Skip to content

Breaking News

Author
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:

Even in the grunge era, when record executives were throwing big money at every heavy rock band that sort of reminded them of Nirvana, Helmet’s early years were a blur. Singer, guitarist and jazz fanatic Page Hamilton formed the band in 1989; Helmet’s first album “Strap It On” came out two years later; the band sold out shows and hit the radio; Interscope Records signed Helmet for $1 million in 1992 and put out the “Meantime” album, which, despite its punishing guitars, managed hit singles and heavy MTV rotation.

“Too fast? I don’t know. Things happen as they happen,” Hamilton recalls, by phone from Washington, D.C. “We were seeing this huge expansion of our audience, and it’s cool.”

But in the early ’90s, Helmet’s money and business zoomed forward perhaps more quickly than the quartet’s collective maturity level — within five years of “Meantime,” Hamilton and bandmates Henry Bogdan, Peter Mengede and John Stanier had broken up.

“We were never a business-minded band, and the business did create a strain on the band,” continues Hamilton, 54. “When there are a bunch of people around the band, if there’s a bandleader, and it’s less ‘all for one, one for all’ … your bandmates start to (say), ‘He gets more attention than we do, he’s the singer and writer.’ It’s human nature. Ego comes into play. Their roles become more defined, and that’s not always easy.”

“Meantime” was such a straightforward rock album that MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head responded to the “Unsung” video with a boisterous “dah-dah-DAH,” adding, “If you, like, saw these guys on the street, you wouldn’t even know that they’re cool.” But Helmet changed the formula for 1994’s “Betty,” eliminating much of the melody from the “Meantime” singles in favor of more droning, metallic tracks such as “Milquetoast.” An Interscope employee made the mistake of asking Hamilton where the new “Unsung” was.

“People were expecting ‘Meantime, Part 2’ when this came out,” Hamilton says of the “Betty” reception nearly 21 years ago. “There’s no need to write a song again, or the ‘Meantime’ album again. The fact that ‘Betty’ wasn’t a gold record, and ‘Meantime’ was, doesn’t mean that it’s not a great record. Because I like the record a lot.”

Although its cover is subversively bright and shiny — a benign blonde woman smiling while caressing a flower in a pink basket — “Betty” is Helmet at its most uncompromisingly aggressive. The drums sound like cannons, the guitars follow in lockstep, and Hamilton hollers surrealistic lyrics about demons, skin flakes and cellulite. In “I Know,” he sings: “Feed the dog / slop the hog/shine the Baptist and debark the log.”

Many Helmet enthusiasts regard “Betty” as the band’s landmark album — Rolling Stone recently said it “continued the band’s riff-as-power tool aesthetic, while also expanding upon it.” Hamilton clearly agrees with this sentiment. More than a decade after Hamilton reformed the band with a rotating group of new musicians, Helmet is playing “Betty” in concert from beginning to end. “It well holds up, obviously,” he says. “It’s really fun to play live, and we’ve done it now about 50 times, I guess. The challenging songs are still fairly challenging. I feel more comfortable now than I did.

“I’ve never been more proud of the band than I am now,” he adds of the current lineup, with guitarist Dan Beeman, bassist Dave Case and drummer Kyle Stevenson. “In New York City, people who’ve been seeing the band for the first time in 26 years were s——- their pants. It’s incredibly groove-y and swings hard and it’s tight. … I feel completely vindicated — we sold out the three New York shows in 45 minutes.”

Hamilton grew up in Medford, Ore., and played in a new-wave cover band called Twist and the Ups while attending nearby Lane Community College. Later, he began to write avant-garde, jazz-inspired music while learning about pianist Thelonious Monk and saxophonist John Coltrane. In grad school at New York’s Manhattan School of Music, he met his early bandmates and they began to put the pieces together for “Strap It On.”

Hamilton’s jazz obsession remains. He spends nearly half of a 30-minute interview gleefully talking Bird, Trane and Monk, referring at one point to the “series of 2-5-1s in the ‘A’ section” of the great jazz pianist’s “Ask Me Now.” His favorite Monk song is “Blue Monk,” although “you can’t pick one bummer in the whole lot of what he did.”

But despite the surprising complexity of Helmet’s music — it sounds easy to play but frequently contains strange chords, unexpected recurring rhythm patterns and bits of blues and funk — Hamilton tries not to drown the band with his jazz training. “I’m not trying to create some kind of eclectic genre where I throw everything in the kitchen sink and show everybody what I know or don’t know,” he says. “Helmet is Helmet.”

onthetown@tribune.com

Twitter @chitribent

When: 8:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Double Door, 1551 N. Damen Ave.

Tickets: Sold out; 773-489-3160 or doubledoor.com