The weather in those Missouri river towns can be hell. When it heats up in St. Louis, the home of Gravity Kills, the humidity soars sky-high and the mosquito trucks come out, adding their poisonous spray to the damp air. "It's very Orwellian," comments singer Jeff Scheel. But he's used to it. He and drummer Kurt Kerns grew up a couple hours away in Jefferson City, where they had those same trucks. Kerns, Scheel recalls, "was a very industrious young man. He dug up a gas mask and he would actually ride around on his bike, following a truck, with the gas mask on. That probably explains a lot about the band."
With its blend of samples, heavy rock and electronica, Gravity Kills' sound is custom-made for the '90s. The dark insinuations, hard grooves and fierce accusations that mark the quartet's second TVT album, Perversion, expand on the themes offered by the quartet's 1996 debut. Heated blasts against conformity and failed relationships define Gravity Kills' lyricism.
But these harsh soundscapes don't necessarily give an accurate impression of the band members' personalities. Go to a Gravity Kills gig and you'll find quite a bit of levity underneath the anger. "We're always kind of laughing," Scheel grins. "The show's very intense but at the same time, I'm always making eye contact and we're making little jokes with each other about shit."
Case in point--the 1996 Halloween shows in Los Angeles and St. Louis, where Scheel dressed up by not dressing at all. His naked form proved to be a bit bothersome to some of the other guys in the band. "Any time I was on one side of the stage, Kurt would be looking in the opposite direction!" Scheel recalls. "It was so funny that he was making such a conscious effort not to look at my ass!"
It was the lengthy touring behind their debut that made Gravity Kills into a bona fide band. When Gravity Kills was first released, the guys were still getting used to each other. Kerns, guitarist Matt Dudenhoeffer and programmer/ keyboardist Doug Firley started off with a song they wanted to enter in a radio contest. At the last minute, they called Scheel to come up from Dallas, where he was attending college, to add vocals. That song, "Guilty," not only won the contest, it got them a record deal and became a national hit. The real bonding between members didn't happen overnight. Says Scheel, "It took us about a hundred shows, I think, to become a band, where we really felt like we were part of a unit, as opposed to four individuals on stage just playing our parts."
While a lot has happened to Gravity Kills over the past couple of years--their debut went gold, they did all that touring and, for the first, time, wrote and recorded an album as a full band--the guys are still realists. Creatively, Perversion shows no sophomore slump (in fact, quite the opposite), but Scheel acknowledges that one never knows what's going to happen once it's thrown to the masses. "I don't know if this record's gonna sell one copy or a million," he shrugs. "I don't have a crystal ball, but I keep hoping the fanbase that we do have will like the record and maybe we'll even expand on it this time. But again, knocking on wood and everything else, you just don't know!"