Nothing fails like success

The Ataris may be famous, but they're not rich

By Newt Briggs

Don't talk to 32-year-old Johnny Collura about credibility. So he's in a power-punk band whose biggest claim to fame is a cover of Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer." It's not like he's one of those tattoo-by-numbers punks who got his first mohawk and landed a gig on Carson Daly the following week. No, he paid his dues on the road with his first band, Beefcake--an act best remembered for the fact that the lead singer frequently wore a diaper on stage.

"We probably sold about 5,000 records total," says Collura, who played guitar with Beefcake for three years. "We toured the entire country, and played every little small shithole in the world. We were lucky if we pulled in $50 a night."

Fortunately, the other band on the tour, the Ataris, was sympathetic to Beefcake's plight, and the SoCal four-piece regularly let Collura and company sleep on the floor of its hotel room. Two years later, when the Ataris needed a guitarist, they remembered Collura and added him to their roster. Little did Collura know that the band would soon turn a soft-rock standard into one of the most requested songs on alternative radio.

"It's amazing what people will buy, isn't it?" says Collura. "You can be the strangest, most fucked-up band in the world, but if you've got one song that makes sense to people who listen to the radio, it will suck them in. That doesn't mean that they're going to like the rest of your record or that they'll come to see you live. But if you're talking about pure record sales and just being noticed, that's very attainable."

And it doesn't hurt when a band has a follow-up power-pop diamond like "The Saddest Song" in its back pocket. Although it did not chart as high as "The Boys of Summer," "The Saddest Song" liberated the Ataris from the one-hit-wonder curse of Alien Ant Farm and instantly doubled the band's FM airtime.

"The majority of the people who listen to the radio are going to work," says Collura. "They've got anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to catch what's on the radio. And for most of that time, it's either going to be something catchy or something that's real easy to digest. You're not going to hear shit from Pedro the Lion or the Weakerthans or Cursive. The Alkaline Trio didn't even get very much play, and they had a bunch of good songs on their last album. That's the problem, people just can't comprehend it."

Apparently fans didn't have any such trouble with the Ataris--a mixed blessing, according to Collura. Although he initially assumed that a gold album would launch him into a new tax bracket, he quickly learned that a few chart-topping singles aren't nearly enough to fill the rock 'n' roll piggy bank.

"There's definitely not the luxuries that people may think," Collura says. "People say, like, `Oh, wow, you've got this bus and all of these people,' but they don't realize that it all comes out of our guarantee. I mean, 30 percent goes to people that aren't even there--the manager, the booking agent, the business manager. Then there are the costs for the bus and employees and merchandise and insurance and a whole bunch of other bullshit. Fuck, if there's anything after that, maybe you'll get a cut of that."

As proof of his financial distress, Collura cites the fact that he owns neither house nor apartment. Granted, he's come a long way since Beefcake, but he's far from the solvency he imagined while sprawled out on the crusty carpet of a Motel 6.

"Thank God my mother still lets me crash at the house," says Collura. "Do you know what a house costs in New York? And I'm not even talking about the city, I'm talking about upstate. The taxes alone will fucking kill you."