The
Stems & Dom Mariani
This article originally appeared in NFH #21 in
the winter of 1991.
Dom Mariani is
probably the leading 1980’s rock and roll figure from Perth in Western
Australia (some might argue for Kim Salmon of the Scientists; a tough call and two very
different approaches to music, but I’ll go with Dom myself). He first achieved
prominence via the brilliant Stems, a band that combined the best aspects of the
mid 80s garage revival with power pop. The Stems sadly broke up after releasing a
batch of great singles, a 12" ep and a great album, but Dom subsequently resurfaced
first as guitar player for the Summer Suns and then as co-mastermind of the
Someloves. We'll try to trace some of his activities in what follows.
Dom was always
listening to whatever was on the radio at a very young age, and his musical
interests got a boost when his father bought him a guitar at the age of nine. It
wasn't until he was about 14 that he got seriously interested in playing it, and
this led to a succession of garagey bands that he played in through high school.
The Stems were the first band he played in that actually left some kind of a mark. They
started in late 1983, with Dom getting together with Richard Lane with the intent
of forming a band to play 60s style music and power pop. Dom played guitar and
sang, while Richard played guitar, keyboards and harmonica and also added vocals.
They brought in Dom's old friend Gary Chambers to play drums, and after a three
month search selected a fellow named John to play bass. In early 1984 they
commenced playing live around Perth.
At the time, the
Perth scene was just coming out of a dormant period. In the late 70's there was a
period when a number of punk bands such as the Scientists and the Victims had
energized local clubs, but those days had receded into the past. But in 1984 people
were starting to go to clubs to see live bands again. The Stems played their first
gigs in a pub in the center of Perth called the Wizbah, a place where a wide
variety of bands could be seen just about every night of the week. During this time
they replaced John with Julian Matthews on bass.
Late in 1984 they
recorded three songs at Shelter Studios in Perth; "She's A Monster",
"Make You Mine" and a version of "Tears Me in Two". The original
plan was for this to be a self released single with one track as the A side and the
other two on the flip. But a friend of the bands who wanted to help manage them
told them he would take the tapes to the east coast and shop them around the indie
labels there. Quite a bit of interest was expressed by a number of labels, but the
Stems chose Citadel because of the high quality of their releases at the
time...Citadel had the great early Lime Spiders singles, Died Pretty, the New
Christs and a batch of other great records among their early releases. The
resulting single left out "Tears Me In Two", and was quite a step for
them, launching them from nearly unknown status into the company of some of
Australia's best indie bands. It's a real sixties garage masterpiece with a cool
Hammond organ sound and some hard edged guitar...far and away the roughest thing
they ever did, and probably the best as well.
Says Dom: "At
the time we were listening to a lot of the sixties garage punk stuff like the
Standells, Blues Magoos, Chocolate Watchband...all those kinds of bands, and it had
a very big influence on us, and I guess that shows on the first single. I think it
did quite well. It was kind of the right thing at the right time, you might say. At
that time, that kind of revival thing was happening everywhere. We were happening
about the same time as the Chesterfield Kings and bands like the Lyres, and it was
all starting to happen in the underground in Australia."
After this single had
been out a while the band went to Sydney in late spring of 1985 to play some gigs
and record a batch of material which turned into their second single and the Love
Will Grow mini lp. The single had a new take of "Tears Me In Two" as
the A side and a new track called "Can't Resist" on the flip. "Tears
Me In Two" is more of the same great 60s sound, from the opening scream
through the pounding, fuzzed out, ascending guitar bits, and the flip is a good
driving number, too. "It was a better production", says Dom. "We had
Rob Younger and Alan Thorne on that one, and we recorded that at the same time as
we did the Love Will Grow ep. I think we captured a kind of a dark feel on
that entire session, which was great...at Trafalgar Studio."
You'd never guess
that either the title song from Love Will Grow or "Jumping To
Conclusions" were recorded at the same session as the single...they've got a
much more jangly, poppy sound that still feels very sixties but has none of the
wild screaming garage punk sort of style that drives the singles. But "Under
Your Mushroom" and "Just Ain't Enough" fit the mold perfectly. Dom
ranks this record with the later single "At First Sight" as his favorite
Stems recordings.
This same foray to
Sydney also resulted in the first Someloves single, "It's My
Time"/"Don't Talk About Us". It came about from Dom's association with
Darryl Mather, who had previously played in the Lime Spiders on their first single.
"Darryl and I met back in 1984 when he was over with his girlfriend on a
holiday", says Dom, "and he saw the Stems play one night, and he came
backstage and we started talking, and he said he was from the Lime Spiders, and I
said "yeah, great band", and he told me he was the guy who wrote
"25th Hour" and I was very impressed. And we just started talking about
the music we like, which was garage-sixties punk. And then we started talking about
things like power pop and we found that we both liked that style of music as
well."
