By GERRY GALIPAULT

(Sept. 14, 2002)

Waymon Boone remembers Splender's first visit with J Records founder Clive Davis as if it were yesterday. The scene was so surreal, he felt like he was in the middle of a Francis Ford Coppola film.

The New York rock quartet had just come off two years touring in support of its 1999 debut Columbia album, "Halfway Down the Sky." Their A&R man, James Diener, had just jumped ship to J, Davis' fledgling post-Arista label. News of Diener's departure, Boone recalls, took all the wind out of their sails. It seemed to the lead singer and his band mates - James Cruz (bass, vocals), Jonathan Svec (lead guitar) and Marc Slutsky (drums) - that all the progress they had made, including having a pop hit with "I Think God Can Explain," was for naught.

Diener quickly allayed their fears.

"We were freaking out," Boone said recently. "We thought that was the end of our run when we found out (Diener) was going to work for Clive Davis over at this new label that didn't have any acts signed, an office or a name. Our relationship with James is as close as a band member; he's the first person who walked into CBGB's and said, 'I get it,' and for that, we're eternally grateful. We couldn't live without him.

"Then James told us that Clive loved the band and wanted us. Somehow it went from the worst day of our lives to the next day being one of our best, because we were like 'He does?!' We didn't care that they didn't have an office or a name; as long as these two guys are going to be there, that's good enough for us."

Then came the introduction to the patriarch of pop.

"Clive was very serious about us," Boone said. "It was a very 'Godfather'-like meeting, very weird. The doors were closed, and two people came in and opened the two doors; 'Mr. Davis will see you now,' and he was sitting at a desk exactly like the scene in 'The Godfather.' He was just as intimidating, but he was very sweet. The only thing missing was a furry cat in his lap."

It took considerable legal footwork to get Splender out of its Columbia deal and into the J camp, but Boone says it bought them extra time going into their second album. Turns out they needed all that time and more: Splender's world was crumbling all around.

Boone had a serious case of writer's block; he had been misdiagnosed as having cancer; two close friends died of heroin overdoses, and there was tension within the band.

"It was the first time in my recording career where I actually lied to my A&R guy," Boone said. "He kept calling and asking how the songs were coming along, and I was suffering from writer's block for a year; I was saying, 'Oh, everything's great,' knowing I hadn't written one bar of music in a year.

"One of the things, unfortunately, that helped me snap out of it was that we've had a really difficult year. I lost two very close friends to heroin, which is strange for me, being a straight-edged nondrug-taker. One of them died before I was able to start writing again, and the other died the day I stepped off the plane to start recording our record. It just put a 10-ton weight on my neck. It definitely fueled the light to start being creative again; from that moment, I knew I had stuff to say."

Boone lays it on the line on Splender's impressive sophomore album, "To Whom It May Concern" (released Sept. 3). On the first single, "Save It For Later," his urgent call to live for today is fitting in post-Sept. 11th America. He celebrates love in "High," touches on moments of despair in "No Big Deal" and counsels a friend in "The Loneliest Person I Know."

He likens the songs to conversations with or letters written to family and friends, hence the album title, "To Whom It May Concern."

"Like 'Save It For Later,' " he said, "that came from a conversation I had. I found that once I lost friends (to drugs) that it brought me closer and further from my remaining friends.

"One of the conversations I had was with a person who was having a lot of difficulty in his life because he had come to a crossroads where he realized - or maybe I made him realize - that everything he was doing in his life was not for himself, that he was always trying to please his father. At a time when life is so precious and short and there's no time to please anybody but yourself before you can make anyone else happy, I told him basically to fuck everything, 'you're never going to make him happy. You have to make yourself happy.' "

Boone heeded some of his own advice, helping to bridge the gap between he and his band mates.

"I'm still not sure what keeps us going," he said. "We definitely fight all the time, and we came to the brink of being so disgusted with each other and not sitting in the same room or having conversations for months at a time, but I would drop dead without them.

"People see you on Leno or they see you at a show, but they don't know what's really involved or rightfully maybe don't care what's involved. It's a lot of stress to be out on a bus or a plane or a car 24 hours a day for years at a time. We spent more time together than married couples do; at least married couples can go to work and have eight hours away from each other. Our work is together; we had to learn to respect each other more; we already know how to push each other's buttons. It was an accomplishment to stay together foremost and then also to set up a higher bar to do this record."

Boone is thankful that he and Splender overcame their many obstacles. He even jokes about it.

"If you had interviewed me a year ago, you'd tell me to take some Ritalin," he said, laughing. " 'Here's the number to a shrink, dude. Take some Prozac and chill out.'

"After all that shit, we've never gotten along better, to the brothers we started out being, and we've never been happier with our record."

ORDER "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN": click here.

ON THE WEB: www.splender.com. Other sites - Splenderfans.net.

