Jim Evens was 2,000 miles from his Chicago home and 100 miles from the San Francisco concert his band was scheduled to perform when the transmission in his band’s tour bus, a converted hospital shuttle he’d bought for $2,500 a few months earlier, died. The engine also had a major oil leak, the mechanic told him, and it was going to cost about $3,000 to get the bus up and running.
Evens and his two band mates pooled their cash. They had $80.
During the early months of 2003, now stranded in Los Angeles, it seemed things couldn’t get much worse for Helen Stellar, a trio of Chicagoans who never caught much of a break in the Midwest but are in the midst of a West Coast Cinderella story. Things got worse, though the tough times only make the band’s burgeoning success that much sweeter.
“Elizabethtown,” which opens in movie theaters Friday, includes “io (This Time Around),” a track from the band’s second CD. Cameron Crowe, the movie’s director, a former Rolling Stone writer and a lifelong music junkie, will soon release a vinyl-only compilation of the band’s CDs on his personal record label.
“We’ve used unsigned artists before,” Crowe said, referring to bands on his movie’s soundtracks, which have also featured headlining artists such as Elton John, Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel, “but this is probably the most random discovery of any piece of music we’ve used.
“A friend of mine was in Amoeba Records where [singer/guitarist] Jim Evens works. Jim was handing out copies of the band’s EP. My friend made me a mix CD and put one of the songs on it. I loved it. I got the whole CD and completely fell for `io.'”
When presented with the shot, the band took it, and Crowe placed Helen Stellar’s reverb-drenched ballad in one of the movie’s early scenes with actor Orlando Bloom.
Evens, a Mt. Prospect native, didn’t play an instrument when he graduated with a degree in graphic design from Columbia College Chicago in 1999. But bored with his job as a waiter at a “very famous, very touristy Chicago restaurant,” which he declines to name, Evens convinced his co-worker (and future drummer) Clif Clehouse to start a band with Evens and an old high school buddy, bassist Steve Bishop.
“Soon after starting the band, I was at my stupid job and the guys called to ask what time we were rehearsing,” Evens said. “I was feeling terrible. I had just lost a good friend. We liked playing but had no reason to take it seriously at the time. Everything felt mundane, and every day felt trivial. So I said, `Wouldn’t it be great to quit these jobs and play every day?’ The next day we had a meeting about it and we did. We saved up some money and bailed out of Chicago the next month.”
The trio moved to Madison, Wis., where they lived cheaply, worked part time and “practiced all hours of the day.” They rented a three-bedroom house just east of the university campus and moved in Jan. 1, 2001, the day their lease started.
After living in the city for only a few months, the trio had enough songs to enter Madison’s Smart Studios, where Nirvana recorded “Nevermind,” its millions-selling major-label debut, several years earlier.
Evens remembers mailing the resulting album, “The Newton EP,” to KCRW-FM deejay Nic Harcourt in Los Angeles on a Tuesday. The following Monday, Harcourt, an independent-music tastemaker who’s known for breaking bands, was spinning tracks from the CD on his drive-time show, “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”
“We didn’t even know until we started getting e-mails from people saying, `Hey, heard you on “Morning Becomes Eclectic.” What’s your guys’ deal?'” Evens said.
Harcourt was getting regular requests for Helen Stellar, and he urged the band to come out to Los Angeles for a series of concerts and a live performance on his show. They happily obliged, had a phenomenal week, but soon found themselves back in Chicago.
“When we got back from our first trip to California, we recorded our second EP and no one would do anything with it,” Evens said. “We felt good about ourselves when we were in L.A. People were saying great things about us. People in Chicago were into it, too, but we weren’t sure if they were there because they loved the music or because they were our friends. We . . . freaked out. That’s when we decided we needed to get back to L.A.”
The band bought a bus, booked a few shows in L.A. and San Francisco, and set out on its fateful trip.
Bus broke down
“When the bus broke down, we tried to make the most of it,” Evens said. “We had some laughs, but mostly nervous laughs.”
After spending two nights in the van, the band called some friends in L.A., who drove up, rented the guys a U-Haul truck and moved the band and its equipment back to L.A.
