By Eliot Wilder / Reasons why you would want to be a pop star: Multiplatinum-sized ego stroking, mostly from the opposite sex. Paparazzi snapping your mug at ever turn. Folks poring through your garbage as if your refuse were treasure. Best seat in the restaurant. Access to any event of your choice without having to wait in line. Your very own fans, both crazed and semi-sane. And, oh yeah, money. Pots and pots of money. Who wouldn't want a mink like Keyshawn Johnson's or a Benz like Lil' Romeo's or an uptown pad like Mariah Carey's?

Curiously, there are those who are in it just for the music. They call these folks musicians. These musicians usually reside in modest apartments, drive cars that were not manufactured in the last 10 years and frequently have what's known as a "day job" in order to pay the rent and put food on the table. Some live better than others, but material wealth is not the aim. Writing a good song is. Because for musicians, it's all about the music.

Consider the Gigolo Aunts. Not likely that they'll produce a line of J Lo-style perfumes in the near future. Not likely that you'll see them on "TRL." Not likely that they will have a Top 10 - or even a Top 200 - hit. So, why on God's great green Earth do they continue to do what they do? Perhaps it's because they are under the somewhat misguided notion that being a musician is in some way noble. Or, better yet, perhaps it's because they love what they do.

Talking with Aunts' main man Dave Gibbs, one senses that it's all about love for the songs that he writes as well as for the ones he listened to as a kid. "All four of the original band members - Steve Hurley and his brother Phil, Paul Brouwer and myself - grew up in the late '70s in Potsdam, a tiny town in upstate New York," says the loquacious vocalist and guitarist on the phone from his current residence in West Hollywood. "It's a small college town and there wasn't a lot to do other than listen to Canadian radio stations, and they played everything from new wave to what would now consider classic rock. You'd hear Joe Jackson mixed in with Lynyrd Skynryd. There was no difference to me between Elvis Costello and Blue Oyster Cult - I just thought that they were all cool."

Because it was from Canada, Gibbs and his pals were also a fed a healthy dose of Neil Young and Rush, in addition to more obscure Canuck new wavers like the King Bees, Harlequin and Martha & the Muffins. "That's what we listened to because that's what came in on the radio," he relates. "Finally, a record store opened, which was a banner day for us. One of the records I bought was the Saints' '(I'm) Stranded'; instantly, even to our 12-year-old brains, we thought, We could do that!" Following their instincts, shortly thereafter they started a group under the name Sniper: "In our insignia, the 'i' was a bullet, which we thought was badass looking." (Gibbs says that "once when a Pizza Hut opened, they poured some fresh cement for the sidewalk, and we put our Sniper logo in it - and it's still there till this day!" Next time you're in Potsdam be sure to check it out.)

Ready to carve out a niche in more than just a slab of sidewalk, the band - which had now grown out of the scrappy garage sound of Sniper and into the more polished pop of Gigolo Aunts - set its sites on Boston. Unfortunately, in 1986, the jangly R.E.M.-ish sound they were strumming was on its way out and garage metal was breaking. "We just didn't fit in. We were playing a style of music that wasn't cool at all. From then until this day we've always been horribly out of sync. OK, there was a time in the early '90s when we were almost right there - but since then, we've always been ahead or horrifically behind."

But the big move to Beantown did prove to be an eye-opener, because other than having seen Peter Frampton on his last "Comes Alive" legs and "Beatlemania" ("twice!") in Canada, none of the Aunts actually knew what it was like to be a performing unit. But that would quickly change as the band toured extensively and exhaustively and, finally, in '88 they released their debut on Coyote Records, the rather lackadaisically received "Everybody Happy." But the album did begin an odyssey for the band, one that would see them hopscotch from label to label and into and out of a wasp nest of legal wrangles - all the while cooking up horribly out of sync music that just happens to also be catchy and crunchy as hell and ultimately brilliant in its own uncool way. Which makes it a shame that many of the band's recordings are not so easy to come by. Blame equal parts naivete and the often strange and dark machinations in the music industry. "As Coyote fell apart," Gibbs says, "we were halfway done with another album, so this crazy dude from this record store in Spain said, 'I'll give you a thousand dollars if you finish the record!' And we're like, 'OK!' And with that we made 'Tales From the Vinegar Side,' which has never seen the light of day over here."

