Music: A Golden Opportunity to Rock the Garden

This weekend, they'll play in front of about 8,000 hometown fans at the Rock the Garden concert. Last weekend, they were in New York and New Jersey auditioning for prospective record labels and opening for the Psychedelic Furs.

And the weekend before that ...

"I'm still a month behind on my rent," complained Adam Hurlburt, bassist/keyboardist of Minneapolis' über-buzzing dance-rock group Solid Gold. "I might have to work retail for another six months," bandmate Matt Locher added. Said frontman Zachary Coulter, a father of two, "I still have to be able to look my kids in the eye and say, 'I'm not going to work today. I'm going to practice with my band.'" Talking two nights before their Grand Old Day gig in a dirty, stuffy, cramped City Sound rehearsal space -- with the seemingly requisite metal band blaring down the hall -- Solid Gold made it clear that fame and fortune have not exactly come their way. They're confident it will, though.

The quintet generated a truly international buzz over the winter and spring with their self-released full-length debut CD, "Bodies of Water." They went to London and New York and played to packed clubs. They went to the South by Southwest Music Conference and crammed in six gigs, including one at the Filter magazine party where Kanye West later showed up.

But they have yet to seal a record deal or do a real tour. Most of their summer is being spent cashing in at home with marquee local gigs such as Rock the Garden on Saturday, a First Avenue headlining show last month and a Minnesota Zoo gig next month.

If things seem to be moving slowly despite their iron-hot status, the guys in Solid Gold are the first to admit it's their own doing.

They're carefully mulling record label offers, they said, because they "don't want to make any rash decisions." That, and they "want to be loaded 10 years from now," instead of settling for a quicker, lesser financial boost. They also insist (deservedly so) that any label that signs them has to rerelease "Bodies of Water" as is.

Solid Gold took an unusually long time to make the album. Recording took three years, off and on, after three more spent on writing. Some of the holdup came from a year's worth of sessions in a big studio that got scrapped. A lot of that time, though, was also muddied up by the personal strife that ultimately would fuel the album's lyrical theme. Call it a desperate search for a more carefree life, set to dance beats.

Describing his large slice of the misery pie, Coulter said, "The band pretty much ruined my family."

Solid Gold even took a long time to agree to talk to us. This interview was four months and several terse, snide and just plain immature e-mail exchanges (from both ends) in the making. Basically, the guys felt that they should have been on the Star Tribune A+E cover two years ago. When they issued "Bodies of Water" last November, they even sent this writer a CD case without the CD inside as a kiss-off.

"We weren't a great band" two years ago, Coulter says now. "But we were pretty confident we would be."

• • •

That "cocksure attitude," as Hurlburt put it, has been around since he joined Coulter and Locher in the band in 2003, when they were living in Madison, Wis., and finishing up college. Their confidence pulled them toward Solid Gold and away from grad school or careers.

"When we started this band," Locher recalled, "I sort of immediately had the feeling that I'll have to pretty much disregard everything in my life to see this thing through. And that's basically what got us to this point. For the past 7 1/2 years, we always had this feeling it was going to bring us somewhere."

It brought them to Minneapolis in 2005. They pondered moving to New York, but Coulter had an infant son and a toddler daughter by then. The 30-year-old St. Paul native -- who (dark, dirty secret No. 1) played on the golf team at Highland High -- opted to move back close to his family for support, so he could also focus on the band.

And focus he did. After getting kicked out of his place, he said, he moved into the house Hurlburt and Locher shared in Uptown. The basement became their work space and their sanctuary.

"All of our personal lives were just [expletive]," remembered Coulter, who worked a couple blocks away at the Wedge Co-op. "I'd go home on my lunch break and just record for a half-hour. It became a place to just hide from the rest of your [expletive] life."

That explains a lot of the agony and despair that underlie the feel-good, escapist grooves on "Bodies of Water." Just the titles of songs such as "Get Over It" and "Who You Gonna Run To" tell the story. So do the lyrics in plenty other songs.

In one of the darkest tracks, "Bible Thumper," Coulter sings about killing a buzzing wasp that is "too tired to sting" and "Thinking of love and the things I wish I'd never said." In the urgent masterpiece "Armoured Cars," he opens with the lines, "Some die like a cigarette / Some die like armored cars / Some die like love / You should have to bury me alone."

"'Armoured Cars' is a depiction of pure desperation," Locher said, "like someone's hand around your neck choking you and it's the point where you're just about to pass out."

Solid Gold's innovative musical blueprint -- wigged-out, Manchester-style dance beats underneath melancholic Britpop melodies and layers of psychedelic organ/synth -- came years earlier in Madison, when they started out playing indie-rock while dance parties erupted around them and hallucinogens flowed freely (hardly a dark, dirty secret).

Said Locher, "We kind of grew out of the crux between the Strokes bringing garage-rock back, and the Rapture making indie-rock people dance.

"It was really exciting in 2003 to go to a house party and people playing really thumping techno songs and rock songs, and everyone was dancing. Instead of just standing there awkwardly next to some chick, you could just get wasted and dance with her. That really got into us."

A defining moment came when the band's drummer at the time moved to New York, forcing them to dabble with drum machines, which they continued to employ when they started performing around the Twin Cities. Once here, they fell in with some of Hurlburt's fellow Eau Claire, Wis., expatriates who were also heavily mashing up electronica and rock music around Minneapolis, including members of Digitata and Mel Gibson & the Pants, plus James Buckley. Buckley plays in Mystery Palace with the guy who would eventually produce "Bodies of Water," former 12 Rods frontman Ryan Olcott.

"Moving to Minneapolis was really an important step," Hurlburt said.

As if pinpointing the Solid Gold eureka moment, Coulter said, "We realized we could make really intense music, but have all these beats and samples to sort of pick up the songs."

• • •

Solid Gold did not become the great band it aspired to be -- or insisted on being -- until it found its final two members.

Slide-guitarist Shon Troth joined before a gig two New Years Eves ago. He added an otherworldly but organic quality to the group's psychedelic haze. He also added to the bearded, scruffed-up, hippie-ish look that Coulter also brings to the group (helping it stand apart from all the over-styled dance-rock bands).

Drummer Adam Peterson was found when Locher advertised from the stage at Psycho Suzi's block party that they were looking for a new rhythm keeper. Peterson tackled the daunting task of enhancing and/or re-creating the beats assembled electronically for the record.

After the musical formula was set, then came the hustling -- an equally important art form in Solid Gold's case.

Staffers at the Current (89.3 FM) like to recount when the band tried to talk its way onto the station's live broadcast from South by Southwest in 2008. The group wound up playing a festival in London after stuffing the online ballot box in a contest put on by Vice magazine (although, they point out, every band probably did that, and the final winners were picked by judges).

From London, they worked their way into the lineup of the Iceland Airwaves festival, from which they earned a write-up in Billboard magazine, from which they landed a manager in London, from which music bloggers started taking notice.

"We definitely worked a few angles along the way," Coulter admitted.

The con work, though, was just one in a string of necessary evils the band justified to -- as Locher put it earlier -- "see this thing through."

"Our pride in this record might come off as arrogant," Locher said, "but it's based in humility because it took us so long to make it, and we put so much effort and just put so much of our lives into it."

They're still working on it, too.

At their rehearsal space -- too dingy to say the guys are still creating music together to escape the outside world -- they worked up a slower, moodier, bloodier version of "Get Over It" that came off like an extended 12-inch remix. It was a brilliant redux. The desperation that originally fueled the song might be fading, but the musicality behind it is still growing. In fact, it might be the one thing about Solid Gold that's moving fast.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658