DIRTY LOOKS

DIRTY LOOKS

Now And Dane

Kate Batisa

The worst gig that Dirty Looks frontman Henrik Ostergaard can remember doing began with a lobster dinner.

“It was the first time the promoter had ever done a show, Ostergaard recalls with a smirk, lolling on a staircase backstage before a gig at L.A.’s Whiskey A-Go-Go. “And he really didn’t know what he was doing. He knew he had to feed us, so he gave us lobster dinners and stuff. The problem was that he really didn’t know anything about advertising, so there were only about two hundred people in this huge building. I’d much rather have skipped the food and had the people there.”

Worrying about crowd numbers may soon become a part of Ostergaard’s past. Though the band’s major-label debut Cool From The Wire is making a mark on the hard rock world, it hasn’t exactly been an overnight success.

Ostergaard, who spent his childhood in Denmark, founded Dirty Looks in San Francisco a couple of years back. Using a constantly rotating group of personnel (he claims it wasn’t because he’s difficult to get along with; his current bandmates Jack Pyers, Paul Lindel and Gene Barnett agree), the combo soon found an audience on the northwestern American and western Canadian club circuit and recorded a lone independent LP before having a falling-out with the label's owner.

“I had signed a three-year contract,” says Ostergaard, “but rapidly discovered that we had very different ideas about what the music should be. The record did okay—it was available on Warner Brothers overseas—but this guy and I did not see eye-to-eye. At all. I was only 18 and didn’t really know any better—I told him he could take everything and ram it. Naturally, he proceeded to sue me, and I couldn’t use the name Dirty Looks anymore.”

Ah, yes, the name. According to Ostergaard, it is not borrowed from the song by labelmates AC/DC.

“Actually, we were either going to be named Dirty Looks or Desilu—you know, the production company that made / Love Lucy. I’m a big Lucy fan. But the other guys in the band wanted it to sound heavier so here we are. It had nothing to do with AC/DC” (Good choice; Desilu does sound more than a tad like a bubblegum or country band).

And while those of us who listen to records for a living will swear on a stack o’ vinyl that Cool From The Wire’s riffs are distinctly AC/DC-like, Ostergaard disagrees.

“I listen to Jeff Beck, old Mountain records, Led Zeppelin, a lot of stuff besides AC/DC. It's really funny, because our previous stuff doesn’t sound anything like them. And I think there’s only one or two songs on this record that sound like them. It’s just no-frills hard rock.”

Be that as it may, none of it would exist at all had Ostergaard not travelled east to visit his mother after finally regaining the use of the Dirty Looks logo. Not surprisingly, he spent more time checking out the local club action than hanging with his mom, and along the way a mutual friend introduced him to bassist Jack Pyers.

“Jack was in another band at the time, but I liked his style of playing,” Ostergaard says, as a roadie hands him a driver’s license a groupie left in his room the night before. Ostergaard blushes slightly and continues. “So I told him to blow off the band he was in. At the time, I had another record deal going with another independent label.”

As it turns out, that record came out before Dirty Looks was anything but a studio concept. The album, In Your Face, was recorded by the trio of Henrik, Jack and a studio drummer. It was, Ostergaard concedes, kind of a dumb situation.

“After the record was done, we figured we better have a live band together to support the record. So we hunted down musicians. We went through a couple of drummers and guitarists.”

Finally they settled on guitarist Paul Lindel and drummer Gene Barnett, and hit the east coast club circuit to polish their chops and pay the rent. The record sold quite decently in Europe, but it was a paragraph in a music-industry trade mag that won the band a deal with an American major. As it turns out, the notice came not a moment too soon.

“When we started Dirty Looks,” muses Henrik, “we sort of gave ourselves a time limit. If nothing had happened by then, we were going to call it a day. I kind of wanted to get back to California—I hate the snow. But two weeks before that deadline, we got a write-up in Billboard under their ‘recommended pick hit.’ The next day seven labels called our label about us.”

After deciding upon Atlantic, Dirty Looks entered the recording studio, where they remained (except for a few forays out in the world to play and thereby maintain their fragile link with sanity) until the record was finished several months later. From there it was onto the video set, back into the studio for two weeks of rehearsal and then out on the road. And that’s okay with Dirty Looks. It’s been a killer of a schedule.

“Every two or three weeks we crack,” admits Ostergaard. “Then we get thrown out of a hotel or something. We’ve punched each other out once or twice.”

And if it gets too bad and someone throws a particularly lucky punch, not to worry, Dirty Looks already have their epitaph written.

“I want people to think of us,” says Ostergaard,” and say, ‘Yeah, they had balls. They played real rock and roll.’ ” You read it here first.