Bound to Glory

Petaluma. Jan. 30. 5 p.m.

"Don't touch that!"
The five members of Train freeze. They look around the stage to see who's drawn the wrath of God, tonight personified by Mystic Theater audio engineer Gregory Rehberg. Drummer Scott Underwood is the sinner, with both hands on the ancient, half-drawn gold curtain that inconveniently bisects the Mystic stage near where he needs to set up his kit. He looks sheepishly toward the sound booth at the opposite end of the theater, where the formidable Rehberg stands.

"I was just ..."
"Do not pull on that curtain! It will fall apart."
The rest of the band goes back to setting up. Scott lets go of the curtain. "Uh, OK," he says. "I was just ..." He breaks into a Jerry Lewis routine. He touches the curtain, lets it go, touches it again. "I just thought ... I mean ... I was ...." Everyone smiles appreciatively, including Rehberg. "Save it, Scott," he says.

Train is home. After a four-month tour of the East Coast, the band has only tonight's gig at the beautifully restored Mystic between it and four precious days off. Then the group hits the road again for another stretch that will take it down the coast and across the Southwest to New Orleans, before kicking off yet another tour opening for Better Than Ezra.

Four years of hard work is starting to pay off: The 500-seat Mystic sold out in advance, and another 150 tickets are quickly made available for walk-ups; the guest list is bursting with old friends and band loyalists. "We used to play at the little sports bar across the street to, like, our friends," recalls guitarist Rob Hotchkiss. "We'd look over here and say, 'Someday, someday.' Now we've sold it out."

The band's success stems directly from "Meet Virginia," a witty, upbeat song that was one of 1998's most requested records on Alice (97.3 FM). Another song, "Free," has caught on at other rock stations after being featured on Party of Five. Train's eponymous album has been well-received: Last year it was nominated for a Bammie award in the Americana/Roots category and to date has sold more than 60,000 copies.

Not too shabby for a DIY record made on $22,500 borrowed from the band members' parents. It's enough to make Train's label, Columbia Records, take notice: After signing the band last year, Columbia is now allowing Train to hire its own sound man for the first time. And the group's just been added to a prestigious showcase at the Gavin Seminar in New Orleans.

But the band members are tired. Bone tired. It shows in the way they avoid unnecessary conversation, the robotic way they lug their gear from their van to the Mystic stage. Every attempt to defuse tension or sidestep trouble is worth acknowledg-ing, even secondhand Jerry Lewis.

The band is also caught in the middle of major changes in the music industry. Corporatization has reached a new zenith with the creation of the Universal Music Group, a monolith born of Seagram Co. Ltd.'s $10 billion purchase of PolyGram Entertainment in December. UMG is now the world's largest record company, with approximately 25 percent of the domestic market. Overnight, prestigious labels such as Geffen, A&M, Island, and Mercury vanished or were "consolidated" beyond recognition.

What that means for a band like Train is hard work, and lots of it. It means 12-hour days, cheap hotels, and bad food. It means driving your own van to gigs, setting up and breaking down your own equipment, selling your own T-shirts, and nyucking it up on wacky morning shows in places like Chico on three hours of sleep. It means shaking every hand, signing every autograph, and flattering every radio geek in every little town you pass through.

It means demonstrating -- in every way -- that you are a low-cost, low-risk investment for your label.

"I think this band is going to be well-known as a prototype for the type of band that is going to make it," says lead singer Pat Monahan. "We have done everything ourselves. We don't spend a dime unless it evolves in a natural way. Our label appreciates that we're not out here wasting their money."

Train formed in 1994, when Hotchkiss and Monahan began playing acoustic sets together in Bay Area coffee shops. Jimmy Stafford, who had played with Hotchkiss in L.A., soon joined. Finally, the rhythm section of Scott Underwood and Charlie Colin came from Colorado. All are accomplished musicians; their music is guitar-driven, soulful, and nuanced, frequently incorporating trumpet, harmonica, and mandolin into melodic, introspective songs.

But except for the shared experience of being on the verge of Making It, they seem to have little in common. Their tastes in music are so different that they watch movies while on the road instead of listening to CDs or radio. Pat and Rob are married and have young children, while Scott doesn't know where he'll be sleeping after tonight's show, thanks to a widening rift with his live-in girlfriend.