Over the next two months, the band wandered aimlessly around Los Angeles. Too proud to call parents for financial assistance, they crashed on friends’ couches and occasionally organized a band practice. Tempers often flared and the situation soon came to a boil. Bishop left the band and returned to Chicago. Clehouse started waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. Evens got a job at Amoeba Records, where he posted a sign looking for a bass player on the store’s bulletin board.
Dustin Robles, an Evanston native living in L.A., was the third bassist the group auditioned. It was an immediate fit, and the band played a gig two weeks later. In January 2005, a year after Helen Stellar debuted its new lineup, Crowe contacted the group about using “io.”
“I told them, `Look, this music is really working in the movie. There’s a whole world of soundtrack people, supervisors and lawyers out there [that I’d like to bypass]. The way we’re going about this movie is really personal. I am my own music supervisor. I’m interested in “io.'”
Last time in `Singles’
“Singles,” Crowe’s 1992 look at the single life in grunge-era Seattle, was the last time a Chicago band appeared on one of his soundtracks. Coincidentally, the song fell into his lap in a similar fashion.
“[Soundgarden’s] Chris Cornell, who we had been working with, said, `I heard this amazing band, Smashing Pumpkins.’
“He had one of their early singles,” Crowe said. “We got ahold of [Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan] and he sent us a demo with a bunch of songs on it. The last one was a really long version of `Drown.’ We called him back and said, `We love “Drown.” He said, `Damn! I knew you’d go for that one.'”
Of course, there’s no guarantee Helen Stellar will have similar success, though Evens says sales of the band’s self-released CDs through its Web site have skyrocketed since the soundtrack’s Sept. 13 release. The company that represents the reunited Dinosaur Jr. and Chicago jam band Umphrey’s McGee courted and signed the group a few months ago. And on Dec. 3, the group will play its first Chicago show in a year and a half at Double Door as part of a mini-Midwest tour.
The band also keeps pretty good company on the “Elizabethtown” soundtrack.
“The track listing on the CD is ridiculous,” Evens laughs. “The first track is Nancy Wilson, who did the score for the movie. She was in Heart and is Cameron’s wife. Then it’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Then Elton John. Then Helen Stellar. Huh? Who the hell is Helen Stellar and what are they doing on the soundtrack?”
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Crowe’s top 5 music-movie moments
Actor John Cusack’s boom-box serenade in “Say Anything” might be one person’s most memorable music-meets-cinema moment from a Cameron Crowe film, but where does it rank with the director? Turns out it doesn’t make his top five. Here’s his list:
(1) “Feel Flows” by The Beach Boys from “Almost Famous.”
“It was one of the rare times you find the one song that takes you to the right place for the very end of a movie.”
(2) “Shelter From the Storm” by Bob Dylan from “Jerry Maguire.”
“It was amazing to get an outtake of `Shelter From the Storm’ from [the 1975 album] `Blood on the Tracks.’ I did liner notes for [the 1985 boxed set] `Biograph,’ so I had a little bit of a relationship with [Dylan’s manager] Jeff Rosen. I asked, `Is there an alternate take of “Shelter From the Storm”?’ They dug around and found that version.”
(3) “Somebody’s Baby” by Jackson Browne from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
“We loved the song but couldn’t find a place for it. The fact that it worked in the premature-ejaculation scene was almost cruel to the song.”
(4) “Where to Begin” by My Morning Jacket from “Elizabethtown.”
“There’s a James Agee book called `A Death in the Family’ and it begins with a description of a Southern night. That was the feeling we tried to capture in the scene, and it didn’t work without any music. We needed something to set the tone. [My Morning Jacket frontman] Jim James wrote a song for that scene and just hit it perfectly, which is really rare.”
(5) “Svefn-g-englar” by Sigur Ros from “Vanilla Sky.”
“It captured the deep melancholy of a guy who was leaving his life and leaving an idealized love behind for reality because it wasn’t right to live a dream.”
— Matt McGuire
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ctc-arts@tribune.com
