30
on March 16. "When I was 21 and stupid as hell, I probably wouldn't have been
able to handle it. But I was 27 when things started to happen, and I was
probably as ready as I could have been."
Still, she says, it was painful at first. Instead of enjoying the kind of
chummy, homegrown support that comes when an artist emerges gradually from the
local scene, Bonham was thrust into the competitive realm of the business,
where talent scouts eye artists as potential jackpots and dismiss them at the
first sign of a new trend, where music fans search for cracks in an artist's
integrity, and where other bands wonder aloud Why her and not us?
"I started writing songs just a year or two before all this happened," Bonham
says. "When [Island A&R scouts] James Dowdall and Rose Noone came to see me
at Toad, it was only my bass player Drew Parsons's second gig and I didn't have
a drummer yet. I was borrowing Stacy Jones from Letters to Cleo. I figured,
`Oh, fuck, I better get a band together.' I didn't know how to go about it. I
ended up making some decisions in haste and then realizing it wasn't what I
wanted. When I had to make changes I'd take a bad rap because I was doing it
publicly. I got labeled as the girl who hires and fires drummers all the time.
I guess I was making mistakes as I went along."
Bonham worried about generating bad karma, as she later told a reporter from
Huh magazine: "My time in Boston was so bittersweet, because at first
people there were so excited about me, and there was this backlash when things
really started going good." It's common for artists to sense a "backlash" when
they enter that awkward area between hometown hero and national success,
especially because there are always other bands from the scene that aren't
getting the breaks. But according to Karen Glauber, an editor at Hits
magazine and one of Bonham's early friends and supporters, she had a way of
winning the right people over. Glauber became aware of Bonham through a demo
tape that Dave Gibbs, the frontman for the Gigolo Aunts, passed along to her,
and she helped get one of the songs from that tape ("The One") airplay on WFNX
in Boston.
"I remember bringing `The One' to [then-program director] Kurt St. Thomas and
Boy Troy at 'FNX," says Glauber, "and not only did they like the song, they
also really liked Tracy. She was really endearing. She did her first-ever radio
interview with Tai on 'FNX, but it was all very low-key and organic. She's just
supremely likable, bright, open, and fun."
Billboard editor Timothy White, who gave The Burdens of Being
Upright an early boost by featuring it in his prominent "Music to My Ears"
column, agrees with Glauber's assessment of Bonham. "People just like Tracy.
They like that she's smart but unaffected, that she can talk but not just about
her music. You know, she's read the paper that day. She's a very aware soul."
Indeed, people who know Bonham almost invariably speak of her likability, as
well as her undeniable skill as a musician. Her song "Mother, Mother" was one
of the most memorable things on radio last year, with its winning combination
of a clever scenario (a young woman trying to convince her mom that
everything's fine, even though it's not), an incisive vocal performance, and
rousing guitars. She has also been quite shrewd in developing her career,
following up "The One" not with a full-length CD on Island, but with a more
modest EP titled The Liverpool Sessions on the indie label Cherrydisc in
1995. By the time Bonham was ready to go into the studio to record The
Burdens of Being Upright, in late '95, she'd assembled a powerful team to
guide her career. Her manager, Scott McGhee, was a serious player in the '80s
and still counts Bon Jovi as one of his clients. He and his brother, Doc
McGhee, currently handle Kiss. And Bonham's lawyer, Michael Guido, is an
insider whose past clients include Bon Jovi and who currently advises Tricky.
Billboard's Timothy White has grown to appreciate this combination of
artistic integrity and business acumen, which he referred to in print last year
as Bonham's accumulation of "a lifetime of musical seasoning and six years of
occupational struggle."
"She's very tenacious," he explains from his office in New York. "She has a
roll-up-your-sleeves ethic. There's an almost unspoken sense that if all these
things don't work out at the highest level then music is still going to be her
life. In one of her songs, `One Hit Wonder,' she comes close to saying that, or
to saying that regardless of how she's perceived on a regional basis, she knows
that her music exists in a larger sphere."
Given the success she's had with "Mother, Mother," both on radio and on MTV,
and the relative failure of subsequent singles ("The One" and "Sharks Can't
Sleep"), "One Hit Wonder," a track from The Burdens of Being Upright,
may speak to a growing concern of Bonham's. "If ever a girlie wonder could ever
be more than just one thing," she sings, simultaneously chaffing against and
acknowledging the possibility of becoming the thing she least wants to become.
It was to avoid one-hit-wonder status, Bonham says, that she and her manager
lobbied Island to follow up "Mother, Mother" with another single last summer,
rather than milking it for more airplay.
"We thought that continuing to push `Mother, Mother' could make the song
bigger than the artist," explains Bonham. "I mean, people were coming up to me
and saying `Oh, you're that girl who screams `Everything's fine.' The song got
so much air- and video-play that I started to be known as `that girl who hates
her mom.' "
In fact, Island had planned for "Mother, Mother" to be only a small element in
the slow career build that began with the EP. Though the song was chosen as the
first single from The Burdens of Being Upright, the thinking was that it
would merely introduce Bonham to the radio market, softening stations up for
"The One," a less caustic pop gem that the label had pegged as the big hit.
"We thought `Mother, Mother' was very captivating," says Hooman Majd,
vice-president in charge of A&R for Island. "But, quite honestly, we were
somewhat surprised by the magnitude of the reaction to it. We didn't expect MTV
to make it a Buzz Clip right away, or for radio to pick up on it so quickly."
Though there are plenty of diverging opinions on why "The One" didn't
duplicate the chart success of "Mother, Mother" -- some industry insiders say
the video for "The One" wasn't strong enough, others simply point to the fact
that 1996 was a tough year for new alternative-rock artists across the board --
everyone who knows Bonham seems to agree on one thing. As Paul Kolderie puts
it, "Nobody is going to put themselves through what you have to go through to
make it in this business unless they're on a mission. There has to be something
unquestioning in you that says, `I'm going to go out there and do it.' Thom
[Yorke] from Radiohead had it. Tanya [Donelly] had it. And Tracy Bonham
definitely has it."
Former Island A&R scout Rose Noone, who was half of the team that signed
Bonham, describes her as "a very grounded artist. She works very hard and she's
very focused. Some artists lose focus, but Tracy never did, not even when the
bidding war over her was in full swing."
Part 3
Matt Ashare can be reached at mashare[a]phx.com.