The toll all this is taking becomes apparent during sound check, when a yelling match breaks out between Pat and Rob onstage and quickly escalates to pushing and shoving. Pat invites Rob to step outside into the alley, but cooler heads intervene before Rob can take him up on the offer.

Later, a witness describes the genesis of the fight this way: "Pat got into Rob's shit because he thought Rob was slacking off. But Rob doesn't take any shit from Pat and pretty much told him to go fuck himself."

A short while after Pat and Rob's near-fistfight, a man walks up to the stage and hands Jimmy and Charlie each a large envelope. They think it's something to autograph, but inside each envelope is a subpoena. The band is being sued by a photographer who claims she wasn't given proper credit for work she did on promotional posters.

In the dressing room before the show, the band's manager, Arnie Pustilnik of Bill Graham Productions, is livid. "Do you know what this is?" he says, shaking a summons in one hand. "It's money. It's hundreds of dollars I'm going to have to spend defending this. Hundreds of dollars --" he waves the summons to indicate the band "-- they can't afford."

"Sometimes we could just kill each other," Rob says over dinner at the restaurant adjacent to the theater. Fistfights, he takes pains to emphasize, are not a regular part of the show. General tension is another story. Both Rob and Scott have quit the band at points, only to rejoin a short time later. What brought them back is the same impulse that lures gamblers back to Caesar's Palace: They've lost too much to quit now. Still, Rob says, he may have no choice but to leave the band if something big doesn't happen by summer. His wife's teaching job ends in June, and he'll have to start bringing in more income.

"People hear your song on the radio and they think you must be rich," Rob says, shaking his head. "We're not making any money yet." He smiles sardonically. "But at least we're generating money."

In the Mystic dressing room, carrot sticks, various lunch meats, and a huge block of Deluxe American Cheese come to room temperature on a forgotten counter. Next to the cheese is a small box containing copies of the brand-new CD single for "Meet Virginia," which will be shipped to radio stations the following week. At the end of each disc, Columbia has provided a 33-second snippet of the song's big guitar hook for program directors who are too busy to listen to the entire four-minute song.

Thirty-three seconds.
Train takes the stage at 10 p.m. The audience is an atypical mix of different ages and incomes, but with a large contingent of attractive, college-age women. They know all the words, and they sway and sing along with every song. A straightforward cover of Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On" gets the hippies, old and nouveau, bobbing their heads, and "Meet Virginia," the last song before the encore, receives the hoped-for ovation.

After the show, the band hangs around in the lobby, signing autographs and chatting with the crowd. Home and a four-day weekend are only a few miles away, but the band members linger for more than an hour, smiling, shaking hands, making nice. It's nearly 2 a.m. before the last satisfied customer ventures reluctantly out into a torrential downpour. They finish breaking down and loading their gear. They part and head out into the rain, in five different directions.

Hollywood. Feb. 8. 2 p.m.

Pat's in a mood.
"I hate L.A.," he says, enunciating every word with a precision born of spite. "I fuck-ing hate fuck-ing L.A." Today, the band has the day off before a show at the Troubadour the next evening.

But instead of kicking it poolside at the Hotel Roosevelt and nursing a bad head cold, Pat's stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard. He threads the van between cars like a New York City cabbie, swearing at a Cadillac that tries to cut him off. He misjudges a swerve slightly and clips an empty school bus with the van's passenger-side mirror.

Charlie's riding shotgun; the rest of the band has gone shopping for clothes on Melrose Avenue. Born and raised in L.A., Charlie is the quintessential laid-back Southern Californian. He keeps a leather satchel across his shoulders at all times, which contains herbal teas, vitamin supplements, and a cell phone. He's happy to be back home, but he's troubled by the headaches he's been having recently.

Unprompted, he speculates on the headaches' cause: "I wonder if it could be stress. I've been feeling guilty a lot lately. My girlfriend and I have been having problems. I'm always on tour and it's becoming such an effort to keep it going. I know it sounds like the typical rock 'n' roll cliche, but I really want to concentrate on my music right now. This isn't going to last forever, for any of us, and I want to live every minute of it. I don't know ... I get tired of feeling like I have to apologize for doing what I've always dreamed of doing."

