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The Toadies Interview
Vaden Todd Lewis. Mark Reznicek, Lisa Umbarger, Charles Mooney, Dan Lightner
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clippings provided by Charles Mooney
The Toadies early days collage
Twenty-five years ago, the biggest record in Fort Worth's rock ´n´ roll history was released — and it sat and sat and sat in record store bins, virtually untouched by anyone beyond local fans, friends, and family. Months later, though, Rubberneck, the major label debut from Fort Worth-bred punk group the Toadies, began to pick up steam. A year after its release, it was on its way to selling 500,000 copies. Two years later, it zoomed past a million — a feat unmatched by any other Fort Worth rock ´n´ roll group.
Rubberneck turned the four band members — singer Vaden Todd Lewis, bassist Lisa Umbarger, guitarist Darrel Herbert, and drummer Mark Reznicek — into bona fide superstars and, for a moment at least, helped shine a sliver of light on Fort Worth’s alt-rock music scene.
To celebrate the album’s 25th anniversary, band members past and present, record company execs, and others tied to the record spoke to Fort Worth Magazine about their memories of Rubberneck.
The Toadies came together in the late 1980s. Lewis, Umbarger, Charles Mooney, and original drummer Guy Vaughn met at the Sound Warehouse on Camp Bowie Boulevard, where they all worked.
Vaughn: Todd and I had been in a couple bands together, so we had a solid foundation. He called me one day and said he had a vision for a new band, and he wanted me, Charles, and Lisa to be part of it. When I heard the new songs, I thought, This guy has really got something.
Umbarger: I said OK before I even knew how to play, which is kind of insane. I think Todd assumed I knew how to play because I knew so much about music. So, I showed up to rehearsal, and he figured it out pretty fast and said something like, “I thought you knew more.” We started from the very beginning, and he basically taught me how to play.
Mooney: Todd and I went to a Smithereens show one night, and we had a great time hanging out. Next day, he said, “What do you think about starting a band?” I had never picked up an instrument in my life. He said, “Don’t worry; I’ll teach you,” and he did.
Umbarger: Charles will probably say Todd taught him everything, but the Toadies signature feedback, that was all Charles.
Mooney: I came up with the feedback as a way to mask the fact that I couldn’t play lead.
In its early years, the group had a difficult time holding on to drummers. A half-dozen came and went over the course of two years.
Vaughn: I played about six gigs with them, including a show with Fugazi at The Axis, which was amazing. But I’d already planned to move to Los Angeles, practically the next day. I wanted to take a crack at the big time.
Terry Valderas: I played with them for a while. But I wasn’t fully committed, and Lisa and Todd saw that, so they asked me to leave. They came over to my house to break the news, and the thing I remember most about it was my little brother’s dog got out and got into a scrap with a neighborhood cat. While the guys are telling me I’m no longer in the band, my brother’s dog and some cat are fighting — and then my brother gets attacked by the cat! It was bad, too. I think he had to have 16 stitches. But I still love those guys.
Michael Jerome: We were all a part of the Fort Worth scene, and we all hung out at The Axis. That’s where I first saw the Toadies. I was about 17 or 18. I was playing in some other bands — that's kind of my thing — and one of them was Pop Poppins. I was out of that band for a while and joined the Toadies. Pop asked me to rejoin, and they were my home, the band I’d been in since high school.
Madison Winchell: I guess I was, what, drummer number 23? I’ll tell you why I left: I don’t want to beat up on Todd, but he wanted to bring in a second guitarist. He’s such a great guitarist. But he wanted to focus on fronting the band, so he brought in Tracy Sauerwein. After that, the band didn’t sound the same. Plus, I was 18, and I thought I knew everything. I didn’t see what was around the corner.
Valderas: Look at the Wikipedia entry for the Toadies, and there’s some other guy listed as a Toadies drummer, too, Dan someone or other. I don’t know who that is.
Mooney: Dan? I don’t know who that is. Ask Lisa. She’ll know.
Umbarger: I don’t know any Dan. Ask Charles. He’ll know.
Mooney: OK, if she doesn’t know and I don’t know, then I don’t know who’ll know. This is why college students aren’t allowed to cite Wikipedia.
Valderas: All these drummers, we were the Spinal Tap of Fort Worth.
In 1991, Mark Reznicek joined; he’s been the drummer ever since.
