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The Alkaline Trio has parked its tour bus right by the front door of Slim's. Fans filing into the San Francisco club look up at the bus's tinted windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rising pop-punk stars. What the fans don't realize is that the band and its crew are also staring through the windows watching them. Studying audience members in their late teens and early twenties, they analyze variations on the mohawk, a guy they dub Johnny Sideburns, a Cruella De Ville black-and-white haircut and a young man in a red suit and a porkpie hat.
Derek Grant, 26, the Alkaline Trio's drummer and headwear expert, makes a correction. "It's a derby," he says, gazing at the crowd. "This is what they call R&D: checking out our demographic," he adds, although it actually seems to be more about the novelty of having tinted glass.
On the couch opposite Grant, bassist Dan Andriano is watching Howard Stern on TV with his wife, Sunshine, a real-estate lawyer who has flown out from Chicago to spend the weekend with him. While Stern speculates on which of his guests have shaved their pubic regions, Andriano says, "It's not just the punkers and the die-hard fans at our shows anymore. I started touring when I was fifteen, and it was very little money -- five dollars a day -- but a lot of fun." Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, Andriano finds himself worrying about money and taxes.
"I used to believe that I didn't need to be concerned with any kind of future," he says. "But everybody could wake up one day and decide they don't want to come to our shows anymore." On the sidewalk, oblivious to his anxieties, a sellout crowd of 600 keeps filing into the club.
Three hours later, the Alkaline Trio changes into black clothes and takes the stage. They play a set dominated by songs from their fifth (and best) album, Good Mourning, with Andriano and guitarist Matt Skiba trading off on lead vocals. During "All on Black," Skiba sings "I'm living in lack of the blood sent from your heartbeat" with such vigor, he makes the song sound like an assault on the very notion of heartache.
While the bald and stout Andriano seems slightly uncomfortable onstage, Skiba is a natural showman, playing to the crowd. On Skiba's songs, the band has the rootsy attack of Social Distortion; when Andriano takes the microphone, he laments and beseeches like a punk-rock Morrissey.
"When the Alkaline Trio started," Skiba says the next day, "I wanted us to sound like Ani DiFranco playing with H?sker D?." Skiba had followed DiFranco around on her tour. "I was madly in love with her," he says. The first two songs Alkaline Trio ever played were DiFranco's "Both Hands" and Sin?ad O'Connor's "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Skiba, 27, grew up in the Chicago suburb of McHenry, the child of an oral surgeon and an ER nurse, both Vietnam vets. His mother, Joan, now a grade school teacher, says, "Matt was always sensitive -- I know that's such a mother thing to say. And he was always wondering what his passion was going to be. But when he was in the third grade, he got a paper back from his teacher with the comment, 'Matt, this is very good writing. I didn't know you knew so much about Twisted Sister.' "
After high school, Skiba thought he wanted to be a graphic designer but dropped out of art school after one year. He worked as a bike messenger in Chicago for three and a half years; when he started Alkaline Trio, he had logged much more time as a drummer than as a guitarist. He still regularly breaks guitar strings, because he pounds them like a snare drum.
Skiba picked the word alkaline out of the dictionary and then recruited Andriano, who had left college after one day and two classes (English and psychology); they went through multiple drummers before Grant joined last year. From the beginning, their T-shirts were adorned with upside-down crosses and other satanic imagery. "I'm not really a Satanist," Skiba admits. "I just tell people that I am to make them upset. And if they think it's cool, I have a new friend."
As Skiba says this, he's sitting in the living room of his sunny apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood. (The rest of the band still lives in Chicago, but Skiba moved here after a fire destroyed most of his possessions.) Skiba is playing Elvis Costello's Brutal Youth on the stereo and stretching the muscles he abused with a day of skateboarding. He has a pierced nose and elaborately painted two-tone fingernails. The paintings on the walls include a portrait of Anton LaVey (founder of the Church of Satan) and two watercolors by Marilyn Manson (whom Skiba has never met).
Skiba considerately offers to share both his weed and a box full of socks he just received in the mail. His gentle demeanor makes the violence of his songs that much more alarming: On the excellent "This Could Be Love," he sings, "Step one: Slit my throat/Step two: Play in my blood" -- and that's before he gets to the part about having his fingers cut off.
He doesn't want to discuss the ex-girlfriend he based the song on but emphasizes that most of his lyrics are extended metaphors. He confesses, "Movies have inspired so many of the metaphors I've been able to use, it almost feels like cheating." The specific movie that inspired "This Could Be Love"? John Waters' 1981 Odorama masterpiece, Polyester.
Alkaline Trio's music has gradually focused more on relationships, with Andriano's songs providing a more positive outlook than Skiba's. "I try to look at the bright side of things," Skiba says, "but just because you're with somebody doesn't mean you're complete." He's noticed that their concerts have been drawing more couples lately: "They come hand in hand, boyfriend and girlfriend. Or girlfriend and girlfriend. Unfortunately, when boys come together, they don't generally hold hands."
What was the band's lyrical focus previously? "This brokenhearted boozy thing," Skiba says. "A lot of our older stuff has to do with drinking, but the drown-your-sorrows thing has gotten old." The Trio's alcohol consumption, once legendary, has been severely curtailed. Andriano got tired of the hangovers, and Skiba needed to protect his vocal cords. (An acid-reflux problem prevented him from recording his vocals on Good Mourning for weeks; he still gets raspy during shows.)
"People tend to identify the band with drinking," concedes Grant. "We get people who come to the show, and all they want to do is have a beer with us or talk about how fucked up we got the night before. And I'll say, 'Actually, we were all pretty sober. We hung out on the bus playing video games and drinking our iced soy chai lattes.' " Tinted glass can conceal some surprising things.
(July 24, 2003)