On the radio, KLOS plays "Free," then segues immediately into Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain." It's no longer a novelty for Train to hear its songs on the radio, even in the nation's No. 2 market. Moreover, the fact that "Free" is the most-requested new song on KLOS, a classic rock station, poses something of a dilemma for a band trying to mine the same alternative vein as Counting Crows, Dog's Eye View, and Barenaked Ladies.

"We're Number 1 on KLOS, but they don't add a lot of new music, so that means we get about 17 spins a week," says Pat. "There are some stations where we're getting 43 spins a week, and we're only at Number 3 or 4."

Pat enjoys the business of making music. Far from eschewing words like "product" or "target demographic," he seems to relish the challenge of being as smart as the lawyers, agents, distributors, label reps, and managers who are steering the band's career.

"I remember the first time we had to meet our lawyer," Scott recounts later. "It was at a cafe right across the street from that theater we played in Petaluma. We hadn't been together very long. We were just these punks from San Francisco and here we had to talk to this lawyer on his own terms. None of us could do it. Except Pat.

"Everybody in the band really respects Pat and admires him for all that he's doing. He's a major stress-case, but record people love him, and there would be no band without him."

Pat is driving a plain white Dodge Ram 3500, neat as a pin inside and out; there's little to distinguish it from a vanpool for a nursing home, or an FBI surveillance vehicle. It still has that new-car smell, and the small red trailer that carries their instruments, gear, and luggage is equally nondescript, with only a dollar-bill-sized "Train" sticker on the back door.

The man they're driving across town to meet is, in Pat's phrase, "a friend of the band's." Jon Elliott, owner of Social Awearness, has been making Train's "merch" -- concert T-shirts, baseball caps, etc. -- from the days before the group could afford to pay him. He greets Charlie, his friend since fourth grade, with a hearty hug and invites them into his shop, which is tucked away in a forgotten industrial strip in Santa Monica.

Inside Social Awearness, boxes of shirts, shorts, and sweats compete for floor space with rolls of fabric. A dozen or so employees filling orders hardly glance at the visitors. The shop hums with the energy of a successful enterprise.

The first item Elliott holds up is a pair of boxer shorts with the Train logo in tiny print all over them. Pat and Charlie love them. For more than an hour, they examine baby T's, spaghetti-strap halter tops, sweat shirts, baseball shirts, pajama bottoms, more boxers -- even baby clothes. They consider each item seriously, imagining the sales potential. They look at the garments in eggplant, baby blue, sunflower, maroon. They imagine them with three different logos. They imagine the logos in varying sizes, fonts, and locations.

Elliott betrays no impatience as Pat and Charlie hash out their opinions on each item, sometimes arriving at a decision, sometimes changing their minds, sometimes forgetting what they decided. After they reject two different men's athletic shirts, Elliott ventures cautiously, "I don't know if you've given any thought to your demographics ..."

"Our demographic is 25-year-old women," Pat says immediately.
Before Pat and Charlie leave, Elliott tells them, "Once you guys are cruising, we can get this done in Mexico much cheaper and start to make some serious money."

"I wanted to be a genius," says Pat during a break in the band's schedule. "So I did what I thought geniuses do, which is drink a lot. We used to play for beer. And by the time I finished, they wished they had paid us money instead."

The nadir of Pat's drinking career was a show the band played for Columbia executives in New York. As Rob puts it, "We were told we could go up there and piss all over the place and we'd still get signed. So we pissed all over the place and they said, 'No thanks.'

"That is the single most powerful thing that happened to us," Pat says. "When Columbia passed on us, I had to sit down and think, 'Is this what I really want?' I sat with that awhile. And I decided I don't have time to be a genius. I have two kids. All I have time to do is work hard."

Pat quit drinking and turned his energies toward becoming a solid frontman and responsible bandleader. Columbia came back three years later. "This band has been the tortoise in the race," Pat says, warming to a favorite subject. "But we're getting to the point where people are starting to think we might win. There are bands out there who haven't sold nearly as many records as us, driving around in a tour bus. That's $500 a day. As we gradually go up, these other bands are finding reality. I'm not going to mention names, but I'm talking about bands that get million-dollar record deals, and then sell 75,000 albums. The labels, that is not their idea of success."

New Orleans. Feb. 19. 6 p.m.

"Radio is the whole world. If you don't have radio, you don't have anything."

Jerry's sitting on the bed in his room at the Hyatt, eating room-service chicken nuggets and explaining the importance of tonight's show.

