source: The Courier
January 2, 1999
Return of the anti-frontman
by Megan Turner
Russell Crowe. Now there's a name with clout; a name that fairly shimmers with both Hollywood stardust and artistic credibility. A name that could, surely, launch a thousand songs into high rotation on the nation's airwaves.
But you'd need an eagle eye to find that name anywhere on the packaging of Gaslight, the new CD released by Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, the raw and rootsy guitar band Crowe fronts.
The star of such films as Romper Stomper, Virtuosity and LA Confidential is the anti-frontman, deflecting rather than courting the limelight, keeping his much-prized integrity intact.
"The requirements that a record company would put on me would take the band to a different place and I'm not prepared to do it that way," he says. "I know that with one turn down that corridor, I could make money for jam. But that's not what it's about. I'm sorry folks."
And so there's no corporate marketeering, no shameless posturing or prima donna rock star trip, just a direct relationship between the band and their fans via the internet (Gaslight is available only through mail order) and live performances (in an itinerary which, incongruously, sees them playing The Viper Room in LA four days after the Ballina RSL).
Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts evolved from a friendship Crowe struck up with guitarist Dean Cochran in New Zealand in 1984. Together with bassist Garth Adam and drummer Dave Kelley, they share in a collective songwriting history of nearly 14 years.
While Crowe's "day job" demands the lion's share of his time and the band project is kept deliberately low-key, Crowe is emphatic that TOFOG is more than a diversion.
"I treat it seriously," he says. "I wouldn't do it on the basis of something to do on my summer holidays. It's another creative expression."
"If you have any respect for what I do as an actor you know I'm not a fucking soap star. I don't have an empty attitude to what I do as a screen performer. I do work that has content to it. If you acknowledge that, give me the opportunity to show you the same artist coming to you in a different medium."
TOFOG play the kind of music that seems tailor-made for a long, beverage-filled night in a sweaty room full of testosterone-charged punters, but Crowe shuns the definition "classic Aussie pub rock".
"That implies there is not much of a narrative thought process," he says. "If a song doesn't have a narrative it doesn't have a point. Those 'oh yeah baby' songs, they fit in a certain place, but for me it's got to be about the story. I'm not a musician's musician; I'm a storyteller."
And the inspiration for Crowe's impassioned and honest, "these are the facts, jack" lyrics? Ask a cheesy question, expect a cheesy answer. "Real life, baby," he growls in the classic film noir patois of his LA Confidential character.
The sounds on Gaslight are a disparate as the times and places that spawned them. "Every song takes you to a different place," Crowe says. "There are live tracks that pop up in the middle of the album; it finishes on a whisper and starts up again with the hidden tracks . The very last uttering on the album is a sigh. Then you go and lie down and have a little think."