THE MUD, SWEAT AND TEARS OF SPLENDER

By GERRY GALIPAULT

(June 25, 2000)

If ever there was a defining moment for Splender, it came at the Zetafest in Miami.

The New York rock quartet, whose Todd Rundgren-produced debut Columbia "Halfway Down the Sky" was released in May 1999, shared the festival bill with Def Leppard, Everclear, Orgy and Shades Apart.

"We went on earlier in the day, and it was in this huge baseball stadium," lead guitarist Jonathan Svec said recently. "I guess that particular day they thought they'd be smart and lay down tarps all over the field where the kids were so they wouldn't be throwing mud. But within a few minutes of the band playing, all these kids rolled back the tarps and started going at it, digging to China. The mud was everywhere. I had a little video camera onstage, and you can see these divots of mud flying up onstage.

"It looked like a swamp by the time we were finished. I got hit in the head; (singer) Waymon (Boone) got hit in the head. We had mud in our teeth. And you would think someone would say, 'Okay, what the fuck are you doing? Stop throwing mud.' Waymon yelled out to the crowd, 'Is that all you got?!' Everyone involved with the festival thought, 'Oh, man, what's he doing? He's lost his mind.' It turned out to be one of the better performances that day."

It's also an example of Splender's fighting spirit. Most bands would throw up their hands in disgust if their album took more than a year to go anywhere, but Svec and his band mates - Boone, bassist James Cruz and drummer Marc Slutsky - are just happy to still be in the game.

Their first single, "Yeah, Whatever," charted briefly last year on Billboard's modern rock tracks chart and the album wasn't exactly a sales flop, but a piece was definitely missing from the puzzle. Rather than chalk it up to experience, Columbia ordered a video for the follow-up single, "I Think God Can Explain." Directed by Chris Applebaum (Lit, Semisonic, Mighty Mighty Bosstones), the video landed on VH1 and MTV, and soon the song took off at radio.

"I Think God Can Explain," a pensive power-pop ballad, was the top debuting single on Billboard's pop Hot 100 chart at No. 71 the week of June 10. It's now poised at No. 62.

Svec says they never lost the faith.

"At first, we thought that everything wasn't clicking with every single section of what we were doing," he said. "We were doing our part by playing live and touring, and we thought, 'Well, maybe the record company's not pushing us enough,' or maybe it's just one of those things that's going to take some time, which is ultimately what it turned out to be. We didn't have one of those candy-coated songs that took off out of the box; it's one of those things that took a little growth and caught on to people.

"This is one of those things that creeps up on you, and in a way, I like it when it happens like that for bands. Stuff that creeps up on you has a little bit more longevity and honesty to it. It's an immediate realization that it's something that someone's not really used to. It's something slightly different but sticks in your mind after it's been around for a while longer.

"We're very positive. As a band, we're very used to being centered on what we want, and I guess we seem to find the hard ways of doing things. But, ultimately, after all the mud that gets thrown on us and all the hurdles we have to jump, we wind up being pretty happy where we are. We work very hard, and we believe in what we're doing."

With radio ga-ga over the cut-and-paste pop of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, Splender just hoped it could slip through somehow, Svec says.

"We see the people and hear what the fans say at the shows and on the Web site," he said. "That helps reiterate what you're doing. It affirms what you're doing when someone says 'Oh, my god, that song means the world to me,' and it's more than one person.

"It wasn't such a negative that it wasn't blowing up right away. Previously, even before we had the record out, we were getting used to that because our record had been delayed by a few months. It had an original August (1998) release date, then it was delayed until October, then November. Then it didn't come out until May last year. I was like, 'What the hell's going on?' But this is the business, so get used to it.

"We've been touring nonstop ever since. Firsthand, that's how we've seen how things have grown and improved. You look at the record sales and the radio adds and that's factual proof, but it's great when you go to these shows and you get more fans and more people singing your songs and a lot more hits on the Web site."

Splender's popularity surely will spread this summer once it hooks up in early July with Third Eye Blind and Vertical Horizon for a major tour.

Svec is shocked to hear that Entertainment Weekly, in its June 16 issue, asked the musical question: "Who the #@%! are Vertical Horizon?" and gave lead singer Matt Scannell an instant charisma rating of 3 (out of a possible 5).

"Matt's a totally cool guy, and he's got the shiny bald to boot," Svec said. "But when I hear things about 'faceless bands,' I guess it intertwines with the whole one-hit wonder thing. You get a group or a song you hear on the radio and everybody knows that song, but you could say you may know what the singer looks like. But 'do you know who the bass player is?' 'No, I don't, but the song's great.' That's a rut bands can get into when they're not promoted properly or there's something image-wise that's not coming across.