This is the Gavin Seminar 1999, the largest radio industry convention of the year. The convention is sponsored by Gavin, a San Francisco-based trade publication that tracks and charts the success of artists and records in all pop-music formats. Until the early 1990s, when SoundScan technology finally took the guesswork out of figuring record sales, Gavin was known as the most reliable source for unbiased data on which records were likely to be hits. Gavin conventions used to be held in San Francisco, but became a movable feast a few years ago.

This is Train's third Gavin, and the band will be onstage for only 20 minutes, sandwiched between Chicago's Dovetail Joint and the Black Crowes. It's practically a night off, but the group has been around long enough to know how important those 20 minutes are. It's Train's last, best chance to impress the people who decide which songs will get airplay and which will not.

Careers are made -- and broken -- at Gavin, in conference rooms at the Hyatt, and in French Quarter bars like Tipitina's, where Columbia is hosting its showcase. Jerry recalls watching a nervous singer/songwriter at a previous Gavin who forgot the words to one of her songs halfway through. "That was it. You knew she was done, just like that. It was like watching an ice skater fall at the Olympics."

Tipitina's is a fairly large venue, with a full bar running down each side of the room, but a comparatively small stage, which is loaded with equipment for Dovetail Joint, the opening act. However, the Black Crowes have also claimed dominion over the stage, and, as they are officially rock stars, their equipment cannot be moved, or even touched. So there are three drum kits onstage, innumerable wires, pedals, guitars, and amps, and barely room to move. There will be only 10 minutes between the time Dovetail Joint leaves the stage and Train goes on.

The crowd filters in. Its members are young, predominantly male, and overwhelmingly white. Here and there one can spot a sports jacket, but for the most part it's a jeans-and-T-shirt crowd. A large contingent of Columbia reps is in attendance, including Jerry Blair, head of rock radio, and Howard Gabriel, vice president and general manager of Red Ink, Train's distributor. Gabriel, in his mid-40s, is still as enthusiastic about music as he was as a teenager grooving to Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother & the Holding Company. The music business itself, though, has broken his heart, he says. "It's not about the bands anymore. It's all about money."

Onstage, Dovetail Joint is getting crucified.
There's more room in front of the stage than in the back of the club, where all the schmoozing is taking place, and the quartet seems perplexed when nobody applauds its opening number. The Columbia people try to goose the crowd, clapping, bobbing their heads, and shouting encouragement. But the talking never lets up during the band's three remaining songs, which it runs through much too quickly. Humiliated, the band members numbly start breaking down their gear.

The crowd doesn't even wait for them to leave the stage before the remarks start.

"Is that your band?" one program director asks a Columbia rep. "I'm sooooo sorry."

"Hi everybody! We are Train from San Francisco, California, and it is great to be here in New Orleans."

The band is loose, and the audience seems to perk up. Pat's voice, normally powerful and clear, is shredded by the constant touring, but he quickly adapts -- by the time the band plays "Free," almost everyone in attendance is listening.

And that's when Pat takes everything on his own shoulders.
In the middle of the song he steps to the front of the stage, gingerly, to avoid the mass of cords and cables, and stares out challengingly at the jaded crowd. "You know, I bet these guys 50 bucks that I could get you excited for just one second," he says. "Will you help me win 50 bucks and say, 'Yeah!'?"

A solid if unenthusiastic "Yeah!" rises from the room. Pat turns to the band and yells, "Fifty bucks!" It isn't Henry V, but it does the trick. Feet start moving. By the climax of "Meet Virginia," Pat's voice is all but gone. But when the music swells and drops at the crucial moment when he sings, "I can't wait to ... meet Virginia," he nails it, making the last two words sound so cool and sexy that Rob starts to laugh in surprise. Pat looks over the crowd with something between contempt and amusement.

But the message is delivered. Not one person listening will forget the name of the song.

By the time Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson struts onstage in his silver lame blouse, white trousers, and white pimp shoes, everyone's pissed legless. Everyone, except Pat Monahan and the other members of Train. They stand stock still in the mass of gyrating bodies, intently watching the stage, absorbing every move, every guitar lick -- looking for something, anything that they can learn, anything they can use.

It's now after midnight in the French Quarter. At 7 a.m., they'll be piling into the Dodge van to drive to Jackson, Miss., bleary-eyed and unsure what will happen next.

But they're still working.