Lukas Rossi: I'm With the Band!
The crunchy metal blasting through the studio is messing with Lukas Rossi's head. Forty-eight hours after winning the competition on the reality-TV show Rock Star: Supernova, Rossi is in a studio in L.A.'s trendy Silver Lake neighborhood, listening to tracks he'll sing on with his brand-new bandmates: Tommy Lee, who also plays drums with Mötley Crüe; ex-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted; and guitarist Gilby Clarke, formerly of Guns N' Roses."It sounds fuckin' big, man! There's so much room," Rossi raves.
On TV he was a former Toronto restaurant worker with a bottomless faith in his own talent. But now that faith is getting put to the test. He looks the part, he's showing he belongs. And then Rossi asks the guy working the soundboard if it would be at all possible to duplicate a cool vocal effect they used the other day. The techie shoots him a look that screams: Duh.
"You have to excuse me," the 29-year-old Rossi says quickly. "I'm just so used to working with really shitty producers."
"Those days are over," says Clarke, smiling. "All you've got to do now is ask."
You can take the line cook out of Hooters, but it will probably take a few months to extract all the Hooters out of Rossi. He's cutting vocals for his band's CD, out in November. He's preparing for a 27-city tour that opens New Year's Eve in Las Vegas. He's been in a pair of popular Toronto bands, but that was the frying pan and this is the fire.
His new coworkers have stood onstage beside James Hetfield, beside Vince Neil, beside Axl freakin' Rose. They've sold tens of millions of records, played packed enormodomes across six continents, indulged in every hoary cliché from the rock & roll buffet and gone back for seconds. In conversation, they each make a point of saying how much they respect Rossi and how he's going to contribute to the success of Rock Star Supernova (the band's gangly name after a lawsuit from a preexisting group named Supernova). That remains to be seen; he'll contribute a few songs to the new CD, but most of it was recorded by his leather-pantsed elders before Rossi was even crowned. In truth, they barely know Lukas, and with Lee now on tour with Mötley Crüe, they aren't going to bond much until they hit the road themselves.
It's a situation likely to keep any frontman jumping. On the one hand, as Clarke notes, they are all in their 40s, and Rossi isn't even 30. "He's more in touch with our audience than we are," Clarke explains. So respect must be paid. But at the same time, Rossi comes to Hollywood with no place to stay and no car — the guy doesn't even have a driver's license.
That said, there are worse things than hitting the gas pedal without a license. Rossi won the votes of millions of viewers and those who mattered most — the hard-rock vets who were judges on Rock Star — with a stage swagger that said, "I own this place." Lee sees an almost Iggy Pop–level intensity in the way Rossi works an audience. Rossi says he went into a zone on Rock Star and couldn't remember what he'd done onstage until he watched the playback.
In person, though, he's cryptic, somewhat incommunicative. He's got some Thom Yorke space boy in him, and a lot of Bowie-esque androgyny.
"That's what true artists are — hard to figure out," Newsted says. "Look at John Frusciante or Kirk Hammett. Those kind of people are a bit weird, man. It's not uppity, stuck-up or standoffish — they're just different. We say, ‘Lukas ain't right, and we like that!'"
Whatever he's like right now, a few months on the road with the big boys is going to rewrite Rossi's genetic code. If he ain't right today, just you wait. He's walking a fine line. He might help revive his bandmates' somewhat dormant careers. Or he may end up being their bitch: Go out there and make us some more money, and bring us some fresh groupies while you're at it. The situation reminds Clarke of when he hooked up with Guns N' Roses after Izzy Stradlin departed. He found himself partying all night with band members at the Plaza Hotel and realized by sunrise he couldn't pay the bill.
It might sound funny, but to Rossi it sounds like a challenge. Sitting on a studio couch, waiting for a song he's written to get turned into a hit record, he ponders his victory. "We were all just meant to be in a band together," he muses. "And we're >> about to drop a record that's the freshest, coolest stuff I've ever heard."
These are tough times for your average rock god. The major outlet for exposure — radio — is losing listeners to the Web and satellite, and anyway, the leading radio format these days is country. It took the capitalist genius of Mark Burnett to see how TV could give immediate global exposure to the rock band of his choosing.
Burnett, the British-born television producer who brought Survivor to America, was already established as the big papa of reality TV. He knew how to craft a hit: with Rock Star, he tried his hand at crafting hitmakers. Last year, Rock Star resuscitated the career of INXS by airing the audition for a replacement for their singer, the late Michael Hutchence. The show was a solid-enough success, but what struck Burnett was how many people turned out for the subsequent INXS tour. These folks were as likely to be new fans of the program as old fans of the band.
"Tommy, Gilby and Jason will always draw their core fans," says Burnett of Rock Star Supernova. "But TV is a really smart way for them to engage a new audience and make them fans more quickly."
A conceit of the show involved the prospects of grizzled Sunset Strip war vets being assigned a fresh-faced recruit. Now that Rossi's reporting for duty, he's bound to get a little hazing. "He's going from being broke as fuck to being catapulted right into the limelight," Lee says. "I know what that feels like. I hope he adapts — some don't and they get this dreaded disease called LSD: Lead Singer Disease. They turn into fucking jerk-offs. I've seen it happen to a few people. I hope he hangs on."
This year's series started with some 25,000 applicants auditioning in 22 cities on six continents. Yet soon after the cameras started rolling on the 15 finalists, it became obvious to Gilby, Tommy, Jason and eerily up-to-the-job host Dave Navarro (think Love Boat's Captain Stubing with a chest waxing) that this was a two-person race, between Rossi and Dilana Robichaux, a South African living in Houston. They were neck and neck, Canada Dry vs. Cajun hippie chick. Dilana stumbled badly midseason, when she badmouthed Lukas at a mock press conference, but roared back with a killing cover of the Cranberries' "Zombie."