"That first time
that the Stems went over to Sydney I stayed in a house with Darryl as well as Bill
Gibson from the Eastern Dark, and we got to know each other quite well, and he
talked me into doing a single with him, which he booked a session for at Albert
Studios in Sydney. The night before we still hadn't come up with the songs that we
were going to record, so we were up till all hours of the morning trying to finish
off these songs that he'd written. I contributed the lyrics and some of the melody,
and that's how that came about..."It's My Time"."
The lineup for that
single also includes Stems drummer Gary Chambers and Happy Hate Me Nots bassist
Christian Houllemare. It's a great single with a much brighter and airier sound
than the Stems material to date, but still packing a good wallop with loud, fat
guitars. Classic power pop at its finest.
But the Someloves
were to go dormant for quite a while as the Stems still had a lot of mileage left
on them. As was apparent from the Love Will Grow record, their sound was in
evolution towards a more power pop style. "We wanted to go in that direction",
says Dom, "or basically it was me that was pushing it in that direction. I was
writing songs of that caliber. Very early when the Stems started we were doing songs like
"Zero Hour" by the Plimsouls and "Stomping All Over The World"
by Kimberly Rew. We were doing some power pop tunes early but we got more involved
in the sixties thing, you might say, and went through that and then came back doing
the power pop things."
Power pop is probably
one of the most difficult forms of rock and roll to make; it generally requires
higher production standards than most underground music, and most bands that try it
seem to fall flat and come across as soft, flaccid, and unconvincing. Yet at its
best, good power pop songs can stick in your head for months on end and give you a
feeling of what's really magical about rock and roll music. Trying to define
what makes good power pop is nearly as hard as making the music itself, but as Dom
has been one of the rare few that has been able to really make good power pop
records on a regular basis, there are few more qualified people to discuss this.
"That's a very
hard question to answer, but I'll try", he begins. "I think great
melody...being able to write great melodies and keep it sort of rock and roll at
the same time. But I think the thing that really tops off great power pop is great
vocals. If you listen to all the great power pop back even to like the Who and
people like the Raspberries, with Eric Carmen's voice or Peter Case from the
Plimsouls...to me, that's what makes those records is the great vocal delivery of
the song. And of course it has to be a great song. The talent to write good, catchy
melodies. I think the Beatles probably started the whole thing. Or even Buddy
Holly, I don't know."
"My all time
favorite song would have to be "Go All The Way" by the Raspberries. Songs
like "No Matter What" and "Baby Blue" by Badfinger. Great songs.
"Radio City" by Big Star, probably one of my favorite albums of all time.
Sincerely by Dwight Twilley is a great record. Two Plimsouls albums...the
first one especially, that really got me going I suppose. That was a very big
influence on me, and "Zero Hour" is a great song. Everywhere At Once
is a great lp. The dB's album Repercussions as well as the first album are
favorites of mine. Some early Cheap Trick stuff; I liked some of that. Paul
Collin's Beat, of course...that first album was a great album. There are some odd
singles here and there, too, that I may have missed out, but they'd have to be my
all time favorites, those ones I just mentioned."
The next Stems single
was quite a shock to fans weaned on their earlier records. "At First
Sight" was a smooth, jangly love song with crooning vocals and an innocent
feel that was 180 degrees away from the frenzied "She's A Monster". The
flip, "Grooviest Girl In Town", is nearly an instrumental with half the
song being an introduction, and it's still got the older feel with a keyboard
foundation, though somewhat more subdued as well. Prior to recording this one Gary
Chambers had left the band because he didn't care for the touring, and he was
replaced with David Shaw.
When the first Stems
lp came out in 1987 under the title At First Sight Violets Are Blue, it
showed a pretty wide variety of styles. Some fans were put off by the softer stuff
at first (I was one of them), but those who stuck with it for a while have probably
found that it's a record that holds up remarkably well under repeated listens, and
a lot of that is due to the variety in the material and production. Dom denies that
the lp was a total change from their previous style. "At First Sight
still has some songs in that kind of feel...songs like "Mr. Misery" and
"Move Me" and that", he says. "I think we were just writing
better songs, and that's the way we were going, I guess. I thought some of the
songs on the album were good. I wasn't really happy with the production. I think if
it was a better recording I'd probably like it a lot more."
