Posted at 03:52 p.m. PST; Sunday, November 1, 1998

Erik Lacitis / Times Staff Columnist

Rock dreams, rock reality

This story happens to be about a couple of local rock groups from a while back, about rock dreams and rock reality. This all happened back in the early '80s, a long time and a bunch of trends ago.

Every local band, and its fans, whether then or now, has the same dream. On sweaty nights on a dance floor, closing the joint at 2 in the morning, you know this band is soon to be famous.

It happens, but most of the time the reality is quite different. The reality is that most local bands stay local. The reality is that you can't make house mortgage payments on what a band member makes playing the bars, even if the band has a huge following. Two-hundred-fifty dollars a week. Those were the earnings back then for Ian Fisher.

Back in the '80s, here in Seattle, there were two popular bands.

One group was the Heats, the other the Cowboys. That era now being a Time-Life infomercial, perhaps a few words from a music magazine will put their work in perspective.

Maybe in a basement box you have the vinyl LP that the Heats released in 1980. You own, according to Goldmine magazine, a publication for oldies collectors, one of the "50 essential U.S. power pop albums."

I can tell you they were good because I was there. Listen for yourself, however. Stop by a Tower Records, which carries the two CDs of their reissued material (The Heats',"Smoke," and The Cowboys', "Jet City Rockers"), a labor of love by a small Seattle label, Chuckie-Boy Records.

The Cowboys were a wonderful band to watch live at a club like Astor Park, now long gone from downtown Seattle. Straight-ahead rock 'n' roll, a mixture of punk and New Wave, was their specialty. They had chosen their name, they said, because they believed cowboys to be the original rock stars. Cowboys went on tours, liked to drink and have a good time, liked women, had a code of ethics and minded their own business.

The Cowboys, and the Heats, were a dramatic change in the local club business. They didn't play Led Zeppelin covers, but insisted on playing their own music. The club owners had to relent because they found their joints packed with fans.

Ian Fisher was wild on stage, jumping and doing acrobatics, obviously having watched old footage of Elvis, losing five pounds of weight a night. It was wild after the shows, too, always a party to go to, a young woman to meet.

I sit and visit with Ian Fisher and he tells me about his life now. Sometimes, Fisher still sings with a friends. Mostly, he doesn't. Some photos and memories from those days he keeps in a box. The large portion of the newspaper stories about the group, pictures and even master tapes ended up in the garbage. Fisher had stored the material with a friend, who moved, and the landlord threw it all away.

Fisher hands me some writing he's done about how it was for him in the '80s. He always used to write in a stream-of-consciousness. He still does:

"Young people came out in droves, wearing New Wave gear from head to toe, shoes man, the chicks wore the sexiest shoes back then, the hair, the asymmetric cuts, big hair, colored hair, bleached, waxed, sprayed, buttons and belts and zippers, a lot of zipper clothes, black checked shirts, thin lapeled jackets, skin tight skirts, pants you had to paint on to wear them, yuppies, dudes, punkers, wannabees, divorcees, coke dealers everywhere, man it was insane, and the whole thing rolled and rolled 'til finally the wheels fell off and a lot of the bands and fans crawled back home exhausted, some of them realized they had husbands and wives and kids and jobs . . ."

The final version of the Cowboys, having gone through various band members, but always with Ian as the lead singer, broke up in 1986 after a year's hiatus.

The ride had lasted six years.

"I gave it everything," Fisher says. "Then I got tired. If you're looking for a tag for this story, it's about having that fire in your belly. I couldn't care about it anymore."

A few days later, I visit Steve Pearson at his home in Lynnwood. He played guitar and, along with Don Short, wrote the Heats' tunes.

Pearson looks remarkably unchanged, still skinny, still with all his hair. He's 44, gone through two marriages, now in a relationship of six years. These days, Pearson earns his living by restoring classic British sports cars.

If for Ian Fisher that flame that was rock 'n' roll burned out, Pearson wouldn't allow it to die. He got older, he had to adjust to the realities.

"Basically, I just swapped hobbies. I used to be a musician and played around with cars as a hobby. Now I restore cars and am a musician as a hobby," he tells me.

The Heats formed in late 1978, a group of suburban young guys who disliked the album-oriented pap and disco that dominated the airwaves. They took their cues from such British songwriters as Elvis Costello, and, yes, the Beatles. They chose their name (originally the Heaters, but they found out another band had it) because of the heater they needed when practicing in a freezing basement.

And what great tunes they composed. John Borack, reviewing the Heats songs for Goldmine magazine, would use such descriptions as "stellar" and "infectious." The group had obvious fun on stage, doing leg splits, running with their guitars onto the dance floor, and the crowds reacted, packing the dance floor.

But the record labels didn't call. Why would a Los Angeles record producer call on the Heats, when he figured he could sign a power-pop band right in his California back yard? Ann Wilson of the band Heart took up the Heats' cause. She got Geffen Records to give the group a listen. Nothing happened.

The group eventually put a single on their own label, selling 18,000 copies locally, and an LP that sold 15,000 copies, not bad for regional sales. Then, five years after forming, the band called it quits. Don Short decided it was time to move on. The break-up history of bands is full of stories like that, those "artistic differences." Pearson was stunned. The two haven't spoken since.

A week after the Heats broke up, Pearson was forming a new band. He wasn't about to let go of the music. The group was called the Rangehoods and still plays every now and then. But Pearson also knew that if he wanted to buy a house, as he has, that earning $250 a week wasn't going to do it. He began restoring cars.

Through it all, Pearson has kept writing tunes.

"At some point, if you do something long enough, you become a nostalgia act. I didn't want to be playing `I Don't Like Your Face' (the Heats' single and one of its most popular tunes) when I was 45. I still have something to offer," he says. He gives me a cassette of some new tunes he's been recording. Driving home, I play the tape in my car. There's some good stuff there; the hooks, the catchy melodies.

"I love to play now as much as when I started," Pearson tells me. "I think we succeeded. We wrote some good songs, we made people happy. I have so many people come up and say, `I met my wife at a Heats show.' A lot of people associate the Heats with a really great time in their lives. The first time you see somebody singing along with one of your songs, you're a success as far as I'm concerned."

One time, somebody in the rock business told me his theory about stardom in the music business. "It's as if," he said, "all these thousands of bands were spinning around on a giant record. Then, by chance, a little door opens somewhere on that record. Whoever happens to be closest falls in and becomes a star."

Not all rock stars burn out. They make adjustments, they grow up, they gain a little perspective.

And they remember what made them want to take that road in the first place. It was the music, always the music. Don't ever forget that.

Erik Lacitis' column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His phone number is 206-464-2237. His e-mail address is: elac-new@seatimes.com

	Then and now

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