"We've been touring for like four and half years. Just all of the dumps," says self-effacing Flys frontman Adam Paskowitz. "Been crackin' away in Dumpville." But that's all about to change. |

Standing on the edge of the chasm that separates the wannabes from the gonnabes, Southern California's Flys are ready to make for the sky. Their bassline-laden, fuzz-grunge ballad, "Got You (Where I Want You)" is soaring up the charts, thanks to its clever placement on the soundtrack to the teen flick Disturbing Behavior. And with the release of their first full-length on Trauma (home to heavyweights like Bush and No Doubt), the Paskowitz brothers are dead-set on destruction.

Of course, the road to success is rarely paved with gold, and in the Flys' case, it often wasn't paved at all. Adam, Josh and the seven other Paskowitz siblings grew up in the camper van that transported the entire family from one poverty-stricken settlement to another across the continent. Not that they were poor -- rather, Papa Paskowitz decided to put his Stanford medical training and two PhD's to better use than pushing pills for some HMO.

"When we were kids, they'd send us to these backwoods upper East Coast places, or Indian reservations, and put us in the house that the doctor from twenty years ago had built," Adam recalls. "And there'd be like nine or ten rooms, and we'd still end up, all of us, in one room." For weeks and months at a stretch, the family would stay put, the father providing medical attention to those in need, the mother, a onetime opera singer of Native American and Mexican descent, teaching and singing to her brood of kids.

"My dad's an absolute brilliant scientist, and my mother is a very intense, competitive woman," says Josh. "And the combination of those two things -- it was right for us." One brother is a computer wizard, another is the owner of Black Flys sunglasses, one is a pro surfer, two are carving a niche for themselves in the rough-and-tumble music business. You do the math.

But the two brothers who share vocal duties ("Vocal duty? Vocal pleasure!" insists Josh) aren't taking their imminent success for granted. Having cut their teeth at such hesher L.A. joints as the Roxy, the Whisky and the Rainbow Room (under the unmemorable moniker Mozart), the Flys have watched countless baby bands disappear into a tangle of nappy hair, leather jeans and tattoo ink. Their first release as their current incarnation, $.25, came under the Caroline imprint, but sold little beyond the venues where the Flys perpetually played. "We sold [$.25] in hand-to-hand combat, about 15,000 of them, and a couple more thousand in Europe," says Josh. "Our intention for [the new record] Holiday Man was to make another indie record and sell 35,000 copies -- that was our goal."

And as such a competitive bunch, their goals were intended to be surpassed. Turn on the radio, and "Got You (Where I Want You)" is playing on some bandwidth near you. Eight thousand copies of the Disturbing Behavior soundtrack are flying off the shelves each week. Holiday Man is barely even in record stores (it came out on August 25), and yet the press is all a-buzz about the Flys. This time, when they hit the road (they're doing spot dates now and will launch an official tour this fall), Josh and Adam will get to see the country from the inside of a touring mobile, much like they did as kids. They're ready.

"We've been on the Slumville tour for years. We've done every high school, college, every dump known to man. All you have to do is sort of assimilate to where you are, whether you play lounge music or rock music," opines Adam about the trials of touring. "And I'm here to say that I have a black-belt in rock."

HEIDI SHERMAN(August 27, 1998)