The album probably
makes a lot more sense when Dom describes some of the bands that have meant a lot
to him...there's lots more than just those from the narrow, sixties garage punk
period. "My all time favorite band would have to be Credence Clearwater
Revival", says Dom. "They got me into playing guitar and music, and I
think I really connected with John Fogerty's vocals and songs. He just had
everything for me. Of course the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the
Yardbirds, the Who, the Kinks, some of the more poppy things like the Monkees, the
Turtles, Tommy James and the Shondells, Them, the Zombies, some of the
garage/psychedlic punk bands like the Electric Prunes, the Standells, the Remains,
Raspberries, Badfinger. I like soul a lot...Stax and Motown. James Brown, Otis
Redding, Marvin Gaye. Surf music...the Beach Boys, the Ventures. Recent bands...the
Replacements are one of my favorite bands at the moment. I heard this song by a
band called Swervedriver called "Son of A Mustang Ford" the other day
which I thought was fantastic. Pixies, Marshall Crenshaw....I've always liked
them."
"As far as
Australian bands, there's not a lot of Australian groups that I like at the moment.
I used to like the Saints. The Sunnyboys I thought were a great band. Some old
Australian bands like the Easybeats and Masters Apprentices. There's a band called
the Falling Joys that put out a record not long ago that I thought was really
good...there's a song called "Shelter". Sonic Youth. Buddy Guy, Muddy
Waters, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson. All the classic things. I have a pretty
big record collection and I have everything from Frank Sinatra right through to Led
Zepellin."
It's easy to assume
that when a musician says he likes one style of music, he does so to the exclusion
of everything else, and here is a case where such assumptions got pretty well
shattered. There's some great crunching rockers as well as some softer pop ballads
on the Stems lp, but overall it hangs together real well.
There were a couple
singles lifted from the lp, but then the band fell apart. As usual it's impossible
to get the parties involved to say anything specific about why it happened. Often
they probably don't understand themselves. Sydney's B-Side fanzine says that Dom
and Dave had some kind of disagreement, and Julian sided with Dave, so the band
split into two camps and when Dom and Richard asked Dave to leave, Julian went with
him. Dom's own explanation: "I was not very happy with the way things were
going towards the end of the Stems. We got quite big, and there are the usual
problems that happen with that. People tend to drift apart, there are internal
conflicts, egos going wild, and bad management was probably the major factor that
contributed to the Stems breakup. The Stems did their last show the last day of
August 1987, and it wasn't until about two or three weeks after that that the band
had broken up, but officially it wasn't till about November that we couldn't
resolve the problems so we decided that's it, the bands finished. And there was a
lot of bitterness there at the end of it, which has slowly gone away."
But by and large,
he's more than satisfied with what the Stems were able to accomplish. They started
with the modest goal of getting one single out and ended up being widely respected
worldwide in circles where a band of their persuasion could hope to be respected.
"I thought we still had one more album to do, but as far as what we did and
what we accomplished I think we did a lot more than we ever really intended to
do", says Dom. "We set out to record one single and maybe never get out
of Perth, but the way things went the timing was great and we just went with it,
and we ended up doing lots of singles and an album and a mini album, which is more
than we thought we'd ever do. We had a very good live reputation. That's the only
disappointment I have is that that live energy and sound was never really fully
captured on the record. I thought we could have done it on the last album that we
did, but because of certain problems we had in the studios...we had to sack the
first producer, which was Alan Thorne, and then get in someone else to rerecord a
lot of stuff. It lost a little bit of spark, but there's still some good songs on
there, I think."
While the Stems were
still going, Dom also was involved in a side project playing guitar in Kim
William's band, the Summer Suns. They played a sort of breezy power pop that's
nearly interchangeable with the later Someloves stuff. The Summer Suns involvement
continued on after the Stems broke up, and they had a nice single on Waterfront in
1989. "I enjoyed the Summer Suns for a while", says Dom. "It gave me
a chance to sort of step back a bit and just play guitar, although I did sing a few
songs in the band. It was basically just me playing guitar and playing Kim's songs.
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I wasn't ready to form another band of my own,
so it was good for me to slip back into a band and play some guitar."
After the Stems
split, Dom wasn't too sure exactly what he wanted to do next. In late 1987 he'd
recorded another Someloves single, the breezy "Know You Now", with the
same lineup that had done the first one, and this had come out in 1988. Through the
rest of 1988 Darryl Mather kept in touch with him and kept talking about how he
wanted to do a Someloves album. He had written a batch of songs, and Dom also had a
few he'd been working on, and eventually they decided they should go ahead and do
it. Christian Houllemare and Gary Chambers were occupied elsewhere, so a new
drummer and bass player were hired on for the studio work. Their choice for
producer was Mitch Easter, the fellow who's produced some of the REM lps and also
is the leader of Let's Active, a sort of pleasant pop group from Georgia in the
US. Darryl got Mitch's address from an Aussie fanzine called Shakin' Street and
wrote him a letter saying how he'd enjoyed his records and asking him if he was
interested in producing something that the Someloves had done, and Easter wrote
back saying yeah, he'd be very interested. He ended up mixing the lp as well and
playing on a bunch of the tracks, along with several friends.
