Here's the Local H preview which ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune's Night&Day section on Thursday, June 10, 2004:
POP MUSIC
Local H gets right to the 'Soles' of the matter
By Chris Nixon
June 10, 2004
'It's 1980. Welcome to Rock 'n' Roll High School," says an announcer during the preview for the cult film, starring legendary punks the Ramones. "Rock 'n' Roll High School, the school where the students rule."
Like most 1980s party films ("Up the Creek," "Hot Dog ... the Movie"), "Rock 'n' Roll High School's" simplistic plot revolves around sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Starring actress P.J. Soles as Riff Randell, one student's love for the Ramones incites general anarchy among the student body of Vince Lombardi High School. Randell battles the evil new principal, Miss Evelyn Togar, finally blowing up the school with the help of Joey and the rest of the Ramones.
For the Chicago-based duo Local H, the fascination with Soles stems from her roles in numerous classic films from the late 1970s and early '80s: "I've seen 'Halloween' a million times," said singer Scott Lucas during a recent interview from his home in the Windy City. " 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' has always been a favorite of ours. . . . I realized: She is in all of these movies that I grew up on and have seen a million times.
"(Soles) always seemed to be around in all these movies that have been really important to me. They're not the American Film Institute's Top 100 of anything, yet they're really important to me."
With its 2004 album, "Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?," Local H ponders the fate of Soles and the fleeting nature of stardom.
Emerging from Chicago's Zion neighborhood, guitarist-singer Lucas and drummer Brian St. Clair prove the adage "less is more," discovering that the sum of two is greater than four. After creating Local H as a traditional four-piece band, Lucas had an epiphany: He could play the bottom strings of his guitar through a bass pickup, allowing him to play guitar and bass parts through one instrument.
So Local H was born as a power rock duo.
Since flirting with mainstream success in the mid-'90s (warming up for bands like Stone Temple Pilots and Veruca Salt), Lucas and St. Clair have maintained a devout underground following. Banking on the 1996 breakout single "Bound for the Floor," the press saddled Local H with the albatross moniker of "grunge."
For the past decade, the pair continued to merge post-grunge rock and catchy choruses with a tip of the cap to Nirvana, S.T.P. and Soundgarden. Despite such high-quality albums as 1998's "Pack Up the Cats" and 2002's "Here Comes the Zoo," Local H still struggles to escape the grunge tag.
"The big trick with us was trying to survive that whole mid-'90s kind of thing, just try to get out of it with our dignity intact," said Lucas.
In April, Local H released "Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?" with songs dealing with pop culture and the misconceptions fed by the retro VH-1 culture and America's numerous makeover shows. The opening track, titled "Where Are They Now?," begins with Lucas screaming You're never, you're never, you're never going to get it.
To obtain the album's roughed-up sound, Lucas felt obliged to mangle his vocal chords before each take for "Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?"
"Before we'd record a song (for the last record), I'd stand in the corner and scream my head off," says Lucas in a gravelly voice. "I'd just try and cash my voice out until it was 70 percent gone, then do the vocal. If you listen to a song like 'Halcyon Days,' my voice is almost completely gone, and that's probably my favorite vocal on the record."
Lucas finishes the thought by giving props to an unlikely source: "I think Rod Stewart is probably the best singer of all time. How does he do it? He always sounds like he's got laryngitis. It's great."
Chris Nixon is a San Diego writer.