When he stood side by side with Robichaux on the final show, waiting as the judges milked the suspense, an unfamiliar look — could it have been uncertainty? — crossed Rossi's face. "That moment was the only time during the whole audition when I'd been nervous," he admitted later. "It could have gone either way."
In the end, it may have come down to the way Rossi held the stage, or his cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together." Or maybe it had something to do with the trepidation a bunch of old dudes had about taking a woman on the road.
Tommy Lee opines freely. Maybe a little too freely. "Could you imagine a lead singer with the dreaded lead-singer disease and a girl who's on the rag?" he says. "Can you imagine?! I wonder which one's worse. That would be good, an egotistical female singer who's having a that-time-of-the-month-thing — hah, that would be some fireworks. A reality show you could film only once a month."
A stretch Hummer whips by as Rossi stands on the sunbaked sidewalk in front of his L.A. hotel. "Hey, Lukas, no more chicken wings ever!" somebody shouts out a window. A motorcyclist all but falls off his bike when he sees the newborn star, recovering in time to request a picture.
We walk along Sunset Boulevard to a faux cowboy bar and pull up at a sidewalk table. Rossi talks about a life that's way behind him now. "It hasn't hit me yet. I don't want it to hit me," he says.
Rossi was born in Toronto and bounced back and forth between divorced parents. His brother Jonas remembers Lukas as a sensitive kid who came alive through music. "Where other kids were running off to skating rinks and being Canadians, we were getting together with music," says Jonas Marcocchio. "Our good times were when we could sit in my room and I could throw on a record."
"Really loud!" Lukas adds. "It used to terrify me. I'd be banging on Jonas's door, and then I'd start listening through the door." He starts doing a pretty good Billy Idol groan: "In the midnight hour …
"Next thing you know, it'd be him and me jumping on the bed, flinging our arms around. That's where we found a lot of our solitude and happiness."
The solitude came easier than the happiness. Rossi dropped out of high school and couch-surfed, ending up in Toronto's West End, a gang-infested vista. "I really had to fight for myself. It wasn't the easiest life, to be honest. I was raised on street life, not book smarts." He took assorted construction jobs, and he's become the most famous alum of a certain restaurant chain better known for its female employees.
He and his brother barely saw each other after the family dragged Jonas to the States. In the days after Lukas won the competition, he phoned Jonas up and asked him if he'd come to Hollywood and be his personal manager. Lukas hasn't spoken to his parents in years. The song he wrote and played on Rock Star, "Headspin," is about his relationship with his mother: "Did I ever mean something to you?"
Rossi's a walking mixed metaphor: an image-conscious gutter bird. There's a side of him that radiates street-punk cred — it's in the way he chain smokes unfiltereds, the way he talks … heck, it's in the way he smells.
But there's also something unnervingly professional about him. This is a showman in the modern-Ontario tradition of Avril Lavigne, Hayden Christensen, Sum 41 and even J.D. Fortune, his fellow Torontonian who won Rock Star in 2005. They all seem to have come out of some secret laboratory in the north country dedicated to sanding off the rough edges from promising talent and grooming them for keeping cool under the brightest lights.
All that swagger and confidence come together in his improbable look: leather trench coat, floppy hat, lip gloss and big sunglasses, capped by a shock of white swirling through his Dairy Queen do. He's like Cruella de Vil bred with Billie Joe Armstrong. He never breaks character. "I was told by the makeup people, ‘Maybe you should lighten up on the eyeliner and glitter,' and I was like, hell no, dude!" Rossi says. Tommy Lee even staged a sneak camera attack on him at the contestants' mansion one afternoon, hoping to catch him in cutoffs and flip-flops, but no dice. Even in 85-degree weather it was black leather and gloves by the pool.
His confidence runs bone deep. Ask him about any downside of doing the TV show and he'll tell you he hated singing the covers. He only wants to play songs he's written. Ask who his favorite songwriters are and he'll say he doesn't really listen to others because he doesn't want their work influencing his own. Even when he was a teen, worshipping the Smashing Pumpkins and the Cult, he refused to put their pictures up on his bedroom wall: As he told a journalist, "I wanted to be the one on the poster!"
So now the posters are being printed. Now he's going to be on bedroom walls. It's got to be a huge change for a West End boy. He's worked hard to get where he is; he'll have to work even harder to make it pay off. Rossi may be the frontman, the only member of Rock Star Supernova that the world has voted for, but he's hardly getting an even share of the Supernova booty. "All the contestants were forced to sign entry-level contracts," explains Tommy Lee. "We've all gone through it, man. There are some dues you gotta pay, it's just part of the drill."
In the days after Rossi won, he house-sat for Lee while the drummer went out with the Crüe. (He couldn't figure out how to operate the wide-screen TV.) He's gone to some Hollywood parties, but the biggest star he's been able to identify so far is Audioslave's Tom Morello. Most of the time he's been holed up in the studio and his hotel room, learning his parts and what's expected of him.
"I'm fortunate to be where I'm at," he says, sipping iced tea along Sunset Boulevard. A homeless man comes over and asks if anyone's ever told Lukas he looks like Joey Ramone. Lukas busts a wide smile and signs another autograph.
"We're a band now," he says proudly. "We're complete. And we're going to keep writing music until the cows come home. Somebody asked me what will happen after the record comes out. It's obvious: make another record."
