An older, wiser dada
The rock band dada tells one of the best discovery stories this side of movie star Lana Turner’s star-making trip to a Hollywood soda fountain.
The husband of guitarist Michael Gurley’s sister owned a Los Angeles car dealership. That was where Miles Copeland, who was then managing the English rock band the Police, had just bought his first American car, a Chrysler convertible.
Gurley, a 1978 graduate of Saratoga High School, asked to deliver the car to Copeland. And, in a move that would change his life forever, he left a copy of his demo tape for Copeland in the car’s cassette player.
Copeland got in later, listened and fell in love.
After a few phone calls, dada — like the haphazard and spontaneous art movement from which it took its name — began a wild ride.
How To Be Found
The group — which included Saratoga alum Joie Calio on bass and drummer Phil Leavitt, whom they enlisted in Los Angeles — was signed to Copeland’s label, IRS Records.
Dada’s first disc, Puzzle, came out in 1992. A single, “Dizz Knee Land,” became a modern-rock staple; it’s still played today. It helped sell 500,000 copies of Puzzle.‘
But after opening for Sting on a tour, the band had a string of bad breaks.
Dada’s aggregate of Beatlesque harmonies, sharp and witty songwriting, bizarre album covers, and tight musicianship never quite got its due.
IRS Records’ persistent financial woes hampered the success of dada’s first two discs, and the label finally folded in 1996 as the band toured in support of its third album, El Subliminoso.
“A lot of the people that worked with us on labels are out of the business now,” Gurley says, “but 12 years later, we are still going.”
Dada has just released a spectacular new album, How to Be Found. This month, the band is starting a barnstorming tour of the United States, hoping a long bus trip will reignite the kind of excitement the group generated a dozen years ago. Dada plays San Francisco’s Red Devil Lounge on Sunday.
The album has the post-punk, post-grunge, back-to-analog sound reminiscent of the White Stripes or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with the edges filed down by dreamy harmonies. The sound fits with what Gurley points to as his influences: the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.
The disc shows the group hasn’t lost anything musically, though it clearly needs a commercial boost.
The album, on the indie label Blue Cave Records, will be in stores Feb. 24; it can be ordered online via www.dadatheband.com.
“After a while in this business, you understand that, in everyone’s career, you go through good seasons and bad seasons,” Gurley says. “You are on top of the mountain sometimes and in the valleys others. I don’t want to do anything else. My career will go until I’m dead, and those are the kind of people I want to work with.”
Dada gets dropped
Dada was dropped by MCA after its fourth album in 1998. when the label went through a reorganization and dropped a lot of other acts. Many of the songs on How to Be Found were recorded while the band was with the label. Although MCA was uninterested then, as soon as dada wanted the recordings back, the label became interested, says Gurley. It took a year of negotiating for the band to get the songs back.
(A similar thing happened to Wilco, which was dropped by Warner Brothers and then released one of its most critically acclaimed albums on the Internet.)
Gurley has been staying musically alive in Los Angeles. He has worked with a band playing lounge music, and he recorded last year with Butterfly Jones, which included Leavitt, former Soul Coughing keyboardist Mark de Gli Antoni and former Mary’s Danish singer Julie Ritter. A critically acclaimed 2001 release on Vanguard Records, Napalm Springs, was linked to the alternative sound of Smashing Pumpkins and Third Eye Blind.
“That’s a side project,” says Gurley. “If dada gets real busy this year, that’ll be great.”
During dada’s downtime, Leavitt toured with the Blue Man Group and did voice-over work. Calio became an A&R representative for MCA Records, looking for new talent for the label. Eventually, they realized they wanted to get back together and try again.
“We had a great fan base; we enjoy it,” says Gurley. “Why stop just because we aren’t millionaires?”
High school reunion
How to Be Found, he says, represents where the band is today. “It’s about searching for your own identity. You hope to get to that age where you know yourself, what you want and what you need.”
Gurley compares the experience to attending a high school reunion, which he still does regularly in Saratoga.
“Everyone had those cliques — jocks and nerds. Years later, none of that matters. Everyone grows up and accepts each other for who they are. But when you are in high school, you can’t see that.”
- Brad Kava
Source: The San Jose Mercury News
