By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
July 5, 1996
J.R. Richards quit college to be in a band. His parents weren’t disappointed.
“I was a music major, and there’s not much you can do with that other than teach or conduct,” Richards said, calling from his record company’s Hollywood digs. “I couldn’t envision myself doing either.”
With the success of his group Dishwalla’s breakthrough single “Counting Blue Cars,” it appears that the singer-keyboardist made the right decision. The four-man alternative band, which also includes bassist Scot Alexander, guitarist Rodney Browning and drummer George Pendergast, will close the Taste of Chicago Sunday afternoon at Grant Park in a strong bill that also includes the Goo Goo Dolls and the Refreshments.
“Counting Blue Cars” has received a lot of attention recently, not only for its hypnotic melodies and disenchanted vocals, but also for its signature line, “Tell me all your thoughts on God/Because I’d really like to meet her.” The single came at a time when the public was receptive to songs that questioned religion, as evidenced by the success of Christian rockers Jars of Clay and Joan Osborne’s Grammy-nominated single “One of Us” (“What if God were one of us?/Just a slob like one of us?”).
“I didn’t make a conscious effort to create controversy or to try to be particularly clever when I wrote that line,” said Richards, who is the band’s lyricist. “But now that I look back at it, it makes a lot of sense. I think that whenever God is used as a reference, it’s important to a lot of people and they take notice. And when you refer to God as being a woman, that isn’t exactly a traditional belief.”
But if the relatively mellow single is what gets fans interested in the three-year-old group from Santa Barbara, Calif., it’s Dishwalla’s debut album, “Pet Your Friends,” that will hook them in for good. The songs are brilliantly different. With shimmery pop hooks and distorted guitars, “Explode” has the feel of a Britpop hit, while “Haze” camouflages an alcoholic’s dire story with soulful guitars. The whimsical “Miss Emma Peel” is a pining ode to the sexy heroine of “The Avengers.”
Named after India’s cable TV pirates, Dishwalla bears the distinction of receiving good reviews from critics and being picked by Sassy magazine for its “Cute Band Alert” column.
“That’s pretty awesome, because I think that Sassy is one of the hippest magazines around,” said Richards, 27. “The dialogue in there is such a crackup, and then to find out that we made `Cute Band Alert.’ . . . One of us actually had a subscription to it.”
To a magazine aimed at 15-year-old girls?
“Don’t go there,” he said, laughing. “I read surfing magazines.”
With the exception of Pendergast, who abstains, the band is full of avid surfers, a hobby that’s been on hold for the 15 months they’ve been on tour. But they’re not complaining.
“I love touring,” Richards said. “We all do, and we thrive on playing live. We’ve been across the United States many times and hope to just keep on touring. I actually prefer to show people what we sound like in a live situation than listening to the record or on the radio. We put an extreme amount of energy into our shows and we rock! Not that the album doesn’t – we put a lot of hard work into making a record that was a good representation of us. But there’s just something really sp ecial about a live situation.”
He takes his work seriously. Despite the distractions of the musicians’ “cute” label, Richards said life on the road for him is tamer than when he’s not working.
“Singingwise, there are a lot of things I can’t do, like eating certain foods,” he said. “I don’t eat chocolate or milk or any dairy products, because they’re bad for the vocal cords. I don’t eat sugar products. I stay away from drinking and smoking too much. I sound like a priest.
Even romances are few and far between for the group. Everyone thinks it’s really fun being in a band, and it is. But you have to take your job seriously, too,” Richards says.
Goo Goo Dolls, Dishwalla, The Refreshments
2 p.m. Sunday
Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park
Free
(312) 744-3370
