The Verve Pipe, Las Vegas Sun, July 11, 1997

Verve plus nerve shoot band up rock Pipe-line Lisa Ferguson Friday, July 11, 1997 | 9:37 a.m. When interviewing celebrities -- especially rock stars -- you can count on playing "The Waiting Game" now and then. Without getting too technical, it goes like this: You schedule a telephone chat and wait for them to call. If it's up-and-coming modern rock band The Verve Pipe, you wait six days. Then, keyboard player Doug Corella, still groggy after a night spent in the band's cramped tour bus, calls from the only pay phone he can find -- in the women's restroom of an Austin, Tex. nightclub. The only apologies offered go to an unsuspecting female who wanders in. "Sorry, I didn't know where the phone was," he says. See, the lads from East Lansing, Mich. are still relatively new to this game, and it seems someone forgot to give them a copy of the rules. Luckily their hit tune, "The Freshmen," contains an artfully-crafted disclaimer: I won't be held responsible .../ We were merely freshman." Well, kind of. With two independent CDs and a European tour (opening for rock legends Kiss last year) under its belt, The Verve Pipe isn't exactly green to the rock 'n' roll scene. Still, it's only been with the recent success of their latest disc, "Villains" on the RCA Records label, that the five-year-old quintet has come into its own. "The Freshman," which describes two men's lamenting over the suicide of a woman both dated in college, exploded onto Top 40 radio, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard charts. Its video is in regular rotation on MTV. On Saturday, the band -- also including the brothers Vander Ark, Brian (lead vocals) and Brad (bass), guitarist A.J. Dunning and drummer Donny Brown -- will play The Joint at the Hard Rock hotel-casino. "We kind of knew ('The Freshman') had a lot of potential," Corella says from the ladies room, "but you never really know what's gonna take off with people. I thought it would sell some records for us." It had to. "Photograph," the debut single from the year-old album, landed in the Top 10. It was followed by a tune called "Cup of Tea," which received a poor reception from radio. "I appreciate that people are digging 'The Freshman.' I think it just pulls on some heartstrings with people," 29-year-old Corella continues. "Certainly at one point, we're all freshmen. I guess it's one of those reflection pieces where you think at one point, I had that." Overall, "Villains" and The Verve Pipe have both gotten an upturned thumb from critics. "What makes The Verve Pipe more relevant than other grunge-lite artists," wrote John Weiderhorn in the June issue of Guitar World magazine, "is the way they blend strong British Invasion-style (guitar) hooks with Seattle-spawned rhythms." (But where they'd get the name? The Verve Pipe "means nothing," Corella says, explaining how they didn't want to seem "too philosophical or trite" but urge people to ask "'What the hell does it mean?' It must be working.") A graduate of Central Michigan University, Corella cites the Beatles, Elton John and English rockers XTC as the band's biggest influences. He pooh-poohs those who contend the band is merely riding on the coattails of grunge grandfathers Pearl Jam, or modern rock's most recent sensation, Live. "I think that's a person's cheap way of not really listening to the album," Corella says. "We're fans of pop music, we're fans of bands who write good songs. The fact is, I guess sometimes we're gonna cross over to those sounds. "To have an album with that much dynamics is important to us. An album is gonna have mood swings and you want your audience to be right along with you." The band will head back into the studio in October to record a fourth album, slated for release next spring. Not bad for a bunch of guys who started off playing Michigan college frat parties. "It kind of worked out for us," Corella reflects. "All you can do is move on, which is (to) the women's bathroom right here." archive