Fastball's New Way

After harsh lesson in the fickleness of fame, Austin rockers try again with a solid album that comes out today

"Show business is a bit like guys that say, 'You know, that hooker really likes me.' "- Jay Leno, as quoted in "The Late Shift," by Bill Carter

There's almost nobody at Guero's at 11 a.m. on a Friday. This isn't really a "rock star" hour, but then, Tony Scalzo isn't really a rock star anymore.

The hour is, however, prime time if you're a 2-year-old, and Scalzo, Fastball's 40-year-old bass player and co-songwriter, has brought his toddler son, Gabe, out for an early lunch. Gabe doesn't seem to have much of an opinion about fame, but his dad knows where Leno is coming from. Boy, does he know.

To newly minted Austinites -- or those who don't follow the ins and outs of pop music -- "Fastball" might sound vaguely familiar. It might have taken up residence in the same neighborhood of your brain -- "Radio Hits of 1998, population: Hot 100" -- as "Paula Cole" or "Natalie Imbruglia."

But that's just part of a much longer, more complicated tale, the latest chapter of which begins today as Fastball's fifth album, "Keep Your Wig On" (Rykodisc), appears in stores. It's the band's first album for a big-time independent label, and it's a sharply written, loose collection that harks back to Fastball's salad days but reminds you these are veteran tunesmiths at work.

Fastball -- Scalzo, guitarist and co-songwriter Miles Zuniga and drummer Joey Shuffield -- fell together in 1994. Zuniga and Shuffield had played together before, but Scalzo was the new guy in town, a Marine brat who took to music early and spent his adolescence in California. "I recently saw pictures of myself at 14, playing a Fourth of July party," Scalzo says. "I looked just like my 11-year-old daughter, tiny fingers on this huge bass."

After years of struggling out west in bands that went nowhere, he moved to Austin in 1993 to play with Beaver Nelson. That didn't work out, but Scalzo found the environment to his liking. "I made nothing on music before I came here," he says, "In Austin, immediately, it was, play a show, here's your $40. I was like (in a Homer Simpson voice), 'Whoo-HOO!.' "

Scalzo started playing with Shuffield, who soon introduced him to Zuniga.

"It moved very fast," Scalzo recalls. "Miles comes over to my house. He plays some songs, I play some songs. Then it was T-shirts, fliers, demo, 7 (inch single)". That's how quick everything went."

After inking a deal with Hollywood and touring with Matthew Sweet, Fastball put out an album on Hollywood called "Make Your Mama Proud" in 1996. It sold about a thousand copies. By all rights, the band should have been dropped.

Instead, by the end of 1998, Fastball was on its way to selling 1.25 million copies of "All The Pain Money Can Buy," largely on the back of the Scalzo-written hit single "The Way," a rhumba-flavored tune based on an American-Statesman story about an elderly couple that mysteriously vanished.

From about a thousand to 1.25 million. That can mess you up.

For the next two years, rock star debauchery ensued. Scalzo can list the clichés off the top of his head. "Too cool for school, hotel suites, first class, wine addiction, overpriced meals, taking a lot of stuff for granted, have to have a tour bus, big crew, monitor mixer, all of that."

But "all of that" came to a crashing halt in 2000, when the follow-up album, the unfortunately well-named "The Harsh Light of Day," tanked. Didn't even go gold. By 2001, the band was no longer active.

A fast rise and fall

"All roads lead to 'Spinal Tap,' " Miles Zuniga says, looking down at his coffee.

Zuniga's a font of little insights like this, even though he looks like he just rolled out of bed. He's wearing sunglasses indoors, rock star style. But we're sitting at Quackenbush's, which is not a very rock star place. But then, Zuniga's not a rock star anymore.

Zuniga is from Laredo, second youngest of 10 kids. While he doesn't recall getting picked on much at home -- most of his siblings are girls -- he remembers Laredo being a pretty tough place to grow up. "I certainly got picked on at school," he recalls, "and music was an escape hatch."

