Tony Scalzo, one-third of Austin, Tex. power-pop trio Fastball, is gleefully thrusting a stick of the world's nastiest lip balm under the noses of his band mates Miles Zuniga and Joey Shuffield. It's "red wine flavored," but the general consensus is that it smells, at best, like the back of a nasty cab, or at worst, like a drunken wino's breath. Where the hell did he get it? "My wife," Scalzo says with a grin.

Scalzo is restless, hungry and probably dealing with a little ADD at the moment, but not without good reason. At the time of this interview, it's a few weeks before the release of Fastball's third album, The Harsh Light of Day, and the band is in New York for a marathon press day before heading over to Japan and Europe for more of the same. Then it'll be back to the States for a short "preview" tour, all leading up the point when things start to get busy; specifically, on Oct. 2, when the band kicks off its twenty-six-date world tour in Amsterdam. Blame it all on "The Way," the baroque, anti-rock No. 1 rock radio hit that earned Fastball a pair of Grammy nominations two years ago and propelled their second album, All the Pain Money Can Buy, to platinum status. Now comes the fun of trying to do it all again.

The good news is, the new album boasts at least a half-dozen songs that can get the job done. The bad news is, the promotional/touring blitz is just now getting started, and the guys already look tired as hell. "I would never bemoan success . . . but I don't particularly want to be here right now," Scalzo notes after the three try and put aside their thoughts about their dinner plans and sit down for questioning. "I like the idea of being successful though, and if you have to deal with certain things in order to get to that point or as part of staying at that point, that's just part of the deal."

According to Zuniga, the band assumed it was out of the deal after its 1996 debut, Make Your Mama Proud, failed to score anything resembling a hit. "We all kind of didn't know what was going to happen, but then [Hollywood Records] gave us another record, and we couldn't believe it," says the guitarist, who shares songwriting credits and lead vocal duties with bassist Scalzo. "We were like, 'Can you believe this? This is hilarious.' We probably felt like our second record was our last shot."

Now, of course, things are a little different. "We definitely have a huge amount of push behind us this time," Zuniga admits, "but it does put a kind of pressure on things, and it takes away some of the innocence and fun of just making music. Up until the last record, all we did was make music for ourselves and our friends and whoever else might stumble across it. And then you sell a million records, and it becomes more of a business, and the musician in you still wants to come out and play, but they have to wait around a long time while you're busy being the businessman and salesman. It's a trade-off, for sure."

There have been other trade-offs along the way, beginning with the band's original name, Magneto U.S.A. (the label wasn't having it). The days of oneness with Austin's local music scene are mostly gone too, though Zuniga can still do a killer impression of Lone Star rocker Joe Ely, and Scalzo -- the group's one non-native Texan -- notes that they'd like to rekindle their Austin identity enough so that locals don't ask them where they're from on the rare occasions they get to play in town.

Zuniga has also had to confront a more personal sort of trade-off with Fastball's move to the fast lane. Although he consistently contributes some of the band's best songs ("Fire Escape" off the last album, and Harsh Light's excellent "Goodbye" and "Vampires"), Scalzo's songs ("The Way," "Over My Head" and the new single "You're an Ocean") keep getting picked as the singles and ending up as hits. "Tony's had two big songs already," he muses, "and if ['You're an Ocean'] is another big song, the label might get to thinking . . . I don't know what they might think or do."

"They'll phase you out," prods Scalzo. Zuniga laughs. "Yeah, exactly. I'll be put out to pasture. There's definitely an unspoken, friendly competition that's there," he admits. "We're both trying to get as many songs as we can on the record, we both want to be appreciated as songwriters and artists. So it's there, but the overall thing is, we're a band, and whatever happens to the band . . . you can't really separate it like that."

"One of the strong points of this band is the fact that we do have two songwriters, and we're still able to make cohesive sounding records," chimes in drummer Scuffield, who played in separate pre-Magneto U.S.A. bands with both Zuniga and Scalzo and essentially brought the group together. "That's a real trick, and it just happens naturally. There's definitely differences in the way they each approach songwriting, but what ends up happening is whenever they bring a song to the band, it becomes a Fastball song because of what the other two guys put on it."

A key element to both Scalzo and Zuniga's songs is their innate sense of musical history. Their influences are pretty easy to spot (Scalzo's songs have racked up more Elvis Costello references than the band's name has drawn baseball metaphors, and Zuniga could probably write a greatest hits album for Cheap Trick) and for the most part, the guys are cool with the comparisons.

"We're just trying to do what we like, maybe play around at emulating some of our heroes, but for the most part we just do what we do, and I think that's where it's at," explains Scalzo. "We're all little rock & roll dudes that grew up in the suburbs and listened to AC/DC and Zeppelin , whatever came around that thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys were into. We've obviously matured and gotten a little more sophisticated in our tastes since then, and grown up. There's other stuff going on that really has little to do with what we do, but I'm totally comfortable with that. It makes me feel proud that we're one of these few song-oriented guitar bands; I think there's a couple of bands that are still putting out real good quality guitar rock songs, and I think we're one of them."

RICHARD SKANSE
(September 23, 2000)