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Good sports A round of pick-up with Luscious Jackson's Kate Schellenbach by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
By tasteful, Schellenbach means balancing inevitable financial concerns with occasional deposits in the karma bank. "We played at a benefit recently called Boarding for Breast Cancer, which was a snowboarding thing. The atmosphere was really fun, it was on this mountain near Lake Tahoe. It was specifically female-oriented. They featured a lot of female boarders and companies with snowboarding clothes for women. As a bunch of city kids, it was our first time ever in that sort of environment. It was the first time I've ever put a snowboard on my feet." Good point. The Luscious Jackson sound is entirely urban, fusing funk and hip hop with graceful, guitar-based pop rock (shot through with a little raised-on-Ramones attitude). Although their latest album Fever In Fever Out is more neat than street (what with Daniel Lanois's warm production), the ladies still cling to a few staples of inner-city youth. "I'm very excited about the new women's professional basketball league. It's the WNBA [Women's National Basketball Association], which is tied in with the NBA. The league was started last summer and New York has a team, which is exciting. It's cool to see women have an opportunity outside of college to pursue a professional basketball career in the U.S." Not that Schellenbach's ditching the drum kit for any harebrained hoop dreams. Still, she and the others want a piece of the action. "We're actually trying to pitch a song to the WNBA," she says, "maybe a theme song or something. We're at a point in our careers where we can do that sort of thing and people will actually listen. We want to be involved and maybe get free tickets for the games." Fair enough... years of hard work should have its perks. Luscious Jackson shoot some hoops, with openers Muse at Spectrum on Wednesday, May 21 at 8pm. $20, all ages |
For those about to rock, I salute you. The idea of playing in a band strikes me by and large as an exercise in misery. Stress, unrewarded hard work and, adding insult to injury, folks who fail to grasp the ramifications of it all. Just ask Luscious Jackson's drummer, Kate Schellenbach. "A lot of people think that when you've got your picture on magazine covers and a video on TV, you're loaded. And the reality is that we have to pay our bills, we have to pay our rent and the money isn't just flying in the door. We're hustling out there, and we're trying to do it in a tasteful way."