Dom is a big fan of
Easter's. "Very much so; I like some of the things he's done, for sure. I like
his band Let's Active...especially the Cypress record. There's a song on
there called "Water's Part", which I think is fantastic. For the record
that we made, Something Or Other, that's the way we wanted to go. Very much
a sort of jangle pop sound. He's very good to work with...he's an incredible musician and
has a great feel for rock and roll I think as well."
The Stems records and
also the first Someloves single were considerably tougher than Let's Active has
ever been even though they were obviously pure pop records (at least the later
Stems were). So it seemed like a bit of a switch in direction to go towards a
softer sound like that, and I wondered if Dom's tastes were becoming less rocking
and more poppy. "I like the sound to be rocking and poppy at the same time, I
guess", he replied. "That's the perfect combination for me. I know Something
Or Other is a fairly smooth record, but I guess at the time we were looking for
that kind of perfect kind of pop record, you might say. Darryl and I had never
played live together, and I guess that was one drawback on why the album turned out
the way it did, because we went into the studio and layered most things, and really
didn't have a band to go in there and put it down fairly live, which is what we
used to do with the Stems. But definitely we'll be returning back to that type of
feel, because that's where I want to go...more of a tougher approach on the next
record. Although I'm very happy with the way the last record came out as well."
The Something Or
Other lp is a beautiful slab of power pop. It sounds best when played really
loud...the production is pretty lush in places, but they've remembered that it's
guitars that make great rock and roll, and they've avoided the usual pop trap of
mixing the vocals too loud with respect to the instruments. The result is a record
with both pop and punch.
The change Dom has
gone through from the early Stems to the Someloves has to some extent coincided
with a trend for the top mid-eighties garage outfits like the Cynics, the Miracle
Workers or the Chesterfield Kings to move away from a blatantly sixties sound and
veer off in a fairly different direction. These days, large scale changes in sound
aren't frequent occurrences for most bands; the general approach seems to be find
something you can do well and keep doing it. I asked if Dom had any explanation for
this.
"That's a hard
question", he begins. "I can't really speak for the other bands, but as
far as the Stems are concerned, we did sort of move away from the blatantly sixties
garage punk sound...back then we were very much into the sort of Pebbles and
Nuggets and Yardbirds and Rolling Stones and stuff like that, and we moved more
into a power pop direction; that's basically the way I wanted to go, being heavily
into that sort of music myself. I thought it wasn't a very big departure from what
we were doing; I thought moving from the garage punk thing to the power pop thing
was just a natural progression like bands in the 60s like the Who did. When they
first started out they were very much r'n'b, even the Rolling Stones and the Beatles,
and they developed into more pop bands. When the Stems first started and we started
to happen, we were regarded as a very hip thing around that time. The same thing
was happening all around the world; that sixties retro thing was hip everywhere.
And after a year or two of doing that we were copping flak about how we were a
revivalist band doing sixties things; it was just a fad you know, and like all fads
they come in and go out, and we tried to move away from it a little bit, although
we still are very close to that kind of music."
There still isn't
exactly a real Someloves band at this point, but Dom is sounding more like he's
starting to consider punting his draftsman job for a while and playing more
seriously; at any rate the records are starting to come more steadily...three
Someloves 45s and an lp in the last year and Darryl and he are starting to talk
about working on a new album. As for becoming a real touring band...
"Well, that's
hard to say at this stage...we're still deciding on that. At the moment we're
thinking about doing a second album, so there may be something after that. We may
do a live tour or something, but at this stage nothing has really been talked about
seriously."
Postscript: In
the winter of 1991 I had the chance to meet Dom in Perth and he invited me to rehearsal;
he’d put together a band called Orange that was playing around Perth doing a set
consisting largely of Someloves material. Although Orange weren't playing any shows while
I was there, word was that in gigs they'd been considerably more rocking than the lp. They
were a four piece with two guitars; Dom and Velo Zupanovich with a guy named Tony on bass
and former Summer Suns drummer Martin Moon. Moon was a character; a very flashy, very fast
player with a Who T-shirt to drive home the connection that his name immediately inspires.
Anyway, in rehearsal they concentrated on working on some new songs; all of them were in
the power pop mode that Dom has been working since the latter days of the Stems, but there
was a real snappy feel to the way Orange played them, primarily due to the added punch
provided by the rhythm section. A record by Orange would’ve been a treat.
In 1994, Dom
resurfaced with yet another new band, this one called the DM3. They’ve released a
batch of CD singles and a couple of full length CDs that are about the best things Dom has
ever done...really hard hitting power pop that’s punchier than the Someloves but more
melodic than the Stems. It’s refreshing to see that the man still has the magic after
almost 15 years of working at music.
