Going Indie & 10 years later (interviews)
Hanson: 10 years after "With its teen idol years long past, band of brothers is quietly evolving"... BY Brian McCollum FREE PRESS POP MUSIC WRITER
The last time Zac Hanson talked with the Free Press, you could practically hear him wiggling impatiently on the other end of the phone.
That's no surprise: One decade ago, Zac was 12 years old. And he was happy to hand the line over to his older brother Isaac to finish the interview ahead of his band's first Detroit concert.
Pop superstardom was a bright, fast flash for the blond band Hanson: two years in the eye of the storm, led by the contagious single "MMMBop" and all the resulting teen-idol glory -- shrieking girls, magazine covers, platinum sales plaques.
Zac, now a husband and father-to-be, laughs warmly when reminded of the long-ago chat, conducted before the trio's June 1998 show at Pine Knob.
"When was the last time you saw a 12-year-old who could sit down and have a long conversation with somebody?" he says. "But I look at it as a good thing, to have been a band as long we have, to be only 22 and be able to say, 'Hey, I talked to you 10 years ago!' "
The fidgety kid drummer has matured into a thoughtful adult musician with a solid grasp of the big picture. He and his brothers made it through the fire intact, seemingly healthy and free of the tabloid drama that so often plagues grown-up kid stars.
If you get your music from pop radio, Hanson disappeared years ago, supplanted by the latest hot new things. But for die-hard fans -- and there are more of them than you might realize -- the band never went anywhere. A series of independent albums, including last year's "The Walk," has seen the threesome digging ever deeper into the vintage rock and soul influences that lurked in earlier hits.
The group's Saturday show at the Royal Oak Music Theatre sold out in minutes when tickets went on sale in February.
The long haul
The idea of endurance was valued by the Hansons even amid the mania of '98, when the precocious brothers sagely referenced the careers of bands like the Beatles. Every artist "hopes that people will continue to enjoy their music and that they can take their audience with them to other places," 17-year-old Isaac told the Free Press at the time.
Zac says there was no specific career blueprint for the brothers, including Taylor, then 15. But they were smart enough to know that pop fads don't last forever.
"We were aware of where we wanted to be. It hasn't been necessarily the exact way we thought we'd get here. But we have our label; we have a fan base where we can tour and release records, a passionate group of people who are part of an underbelly culture of this band," he says. "That's where we wanted to be, and that's where we want to continue to be -- still putting out music that's accessible, but music that's quality, the best you can possibly do."
The brothers have come to see themselves in the mold of a 1970s pop-rock band, the sort of outfit that once regularly roamed the mainstream.
"That was a time when you saw bands that still had harmonies, had multiple vocalists. They did rock 'n' roll music but had backbeats," says Zac. "I don't think there are a lot of bands like that anymore. The Doobie Brothers of today isn't around. We've evolved our love of '50s and '60s music and incorporated the influences, in the same way those bands did."
A variety of fans make up Hanson's audience today, says Zac. Some supporters never abandoned the group. Others set it aside as they grew out of adolescence only to later rediscover the band.
He particularly likes meeting musicians who credit him as an influence, like many of the players he encountered during last month's South by Southwest festival.
"Now they're 18 or 20, and they're like: 'Yeah, dude, I grew up listening to your music. My sister had it. And I started a band playing drums to you!' "
A trend is born
It's easy to forget how much different -- and older -- the Billboard charts looked in 1997, when the Hanson brothers emerged from Tulsa, Okla., with a set of catchy songs they'd cowritten. A decade of Britney, Christina, Justin and others has made teen-pop dominance seem like a given.
The Hansons certainly weren't history's first Top 40 teen idols. But they were the first of the millennium teen-pop wave that has become one of today's most familiar features. Bolstered by the biggest youth population in U.S. history -- the baby boomers' kids -- Hanson led a trend that continues with acts such as Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers.
"It was like there was this whole generation of people -- who happened to be our peers -- and they were just being completely neglected by the music and the culture," says Zac. "There was nothing that represented them in a way that was compelling to them. It wasn't that we were the shining stars. But we came out, and we were the young guys, a band who were their peers. And they grasped onto that."
Zac is quick to point out, however, that although Hanson and those other teen acts may be part of the same cultural phenomenon, they're not necessarily musical peers. He has long bristled at critics who lump his group in with the bubblegum dance-pop that followed. 'N Sync may have been dubbed a "boy band," but it was Hanson -- armed with long hair, plaid clothes and instrumental chops -- that fit the traditional notion of the term.
"I wouldn't want to take credit for so much of the terrible music that was part of the huge marketing machine that came after us," he says. "We don't like being put in that group because it's not really related. It would be like putting Metallica on the next Hilary Duff tour. Even if Hilary Duff were wearing a torn black T-shirt and chained handcuffs."
Ten years after a tour that found the brothers stealthily adjusting song keys to accommodate their changing voices, Hanson is comfortable in its own skin. The trio has grown up, says Zac -- even if the personalities once sketched out in gushing Teen Beat profiles still hold true.
"As you become older, get married and have kids, you evolve and change," he says. "Your skills and role in the band become more developed. But I think the core of who we are is still there: Isaac has always been the big idea man, kind of this dreamer. Taylor has always been more of an executor. I've always been more of the practical person. We're still us."
That merry band of brothers named Hanson, the one that created the so-catchy-it's-contagious teen-pop confection "MMMBop" and sold millions of records a decade ago, has gone indie.
The term "indie" connotes music that's too peculiar or innovative to reach the masses. That doesn't describe Hanson, whose latest album, "The Walk," has the same soulful pop-rock you'd expect from the trio that inspired so many comparisons to The Jackson 5 in its "MMMBop-ing" heyday.
Hanson, performing Wednesday at Higher Ground, has gone indie only in the business sense. They left Island/Def Jam Records four years ago, taking the album they recorded for the label, "Underneath," to their own independent label.
"Then you come to 'The Walk,' and 'The Walk' is the further extension of that," said Isaac Hanson, the band's guitarist and, at 27, its oldest member. "This is really the first record we've done from scratch as an indie. It's allowed us to approach making a record from what we feel like is the right place -- who is this band, what is the best version of a record we can do, and let's do it."
Speaking by phone last week from New York City, Hanson said the independent streak that runs through him and his brothers Taylor and Zac has been there from the start.
"We've always tried to think of things long-term, even from the early days," Isaac Hanson said. "There are a lot of things that we could have potentially done that might have made us money. We could have made dolls or lunch boxes or these kinds of things, and we might have sold a lot of those, but we felt like we wouldn't have been able to sleep at night or live with ourselves if we were doing things that we thought for right now could work. We thought, 'We might be young now, but we won't be young forever.' We had to approach it from what will we be proud of 10 years from now?"
Hanson said the band is proud of its music, not just now but of the music the three boys made all those years ago.
"Here's a huge advantage for us: We were the songwriters at the beginning, so we always felt very secure in what we were doing musically," he said. "Our biggest challenge was ultimately a misunderstanding of us in a more superficial way, on an 'image.' People would be like, 'They're so squeaky clean' and I'm thinking, 'We're Midwestern kids and our drummer's 11. If our drummer's strung out on drugs or a complete ass, that wouldn't have really worked.' It's kind of this funny juxtaposition where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
"Those early days have gotten us to where we are," according to Isaac Hanson, "and because we were writing those songs I've never felt like anything we were musically in the past is contradictory to who we are today." If you go: Hanson with Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers and Kate Voegele, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Higher Ground Ballroom, South Burlington. $27 in advance, $30 day of show. 652-0777, www.highergroundmusic.com.