"Maybe one of the reasons why we didn't propel as fast in the beginning was because we didn't have a video. We were supposed to do a video for 'Yeah, Whatever' originally. We had one slow week at radio and Columbia was like, 'Maybe we'll wait a little longer.' Of course, the following week, we had a great week at radio. Thank goodness we did a video for 'I Think God Can Explain.'

"Everyone's so used to watching videos and seeing bands exposed like that. It really does help when you get that kind of promotion; it puts a face with the song and the people can suddenly affiliate the music with the band. We are a band, we are a rock band, so I think it's important to make that connection rather than a lot of these pop acts that are just singers in front of tracks, where the music is all digital or a plethora of different studio musicians. There's a lot more organicness and human quality to a band like us and Vertical Horizon."

THE FIRST RECORD I EVER BOUGHT: "The first one given to me was 'Kiss Alive,' but then I vaguely remember buying a Queen record at a Woolworths. I love Queen, they're one of my all-time favorite bands."

THE FIRST CONCERT I EVER WENT TO: "Van Halen for the 'Diver Down' record. My friend's family got us tickets, but the concert was canceled because Eddie (Van Halen) had broken his wrist or sprained it or something and it was put off for four or five months. I was crushed; I thought it would never happen, and when it finally did, it was at the Brendan Byrne Arena, which is now the Continental Arena in New Jersey. It was amazing."

THE LAST CD I BOUGHT: "A Perfect Circle's 'Mer de Noms.' I love Maynard (James Keenan) and I love Tool. It's a very cool record. It has a lot of the characteristics of Tool, but the music is a bit more gracious and forgiving and a little more feminine. It has a nice quality that's needed right now; it's not just all tear-your-face-apart kind of thing."

SPLENDER HAS RUNDGREN IN ITS CORNER

By GERRY GALIPAULT

(May 9, 1999)

It has been 10 years since Todd Rundgren, the wizard/true star, produced his last band, The Pursuit of Happiness. Though he was repeatedly offered chances to produce over the past decade, he couldn't be lured away from his own career, which included creating musical gizmos and pioneering on the Internet.

So, it says an awful lot about a new band for it to bring Rundgren back behind the boards.

The New York-based rock quartet Splender was "honored" to be the chosen ones, says bassist James Cruz.

"When we first met with Todd," Cruz said recently, "we were expecting a guru, this god, this immaculate person, but we was very down to earth and very exhausted-looking. He was coming off a tour called 'Todd With a Twist.' As soon as we started talking, it was right away to business. He was very direct, right upfront.

"We had gone after a lot of producers and he was the last one we thought would've answered. When he did answer, it was like, 'What?! Oh, my god.' Right away, you start thinking, at least I did, 'Okay, what does this mean now? This is no no-name guy or somebody only underground musicians know about. This was a legend.' Could we live up to it?"

Lead singer Waymon Boone said Rundgren, whose vast resume includes Grand Funk's "We're an American Band," Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" and XTC's "Skylarking," quickly put them at ease.

"We had a lot of phone conversations to get a sense of what he thought of the band and the songs," Boone said. "He let us know very early on that he was impressed with the songwriting and the pop sensibilities in the music. He liked the way the songs were structured, and he didn't feel the need to mess with the nucleus of the music. He always thought the demos were a great template for the album. It gave us confidence that we were already in the right direction.

"He was very vocal in the beginning, telling us that he really liked the music and really thought he had heard something special that he hasn't heard in other bands in a while. We were elated to hear something like that."

Splender's strong debut Columbia album, "Halfway Down the Sky" (out May 18), moves effortlessly from the jangly guitar rock of "I Don't Understand" to the borderline psychedelia of "London," along the way injecting a fierce view on love gone awry on the impressive first single, "Yeah, Whatever."

The album is the culmination of years of sweat and toil for Boone and Cruz, who have been together in a variety of bands since 1990. It finally fell into place when they teamed with guitarist Jonathan Svec and drummer Marc Slutsky nearly three years ago.

"We pounded the pavement around New York," Boone said, "sort of beating on everyone's door, walking around with demos coming out of every pocket and asking anyone who would be willing to listen. The only people that were willing to listen was this one publishing company. That was our first break, because they took us in and really worked with us and helped develop us, encourage us and give us the pat on the back that we needed. At the time, we were going through a lot of stress and anxiety because we had been playing for many years and not getting anywhere, and they were the first ones to step up and say they got it.

"Once we started working with them, we did a series of tours around the country. We went to Europe, we opened for Primus, we opened for Korn. Even still, it was years after that before we even made a dent toward making a (label) deal."

A self-professed incurable dreamer, Boone said he never lost faith.

"We always had the belief we would get somewhere, that at some point something good was going to happen," he said. "We've worked so hard that we are completely appreciative of what's going on now. At the same time, I think we've earned it. We've paid our dues."