Rock and rollercoaster

Yet Funland was determined: They headed to Nashville to cut demos for their forthcoming full-length album, for which they had planned to use Sugar producer Lou Giordano. The tapes from that session are first-rate, containing many of the songs that would later make it onto The Funland Band ("Impala," "Angry Girl," "Feedback," and "Spinal Music" among them), but Sweret rejected the songs out of hand. Like a scolding teacher, he assigned them failing letter grades.

The patronizing way Sweret treated the band, and the label's failure to live up to so many of its initial promises, led Funland to do what few bands would even think of: They demanded to be released from their contract with Arista. So in January 1994, the band became free agents once more, leaving the songs on Sweetness in Arista's possession as part of their contract buyout.

In a little more than a year, Funland had lived the rock-music dream, then watched it die by their own hands. When it was over, they briefly, and privately, considered ending the band and moving on individually. Yet, in retrospect, they admit their crisis of confidence had less to do with the soured Arista deal than the band's personal matters that slopped over into business.

"If we ever had feelings individually of wanting to get out of this, I wouldn't say that it had anything to do--personally--with Arista not validating us or not letting us do an album we wanted to," Vogeler says. "There were times when some of us talked about not wanting to do this anymore, but it had nothing to do with that."

"Over the past couple of years there's been numerous times when I've felt self- doubt and wondered, 'Are we any good?'" Schmidt says. "'Do we deserve to be making music?' Even though Arista was a shitty label to be signed to and in the back of our minds probably we were suspicious of that in the beginning, there was something validating--which was wrong--about having been signed. To some people who've chosen a career in music, getting signed is the Holy Grail, and you've achieved it, so there was a certain amount of validation there, and then it was taken away."

Vogeler nods, then adds: "There was a point after we'd gone through all that and we realized most bands would have broken up, and I think that encouraged us to keep on."

To "keep on" meant Funland would find itself back among the unwashed and unsigned again, back to play the Deep Ellum clubs. With a new bass player in tow--Mike Vanderheiden, who would be gone by early 1995, yet another musician whose personality clashed with those of the Three Musketeers--the band went back to playing Club Clearview, Trees, the Orbit Room, and the Galaxy Club. They would also return to Nashville to cut another set of songs, this time for an album they would shop around to labels or, worse come to worst, release themselves.

In the meantime, Funland would watch as bands they had played with or which had come long after them signed to major labels in quick succession: The Toadies, Hagfish, Brutal Juice, Deep Blue Something, Vibrolux, Tablet. They watched as Tripping Daisy ascended the charts, waited as the Toadies became an almost ubiquitous presence on MTV after so many starts and stops of their own. And Funland had to wonder if they had blown their One Big Chance.

"I don't think we've ever thought we had our shot," Vogeler says. "That's never crossed our mind."

"There were definitely nights after shows during the darker point of that two-year period where we wondered if we really want to keep doing this," Schmidt says.

"But it wasn't like, 'We blew it, what do we do now?'" Vogeler adds. "I think all these bands getting signed is good for the scene, and it's going to open up opportunities for all our friends' bands and us."

Schmidt jumps in: "I've never for one second been embarrassed that we were on a major and now we're putting out a local record. It more or less strikes me as weird there are bands that formed after us that are putting out major label records and we're just now putting out our first record ever, and it's on a local label. But it doesn't strike me as, 'That's not fair.'"

After failing to get any response from a label, Funland released the Misunderstanded cassette and sold it at shows, like any other young band. This summer, the band--this time with Tablet's Philip Irby as a temporary bass player, who'd later be replaced by three more fill-in musicians--signed a deal with Steve Records, an imprint of local studio-cum-distributor-cum-manufacturer Crystal Clear Sound that also released Sixty-Six's debut. Culled from the second set of Nashville recordings, which the band would remix with producer Keith Rust, and with some brand-new recordings, the resulting album was sent to stores at the beginning of this week.

A mere four and a half years after forming, Funland has finally released its first full-length album, its true debut. And though it's on a local label--albeit one that has its own very powerful distribution capabilities--Schmidt and Vogeler insist they're actually quite pleased it worked out this way.