June 2004, Culture Room, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Sometimes an album hits you in a certain way, captures you even though it may not be something you would normally gravitate to. My daughter listens to the Katy Perry and Taylor Swift music of the world, and I’ll admit to singing along to some of their songs. I have, and always will, be a sucker for pop music.
Rooney was an OC band, one of those too-cool-for-school, California bands you would hear on that vapid television show (the fact that some of the people from it are still popular is beyond me). But I heard “Blueside” in passing, and loved it right away. When I got hold of the album, which I read later was forged through much struggle, I took right to it. It shared a musical sensibility with some of the bands of the day — Grandaddy, The Donnas, OK-Go — but was a bit more mainstream than the others.
The lead singer, Robert Schwartzman, was part of a family considered Hollywood royalty. His mother is Talia Shire (of Godfather and Rocky fame), his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola and his cousins include Nicolas Cage, Sofia Coppola and Roman Coppola. His brother Jason was the former drummer of Phantom Planet. There seemed little doubt the band was going to be huge.
And touring through the country on that first album, the band had its day in the sun. I saw them at the Culture Room, where I would also see Snow Patrol, The Sounds, Something Corporate, and they were fun and lively and maybe a little frayed. At this point, playing the same 11 or 12 sings, you could tell the band was ready to move on to new material. Schwartzman even made mention of a new album in the works that could be out soon (it would not come until 2007, the band was never to find the same popularity again).
But hearing those songs — “Losing All Control,” “Popstars,” “Blueside,” “If It Were Up To Me” and the breakout hit “I’m Shakin’ ” — the band clearly had something. Here’s my thought about bands like Rooney: I know they wish to mount a huge career built from the successful start, but when it doesn’t happen, I hope they don’t think it’s all for naught. Making one album, hell one song, that brings happiness is achievement enough. Years ago I talked to Ned Brower, the band’s drummer, who was promoting the band’s album Eureka, which it released itself in 2011. He had to say this:
“We made plenty of mistakes we try and learn from them the thing that’s really hard is to make sure you have a good team around you. You really have to be self-reliant. At the end of the day people only care as much as you do about all this stuff and the details. You know we’ve been with these huge companies that have this huge overhead, but none of that matters.”
The music is what matters, I’m happy to know they know that.