Reznicek: Before I was in the Toadies, I was in another band with my friend, Tracy Sauerwein, and we were both let go from that group. She had been going to see the Toadies, and she kept trying to get me to go with her. I’d say, “I don’t know who they are; the name sounds dumb,” and then she joined the band.
I finally went to see them after Tracy joined. They were incredible. They were getting ready to part ways with their drummer and had already decided on someone else, but I sat in with them and got the gig.
There was also a change in guitarists. Sauerwein was fired, and longtime friend Herbert joined. Months later, Mooney left.
Mooney: I quit in April 1993. I just finished college, was getting ready to get married, and I felt some pressure from the family to get a “real job.”
Herbert: I played drums in a band called Slowpoke, and we used to gig with the Toadies. Charles and Tracy were out, so I moved into the guitar spot, which was an easy fit. It was like learning to play all your favorite songs. One rehearsal and I was ready to go.
Not long after Herbert joined, labels started taking interest in the band. A small indie label called Grass released a Toadies EP, which attracted major label interest.
Herbert: Grass pushed for a full-length album, but I knew the songs were good enough for a major. I worked the phones trying to get labels out to see us. Finally, Ray Santamaria, an Interscope A&R guy who heard the Grass EP, flew out to see us at Mad Hatters.
Santamaria: How do I articulate it? It was heavy-rock punkish music with some pop sensibilities. In the world of grunge and everything that was happening at the time, what they were doing was very unique. I remember meeting them. They were very polite and very frustrating. They were interested in a deal but wanted to do it their own way.
Herbert: Ray said that he could get some people from the label to come out if we could get a gig in LA. I pestered the only club I had heard of out there, the Whisky A Go-Go, until they booked us a show in the middle of the week. We strapped a U-Haul trailer to one of those giant land yacht sedans from the ’70s and drove all night to get there. Ted Fields, owner of the label, came to the show and signed us on the spot.
It was an incredible feeling, like winning the lottery. We drove up and down Sunset Boulevard, screaming out of the windows of the car. We got so drunk that night that we could barely stand.
The band signed in June; by September, they were making Rubberneck.
Lewis: We talked to a lot of producers but settled on Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf. They went on to do a bunch of huge records, but at the time, they had worked on this record by a band called Wool, and that record was pretty close to what I wanted, just a clean, crunchy sound.
The studio where Rubberneck was recorded was located in a remote area of Mendocino, California.
Reznicek: The studio was way up in the mountains and was in a big, long ranch-style home. We stayed in a cabin, surrounded by animals and nature and all these giant redwoods. It was an amazing experience. Just a bunch of kids recording an album on the side of a mountain.
Herbert: You had to drive an hour to buy a gallon of milk. It was out there, and if you weren’t working, there was nothing to do. The boredom was palpable. The studio gave us a bag full of weed, and it was difficult for people to get motivated after that. We played more “Street Fighter” than guitar. For someone like me, who likes to work, it was torture.
“Possum Kingdom,” the song that would eventually kick-start the band’s career on a national level, almost didn’t make it onto Rubberneck.
Umbarger: We didn’t want that song on there at all. We fought Ray, and we fought the label on it. They came back to us and said, “This song is one of the reasons why we signed you.”
Santamaria: I told them, you gotta put that on the record. I couldn’t figure out why they were fighting us so much about it.
Reznicek: It’s not that we don’t like the song. We love it. But we felt like people had already heard it. We had released it — twice, on two other projects. We were thinking, Our friends don’t want to hear this again. It never occurred to us that maybe people in North Dakota hadn’t heard it.
The album cover was a painting by local artist Dan Lightner, then an art student at the University of North Texas.
Lightner: I was working at the same Sound Warehouse where most of the band worked. Todd had used some of my work before — for the I Hope You Die cassette and the Velvet tape. After they got signed, the first thing he asked me was if I had any paintings they could use for the cover. I was actually thinking he might use another painting — this one of a woman kneeling in front of a burning house. They have some songs about fire, so I thought it’d be perfect. But he picked the one of the guy leaping.
It was inspired by the work of artist Robert Longo and his “Men in the Cities” series, as well as a 1951 serial called “Mysterious Island.”
Lewis: I don’t know much about art. I just know when I like something, honestly, and it looked like a guy stepping into nothing, which is what I felt like we were doing.