Undeterred, the Aunts kept playing and touring, and "finally we got a clue. We figured out our own little sound. When we started the band, we really wanted to be democratic. We thought that we'd have three singers and each of us would take a turn, sometimes even in the same song." A stint touring as a guitarist with Velvet Crush served as a wake-up call for Gibbs. "I was blown away by them. They were miles ahead of us, but doing the same thing we wanted to do. It was at that point, around 1990, that we decided that we had to get our shit together. We'd been fucking around since 1979, we'd been a band since 1986, so we basically moved in to our rehearsal studio and we got good. We tried to do what we wanted to do instead of what we thought was going to be happening in the Boston scene. We wanted to write really melodic songs that actually rocked. And instantly a whole bunch of songs came pouring out."

The material that they recorded during this fecund period was released as a series of singles, one of which ended up in the offices of Fire, a small English label. Figuring that no one in American wanted them and believing it would be a hip thing to do, Gigolo Aunts inked a deal, a decision that "would later come back to bite us on the ass," Gibbs sighs. "Everybody begged us not to do it, but we did it anyway." It was that particular deal that kept the group, well, kept for many years.

In 1992, Fire put out "Flippin' Out," a reverb-soaked, guitar-drenched record that, Gibbs admits, was very much of its time - that being the peak of grunge. The U.K. loved the album, but the Aunts were finding it difficult to get signed in the U.S., where not only groups like Nirvana and Sonic Youth were selling boatloads of LPs, but also more pop-oriented bands like the Poises, Teenage Fanclub and Sloan weren't doing so badly, either. But Gigolo Aunts were having a tough time latching onto the gravy train because "nobody would deal with our English label because the owner, Clive Soloman, was kind of crazy and he was demanding all these things. Clive had great taste - he'd initially signed bands like the Farm, Pulp, Lemonheads and Teenage Fanclub, all of which he sold to other labels. But for some reason, he signed us and he just wouldn't let us go." Understandably, prospective American labels like Atlantic, Zoo and Geffen were put off by Fire's conditions for signing the Aunts; specifically, Soloman wanted to license out his band.

"Finally," Gibbs sighs, "RCA, because they were in such dire straits at the time, said, 'Fuck it, we'll do this deal with you.' It was horrible. It involved all these terrible percentages for us in which we could sell a million records and still not make a dime." None of that mattered much, because when RCA released "Flippin' Out" stateside, the album, although critically well received, failed to sell enough to impress the suits upstairs.

Not everything was so dreadful though, because while touring behind the Cranberries and Suede, Gigolo Aunts were befriended by Counting Crows' Adam Duritz, who continues to be a major booster and a benefactor. Duritz also proved to be Gigolo Aunts' liberator, freeing them from the evil clutches of Fire and various legal hassles, and then signing them to his short-lived E Pluribus Unum label, which released "Minor Chords & Major Themes" in '99. (Post "Flippin' Out," the Aunts did record a still-unreleased record for RCA: "It was a terrible album through and through," Gibbs says. "It was just awful; very heavy, dark and stiff sounding.") "Minor Chords," on the other hand, was a breath of fresh pop air, the album that they had long been threatening to make. "We'd been touring on these songs and we knew what we were after. It turned out exactly the way we wanted, right down to the artwork."

Alas, "Minor Chords" was not the huge seller everyone had hoped it would be. But do you think that would stop our intrepid Gigolo Aunts? After all, these guys are musicians, and musicians, as stated earlier, are in it for the music. Which brings us to "Pacific Ocean Blues," the latest from the group, which currently includes Gibbs, bassist Steve Hurley, guitarist John Skibic and drummer Fred Eltringham. Its title, a wave to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's great, long-lost solo endeavor, says it all: chiming and wistful West Coast pop.

Although it began with Gibbs and Hurley just hanging out and laying down tracks when they felt so inspired, the band, which had been splintering in the last few years, slowly gathered together to record what is perhaps the definitive Aunts album. "Blues" also brings the group full circle, back to the type of tunes that they loved in their youth, and back to Spain, where the Bittersweet label (Boston's Q Division Records is now distributing it domestically) put it out last year to great fanfare: "Spain is awesome," Gibbs exclaims, "as any country of hot-blooded people will be. They are passionate about everything - food, sex, wine and rock 'n' roll. Those Spaniards are fucking into it."

They are also fucking into Gigolo Aunts, which is allowing this out-of-sync gang of musicians a justly deserved shot at superstardom. Yep, finally, it's time for Gigolomania. Who says you can't have it all? Viva Gigolo Aunts!

From Amplifier magazine