Summer 1994. Things were pretty easy for Veruca Salt. The first three minutes of music they put to tape, a crunchy little single called "Seether," found its way onto radio airwaves across the country and into heavy rotation on MTV before the band even released its first album. When record labels glimpsed the band's attractive co-founders, Louise Post and Nina Gordon, trading bratty vocals and bold guitar licks, they began frothing at the mouth. Despite the intense bidding war that followed, the band chose an indie label, Minty Fresh, to release its debut, American Thighs, later that fall. It went gold and the Chicago-based four-piece was on the fast track to rock stardom.
Spring 2000. Veruca Salt are set to release their third album, Resolver, but the band is barely recognizable from its initial incarnation. Only Louise Post remains from the original lineup, and even she looks different. A quick listen to Resolver reveals the scars she's incurred from being dragged along that fast track, a long, winding one, filled with personal and professional upheaval.
"The sudden fame and recognition we got kind of overwhelmed us," Post admits. "It put more pressure internally on the band than would have been there otherwise and bred a seed of malcontent that festered."
The initial pressure came in the form of a nasty backlash the band endured from any long-suffering and resentful veterans of Chicago's music scene. Expectations though, remained high for the band's sophomore effort, Eight Arms to Hold You. Impossibly high, in fact, and when drummer Jim Shapiro (who also happened to be Gordon's brother) jumped ship just before its release, it was clear all was not well in the world of Veruca Salt. The band's open embrace of big, thundering rock on Eight Arms didn't tap the cultural zeitgeist the way their power-pop debut had, and suddenly Veruca Salt were being written off as one-hit wonders.
Post claims not to have been bothered with the lukewarm reaction to the album ("There were a couple reviews that were used as toilet paper," she says, "but I still love that record"), but the band continued to splinter. In 1998, Gordon announced she was leaving to pursue a solo career, and in her wake original bassist Steve Lack scurried out of the picture as well. Post was the only one left standing.
Gordon's parting, in particular, was less than amicable. She and Post had started Veruca Salt together and grown extremely close over the six years they spent fronting it. Her exit came as a shock that Post still seems slightly puzzled by.
"She was unhappy, I imagine," Post says quietly. "I think we needed to make a definite break. We had been pretty much attached at the hip for six years."
If losing her band mate and best friend wasn't enough, the rest of her life was falling apart as well. A relationship with Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl came to an ugly end, amidst reports that Grohl had been galavanting with actress Winona Ryder, and by mid-1998, Post was alone and confused. Instead of crumbling though, she gathered together the pieces of her fractured life and turned them into the angry power-pop narcotic that became Resolver.
"I am not the same as before," she sings hauntingly to open the album, pretty much laying down Resolver's main theme. From there she fires off bitter, guitar-driven salvos at those who've made the mistake of crossing her, all but calling out her oppressors by name at certain points. "She didn't get it, so fuck her," she howls in Gordon's direction on the hard-driving "Born Entertainer." On the chilling "Disconnected," it's Grohl who's caught in her crosshairs: "It's kind of scary when your lover leaves you for a movie star," she sings before adding, "you can't make me love your band or buy your records."
"A lot of these songs were really their own independent catharsis for me," she explains. "They seem very specific, but could apply to many situations. And if you noticed, there's generally resolve by the end of them. For me, it was coming to peace with whatever kind of chaos drove the song in the first place."
Brian Liesegang (of Filter fame) produced the naked batch of songs, adding polish or grime to them as it made sense. "I wanted it to sound huge and frail," Post says. "As frail as I felt at times, and as seething -- no pun intended -- as I felt at times."
Now, having recruited a new band -- guitarist Stephen Fitzpatrick, bassist Suzanne Sokol and drummer Jimmy Maidla -- Post feels like she's begun filling the void left by Gordon's departure.
"The band members now are great and I'm really psyched to be playing with them, but making the record on my own, going on a press tour by myself, there are moments when it's like, 'Where's my other half?'" she says. "It's confusing, but I get past it and go on to the next thing.
"I was saddened by Nina leaving, but I was also emancipated," she continues. "Now it's all on me."
DAVID PEISNER
(May 23, 2000)