At the time, major labels were aggressively signing alt-rock bands, many of which would put out one record, then get dropped when it didn’t sell. For this reason, Lewis intentionally kept his expectations low.
Lewis: I thought, We’ll do the record, the label has to put it out contractually, they have to put us on tour contractually, and then they’ll realize we tricked them into signing us. We'd get dropped at some point, and I’d go back to working in the record store. I had already talked to my boss and told him I’d be back to work in a year or so.
Umbarger: The rest of us had both feet jumping in the deep end. We were pumped.
Rubberneck came out in August 1994, nearly a year after it was finished.
Reznicek: It came out in the middle of summer, and the label wasn’t as behind it as much as we thought they’d be. It was a huge deal at home. We had a big release party. But everywhere else, it wasn’t a big deal.
Santamaria: The record company was putting all of its resources toward acts taking off or that they felt had mass appeal. For me, it was a year of jumping up and down and screaming at them, “You have to do something with this band!”
Months passed and the record barely moved. The group toured, opening for alt-rock hot commodity Bush. Finally, a DJ in Florida heard Rubberneck and started playing nearly every track on a daily basis.
Lewis: This was back in the day when DJs could play what they wanted to play, and this guy started playing everything on the record. That started a fire, and it spread to LA and then to New York.
Before influential Los Angeles radio station KROQ would play the song — it wanted to play “Possum Kingdom” — the station required an edited version.
Reznicek: The label and the station told us it was too long.
Santamaria: It was definitely too long. I think it was a five-minute song. The guy in Florida was playing it, but for KROQ to play it, it needed to be shorter. If you could get a song on KROQ, you were set because every other alternative station in the country followed their lead. But the band wouldn't trim it.
Reznicek: They cut it themselves and didn't tell us.
Santamaria: I don't think they were that mad when they were hanging platinum albums on their wall.
In all, there were six singles from Rubberneck, helping it sell more than a cool mil.
Reznicek: We were playing with bands like Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Radiohead. We went on after Radiohead. That’s crazy!
Umbarger: Oh, yeah, and we were on MTV’s “120 Minutes.” One time, Todd and I hosted “120 Minutes.” I grew up watching MTV. That was a dream come true for me.
Fame had its price.
Herbert: I was tour managing; working the phones advancing the shows; dealing with the promoters, the label, the merch; and doing the bulk of the driving. I wore myself out, and it affected my relationship with the band. No one wants to get on stage and rock with the guy that got you up at 7 a.m. so that we could drive from El Paso to Sacramento for the 10th time.
Herbert was cut from the group and replaced by North Texas guitarist Clark Vogeler.
Umbarger: I loved Clark, but my one regret in the Toadies was seeing Darrel go and not saying something about it. We were just kinda a-- holes back then.
Interscope rejected the band’s second album, Feeler. Salvaging what they could from the Feeler sessions, they reentered the studio to record Hell Below/Stars Above, released in 2001. Shortly thereafter, Umbarger quit the group, and Lewis dissolved the band.
Umbarger: There was no label support for the record. We were playing all these tiny clubs again. It just didn’t feel right. All the things that Todd was afraid were going to happen were happening. It was a very emotional time for me. It had been such a big part of my life, but I felt like it was the right thing to do.
Five years later, Lewis reassembled the band, and it’s been active ever since. Reznicek, Vogeler, and bassist Doni Blair are the current members.
Lewis: I’ve just kept going. We’re working on album No. 7 now. It’s still fun, but fun is a changing goal for me. Fun is being able to do music for a living and have people show up and listen to it.
Jerome: I will always be super grateful for that moment I had with the Toadies. Through all the stuff that happened, they’re still my brothers and sisters — these people I knew and loved and grew up with right here in Fort Worth.
Michael Jerome plays drums for multiple acts including Richard Thompson, Better Than Ezra, and Liz Wright. Guy Vaughn is a music executive at Warner Music in Los Angeles. Darrel Herbert works in the film industry in Hollywood. Madison Winchell, Lisa Umbarger, and Charles Mooney III play in a Fort Worth-based band called SolShifter. Tracy Sauerwein died in 2004. Ray Santamaria is now a therapist in California. Dan Lightner runs a record shop in Fort Worth called Panther City Vinyl. Terry Valderas is a local drummer and DJ.
