Soundkindergarden...Nirvana in Pajamas...Silverhighchair... Daniel Johns has heard all of the joke nicknames for his band. silverchair has sold 3 million records worldwide, toured with the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, performed on "Saturday Night Live," landed magazine covers and played major radio festivals- but no one has been able to ignore the fact that the guys aren't old enough to buy cigarettes.
"The most unfair thing is people who think I have a limited range of life experiences, that it's not possible ;to have feelings at 17 or 18," vocalist/guitarist Johns, who turned 18 this month, said recently. silverchair will perform at the Ogden Theatre on Wednesday night.
"But go ask any teenager if they can be pessimistic or resentful or angry , and they'll (bleeping) tell you!"
Johns thought he would grow up to be a surfer or a plumber.With bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies, he went from jamming in a garage back home in a small Austrailian town to winning a demo-tape contest run by a TV show. The prize was a day n a recording studio, and the teen threesome recut "Tomorrow," an anthemic track that could have been a Pearl Jam song.
It launched a startlingly rapid climb. The debut album Frogstomp entered the Austrailian charts at No.1, and silverchair swept the 1995 Austrailian Record Industry Awards (the Aussie equivalent of the Grammys). In America, Frogstomp reached double-platinum status and established the band as the most potent rock export from Down Under in a decade.
silverchair's music draws upon straightforward, familiar elements of the Seattle sound-the quiet verses and the hyper chourses, the forceful percussion and the mighty guitars, the angst, the energy and attitude of the lyrics. The new album Freak Show keeps the intensity intact while developing a more proficient style.
"Abuse Me" is an alternative hit, with Johns moaning"C'mon abuse me more I like it" to silverchair's detractors.
"It's basically saying '(bleep) you' to all those people who gave us crap- we don't really care."
According to Johns, the new single "Freak" is about the accelerated arowth rate he's undergone- "Being an outsider, being perceived as a lot diffrent from everyone else when you're not."
The rest of Freak Show is surprisingly polished. The wailing "Lie to Me" is an 80-second punk song, and the ballad "Cemetery" features violins that actually seem to lament.
"Both albums have a hard-core element to them- we like Helmet, Korn and Rollins Band,"Johns explained. " But from the start, the main influence on us was Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. We only started getting into the other stuff later."
Grappling with fame as an underage grunge savior, Johns has a "let's just rock" attitude.
"With our first album release, it was just getting our music out to people. With the second album, we wanted to experiment a lot more and try some stuff out, but the industry didn't want us to go too far away from what we did on the first album. Now that it's done over a million copies in America, we're not considered a one-hit-wonder band anymore.
"So if people can't take us seriously, they're never going to. We don't care if the third album goes bad. We're allowing ourselves to have as much freedom as we want. From here on we're just going to play music until we're sick of it."