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By Caren Myers
Silverchair's manager, a harried guy in his thirties with a goatee, is trying to teach his band some manners. Australia's biggest grunge exports are, after all, barely sixteen, and he has a paternal interest in their welfare. He has just called room service for some soft drinks -- alcohol is off-limits -- and he's trying to take everyone's order.
"I want a water," announces Daniel Johns, the band's singer and guitarist.
"What do you say? prompts the manager.
Daniel, whose features still have a child's pudgy delicacy. gazes at him guilelessly. "I want a water... now!"
silverchair can afford to be cheeky. They are, literally, alternative rock's new poster children. Their debut single. Tomorrow, recorded when they were fourteen, has taken up permanent residence on MTV. Their debut album, frogstomp, has sold a million copies. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have invited them to join their fall tour. But first the trio -- Daniel, bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies -- are going back home from London to Newcastle, an industrial city in New South Wales. They have to get back to tenth grade.
With their regulation flailing hair, baggy shorts, and aptitude for recreating the sonic density of Vs. by Pearl Jam, silverchair sound a lot like any other bunch of identi-grungers. But in their artless, kidlike way, they've tapped directly into the rock audience's craving for the familiar. silverchair's straight-ahead, flannel-clad sound is fresh for kids who weren't of record-buying age in 1991. It has the cathartic early-'70s riffing and anguished vocals that rock fans are desperate for, now that Nirvana are dead, Scott Weiland is in rehab, and Pearl Jam are scuffling with TicketMaster. With its homespun acoustic melody punctuated by flashes of sound and fury, Tomorrow is exactly what the audience has been waiting for.
Now silverchair are bigger than, oh, Crocodile Dundee. But they don't want to talk about it. Any mention of fame and they become vague and evasive. Most alternative-rock stars shrink from their own acclaim, but silverchair, with typical teenage disregard for verisimilitude, flatly deny that their success is happening at all.
While the attention of every record company in the rock world was focused on Seattle, the trio were blithely tucked away in Newcastle, learning the chords to Pearl Jam's Go. By the time they began working on their own material, they sounded convincing enough to win an all-Australian demo-tape competition. The prize was a day in a recording studio, so they used it to rerecord their winning song, Tomorrow. It became a number one hit down under.
Most ordinary kids would gloat, but silverchair are too prudent to indulge themselves, beyond demanding that their record company take them to Magic Mountain when they're in L.A. They have no plans to leave home. ("Why?" shrugs Chris. "You're still going to have to come back to get your clothes washed.") If they make any money, they'll put it in the bank. When a radio promoter offers them a beer, they giggle, then stoically decline. They don't insult other bands. They don't trash their hotel rooms.
"Whatever you do, you always gotta pay for it," observes Daniel sagely. "You can't really get anything out of it. If you pick up the TV and chuck it out a window, then it's broken. And you don't have any TV for the rest of the night."
After hovering for a few days, I realize a funny thing about silverchair. The word they use the most often is not "dude" or "unreal." It's "normal." As in "We're just normal kids" or "Everything is just normal." Success hasn't really affected them. No one at school is jealous. Everything is exactly the same. And maybe it's true. Certainly silverchair have a better chance of keeping a handle on real life than most instant stars, because they are still going to school, playing soccer, blowing off their homework. But there is a sense that they tell it more the way they wish it still was, rather than the way it's turning out.
It makes sense, in a way, that their current idols are the hard-rocking, clean-living Helmet. And there's something reassuringly parental about Page Hamilton, who at thirty-five, is old enough to be their dad. From where they're standing, the perils of fame are all too clear, It's not just that the rock 'n' roll lifestyle can kill you, it's the fact that it can turn you from an average, well-liked guy into a poseur whom no one wants to eat lunch with. And to silverchair, who are at an age where what kids want above all is to be part of the crowd, standing out by behaving like rock stars would be the greatest sin.
"You wouldn't want to do that," says Ben soberly. "People'd hate you and they wouldn't buy your record and it'd be bad."
A week later, silverchair are playing at the Academy in New York City. The audience looks like the cast of Larry Clark's Kids. Onstage, moving briskly through their noisiest songs, silverchair display more swagger than they do in person. They slow Israel's Son down to a near halt just to get the
added emphasis when they kick-start it again. It's hokey, but the audience cheers enthusiastically. Daniel announces a new song; it has a pummeling rhythmic intensity that feels vaguely familiar. It sounds a lot like Helmet.
For the finale, Daniel throws the mike stand down a few times. Ben emerges from behind the drum kit and dives headfirst into the bass drum. He looks like a cat hopping into a Kleenex box, and I realize that this is what happens when sixteen-year-old kids are the new rock animals. They just do on stage what other kids do in their bedrooms: pretend they're in a rock band. Part of rock's appeal is that it affords people the chance to watch someone a little angrier and more charismatic than themselves spewing out their own frustration. Here, watching the workmanlike antics of silverchair, the audience seems to be staring at itself.
[NOTE: Part of the middle of this article is missing. If anyone has the complete article, please let us know.]
