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It's a grand old Toad

Published in the Asbury Park Press 3/04/03

By ROBIN KAVANAGH
CORRESPONDENT

In the beginning of the 1990s, there was a
surge of "new" music (call it alternative, call it
grunge) and it was good, even if the underground
had loved it long before mainstream radio did.
Among the darlings were Soundgarden, Pearl Jam,
and -- Toad the Wet Sprocket?

You know their songs, even if their name isn't
so familiar. They made a splash in the alternative
rock scene in the early '90s with hits such as
"All I Want," "Walk on the Ocean" and "Come Down."
Turn the radio dial to WPLJ, and you can still
hear some hits from their gold and platinum albums
played more than 10 years later.

TOAD THE WET
SPROCKET
With Wheat and Bleu
7 p.m.
Tuesday, March 4
Birch Hill Nite
Club
Route 9 South, Old
Bridge
$20

When word that
the band was reuniting for the first time in five
years blew through the air, Web sites dedicated
for the sole purpose of keeping the memory of Toad
the Wet Sprocket alive and well went wild, and the
20- and 30-somethings whose adolescences were
marked by Toad's soft-spoken yet rock-based sound
helped to create sold out shows around the
country. It was as if the band had never broken
up.

"The shows have been great, the audiences have
been wonderful," said lead singer Glen Phillips of
the club shows the band has played over the past
few months. "It's been pretty astounding."

Phillips said that returning Toad fans would
not be disappointed, mixing up old favorites with
a few songs from the members' solo projects.

"It's like a grand-old-toad show. I'll maybe do
one solo acoustic song, the rest of it's pretty
close to the album. It's 20-something songs so it
becomes a reasonable slice."

The folky, rocky (maybe even a little country)
band from California broke out of the underground
in 1991 with their album, "fear," which went
platinum, even though the group never strayed from
their main view of what music should be: lyrics
and melody before popularity.

"We're probably a third-generation American bar
band," Phillips said of the group's sound. "The
really formative music when we were getting
together, it was stuff like The Replacements,
Husker Du, Dinosaur Junior, Elvis Costello, Whoop
the Boy, REM. Punk had happened and kind of gone
down. People were calling this punk, post-punk or
garage, whatever it was. I remember it being
called post-modern for a second, college rock.
Whatever it was, it was this very song-based,
lyric based music that was defying a lot of
description and it wasn't being played on the
radio yet, but this was the kind of music that
made us want to play music."

Toad the Wet Sprocket enjoyed a short ride in
the limelight, with Top 40 hits from their
follow-up albums, "Dulcinea" and "In Light Syrup."
But as time ticked away during their proverbial
15-minutes of fame, band members found that their
musical ideals and passion for their sound had
begun to wane. Solo projects looked like a good
idea, and it took five years before they would
dare try it again.

"It seemed like it was feasible again,"
Phillips said of the reunion. "We had, as
break-ups go, we were able to break up before
things got really, really, really bad, and while
things were just about to get really bad. We knew
exactly where it was heading. Enough time passed
that everyone had an understanding of what was
good and what was bad, and everybody had more
gratitude and were able to get together and I
think the expectations had dissipated and allowed
it to be what it was without all this crazy
pressure all around it. It just felt possible for
the first time. It seemed like it might be a
positive thing instead of a drag."

Toad will be playing the Birch Hill in Old
Bridge on March 4, joined by Bleu and Wheat, bands
which Phillips said are "very grounded in melody,"
much like Toad.

"Bleu is kind of in the Jellyfish world of, I
don't know what you would call it, extreme pop?
It's just all those gargantuan bands the 70s
rolled up into something that's larger than life
and a lot of fun. And Wheat is much more in kind
of a Granddaddy Built to Spill or Flaming Lips
world, more, you know certainly on the pop side of
that but really inventive, great songs."

So what does the future hold for this
genre-defying, lyric and melody-driven group that
is only holding a limited number of dates around
the country? Phillips said no one knows for sure.
He said there are no plans to write new music, or
release a new album, but that the band would just
take the future, one step at a time.

"We're not going to be rushing into anything
that's not going to be great--The music actually
has to have some passion behind it or it's not
going to be worth anyone's time."

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