MUSIC

Fastball: In harmony

Austin band reunites and finds their way years after initial big success

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, April 11, 2009

Fastball singer Tony Scalzo doesn't need to go back far to recall his band's best South by Southwest moment. You'd think the highlight would've been in March 1998, when hundreds lined up outside an already packed La Zona Rosa, hoping to hear monster radio hit "The Way" in the flesh. But that show was too nervewracking, with so much career momentum on the line.

And it didn't help that the band's co-frontmen could barely stand each other at the time.

Scalzo's favorite Fastball set at SXSW was last month at a half-empty wine bar miles from the downtown frenzy. "It was at Vino Vino (on Guadalupe Street) and our old friends from Spain were there and it just felt like a family reunion," Scalzo said of the loose, impromptu show.

Usually, a band is fresh, hopeful and all in it together early in their career, but over time they become jaded and grow apart. Fastball is doing it backwards, getting the bitter part out of the way early. The Austin power pop band, whose Beatles-influenced sound spans several radio formats, had a platinum album in 1998, just four years after forming. But tension between Scalzo, whose songs became hits, and singer/ guitarist Miles Zuniga, whose songs didn't, zapped some of the glow from the limelight.

Now, on the eve of Tuesday's release of "Little White Lies," Fastball's first album in five years, the trio of Scalzo, Zuniga and drummer Joey Shuffield, all in their early 40s, are giddy as kids who just got their first review in the local rag.

Ten years after receiving a pair of Grammy nominations, Fastball is starting over, without a label, without a road crew, in a music business landscape much changed since the days they spent $30,000 a week keeping their show on the road.

The spirited mood of "Little White Lies" is a gauge of the band's new contentment and spirit of brotherhood. Scalzo and Zuniga didn't write a single song together on the band's first three albums. But on "Little White Lies," they share songwriting credits on nine of the 12 songs.

This is a band in harmony, from the meld of vocals on such catchy new songs as "Rampart Street" and "All I Was Looking For Was You," to the way the trio interacts when they're not playing. The bristle brothers have become the hang gang.

"This is the most satisfying time I've ever had being in a band," said Scalzo who grew up in the Orange County, Calif., punk scene and moved to Austin in 1994.

Scalzo describes a quite different scenario during the band's commercial heyday, when "The Way" and "Out of My Head" were Top 20 hits.

"We played 340 shows (in 1998) and they were all crap," Scalzo said of the parade of promotional shows and opening act slots. "We'd play our 45 minutes, scatter in opposite directions, and then get wasted."

"There was just a basic lack of communication," Zuniga said of those early years. "We never thought like, 'what's best for the band?' It was always 'what's best for me?' What's best for Tony?' 'What's best for Joey?'"

Zuniga likens the band's rejuvenation to rebuilding in the aftermath of a flood. "When the tide recedes, you look to see what survived. And you go from there, seeing what you can work with," he said. What was left was mutual musical respect. "We had to step away a little and work with other people before we fully appreciated each other," said drummer Shuffield, an Austin native who now pulls double duty as the band's tour manager.

Zuniga, of Laredo, quit Fastball after the promotional tour for 2000's stylistically bloated failure "Harsh Light of the Day" and moved to Nashville to try his hand at songwriting. Shuffield quit briefly to concentrate on Young Heart Attack, a side project that found success in England. Scalzo worked on a solo project, recording demos in his home studio in a working class neighborhood near Rundberg Lane. The trio lived off royalty checks, though they were a few zeroes short of the $180,000 check Scalzo received one day after "The Way" became a top-five hit (just six months earlier he'd been working the overnight shift at the Bagel Manufactory).

A chance meeting in Nashville in 2003 got Scalzo and Zuniga writing together, which is when past differences began to be put aside. The duo became especially tight during a 2004 acoustic duo tour to reintroduce Fastball to audiences before the album "Keep Your Wig On" was released on Rykodisc. "There were just the two of us in my Acura SUV and we'd drive for hours between gigs, talking and listening to music," Scalzo recalled. Not friends before they started the band, the pair got to know each other on those long drives.

"I think getting married definitely changed Miles," said Scalzo. "And becoming a father (in 2005) made him even more grounded." A father of three children (ages 7 to 16), Scalzo remarried in December. "Being happy in our personal lives helps in our professional lives."

The sky-high expectations are long gone, but so are the big recording budgets and tour support dollars. It's a trade Fastball will take. "When I think about all the money we blew, it makes me crazy," Scalzo said.

When the band, augmented live by bassist Corey Glaeser, embarks on a monthlong national tour April 25, the expenses will come out of pocket, as did the recording sessions for "Little White Lies," which cost the band members about $25,000.

"Tony and Miles together are a rare, very talented songwriting team," said the album's co-producer C.J. Eiriksson. "They deserve far more recognition than they've received lately."

The new comeback album opens with "All I Was Looking For Was You," a love song that could also be about a band that went on a long search for what they had all along. Zuniga's voice meets Scalzo's on the chorus: "I ran my ship into the ground/ Chasin' some high and lonesome sound/ The lies I told to get me through/ Nobody knows me like you do/ All I was lookin' for was you."

Though the money's not rolling in like the old days, Fastball is happier being best friends making music together. That's them setting up their equipment on a small stage they haven't played in over 12 years. Missing their old seven-member road crew less than you'd think.

mcorcoran@statesman.com 445-3652

Fastball plays a free in-store at 5 p.m. Tuesday at Waterloo Records, 600 N. Lamar Blvd.