(Shuffield, a 42-year-old who has been playing in Austin bands since the '80s, is currently on tour with up-and-coming hard rockers Young Heart Attack, which also included Scalzo for a time. Shuffield returns to Austin next Tuesday, so drummer Kevin Pierson will fill in during Fastball's record release show at the Parish on Friday.)

Zuniga recalls his time at the top the same way Scalzo does, and agrees "Harsh Light of Day" was a tough album to make. "The Way" was an accident, and you can't replicate an accident. "It's hard to recapture that innocence," Zuniga says. "We thought we were gonna get dropped after our first album did so poorly.

"Operating under 'I'm gonna get fired from my job,' " Zuniga says, is the kind of thing that'll cause a band to stumble into a left-field hit. "As opposed to, 'You're the golden boy! Do it again!'

"How am I gonna do that? I don't know how we did it the first time." He shakes his head. "Plus we were hung over."

Don't get him wrong. Having a hit album is great. "Everyone's greed and self-interest and the cutthroat nature of the music business was, for once, working in our favor," Zuniga says.

But as he puts it, "those who live by the radio hit, die by the radio hit." And Fastball all but died. After "Harsh Light" cratered, Zuniga split for Nashville to try his hand at country songwriting.

"I thought, "wouldn't it be great to lay around the house and have someone else tour and I get the check in the mail? That would be amazing.'" But he soon found he wasn't quite cut out for contemporary country radio. "If I had listened to country radio, I probably wouldn't have left the garage."

But Zuniga did learn to collaborate and collaborate fast. "I developed my songwriting to the point that I could write a song in three hours with a complete stranger if I had to," Zuniga says. "I started asking myself, 'If I could do this with all these different people, why couldn't I do this with Tony?' "

Band bonding

Even when Fastball was at the height of its fame, Zuniga and Scalzo weren't really pals.

"We never had time to become good friends before we had a hit," Zuniga says, "I thought that was the biggest weak spot in the band. Some bands can hate each other. But it's not good for your small intestine."

But then Scalzo started visiting him in Nashville, and, for the first time, they started writing together. Both men hope their newfound spirit of collaboration will end Fastball's rep as a one-hit, one-songwriter band.

"People would say things to me like, 'You're the real reason that Fastball is whatever,' " Scalzo says. "There's no way that anybody can say that if this thing does well."

Soon after, Scalzo and Zuniga went on tour together, just the two of them, to remind the public who they were and, honestly, to get to know each other better.

There were hurdles to overcome. Zuniga says there was more jealousy in him than he had thought. "When we started this band, I thought we were going to be playing my songs," he says. "Then it was my and Tony's songs, then he ended up writing the hits." (Scalzo's "Out of My Head," also from "All the Pain ...." gained some radio spins as well.)

And Scalzo admits that, like many oldest siblings, he would often fall back on a "you're just a kid" posture when arguing with Zuniga (there's only two years between them).

"I'm way more mature now," Scalzo says of the trip. "I've learned to compromise, I don't take things as personally anymore. "

Zuniga says they learned that they actually need each other. "I really do think there's something special about us singing together. People get excited when it's the two of us."

The result of all this late-blooming camaraderie is "Keep Your Wig On," which has the easy feel that "The Harsh Light of Day" couldn't buy. "Airstream," a quasi-country tune, is getting a spin or two at AAA radio. Mellow pop songs like "I Get High," "Falling Upstairs" and "Mercenary Girl" also sound radio-friendly, as does the peppier "Drifting Away." And moments like the seat-of-the-pants guitar solo on " 'Til I Get it Right" are refreshingly less slick than what you can find on the band's Hollywood albums.

Is there a hit? Does it matter? Not even Fastball is sure. Ryko doesn't have the resources to push this album down anyone's throat, so growth will have to happen organically, the way it should have the last time around.

Zuniga takes off his glasses. "It all happened so fast. In hindsight, it would have been better to go from selling 1,000 copies to 100,000 copies to having a gold record," he says. "That gives you a little time to get used to it. But from nothing to 1.25 million ...

"You get a lot of daytrippers that way, people who just consume music the way they consume gum or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that, and you make a lot of money, but they're not necessarily gonna buy your next record, or come to your show, or really care about you beyond those three minutes."