It's an unlikely venue for the band's groove/funk sounds and doesn't exactly attract the usual crowd, but Soular Slide has no regrets about a recent Saturday night at the Time Out #1 on Fuqua. After all, the management is pretty cool, they pay well, and they even keep asking the group back (despite misspelling its name as "Solar" on ads and table tents).
Soular Slide wants to put the whole nation under its groove.
Details
Friday, July 20; 713-869-COOL
Fabulous Satellite Lounge, 3616 Washington Avenue
Related Content
More About
But since this is a blue-collar sports pub out in the burbs where the South begins, sometimes the music has to take a backseat, especially when NASCAR is at the wheel. It is Soular Slide's misfortune on this night to be up against the big race at Daytona. "Only eight more laps to go!" one fan glued to the big screen yells amid the increasing cheers and whoops. Many are on their feet in anticipation. Not one of them is paying attention to the band in the corner, more than an hour after its scheduled start time.
A few minutes later a huge roar erupts from the crowd as the lead car crosses the finish line: Sentimental favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr. has won on the same track where his father was killed in February.
"AWRIGHT! Let's give it up for Dale Earnhardt Jr.!" vocalist Shawn Pander exhorts the throng only seconds later, before making the smooth transition of a practiced front man. "We're Soular Slide -- and we're here to rock!"
With that, the multiethnic five-piece group -- Pander, David Wolfe (guitar), Mike Meade (bass), Greg Benavides (drums) and James Bourdier (keyboards, trombone) -- launches into one of its booty-bustin' numbers. And while some of the race fans are miffed they're missing the post-race interview, the 20 or so who have come specifically for the band groove and move and clap in their seats. The group's energetic Dave Matthews-meets-Stevie Wonder originals go over well; many of them, including "Ain't Nothin'" and the slinky crowd pleaser "Super Sexy," are from the debut CD, Too Tasty for Color TV. But they also can twist a cover or two.
"My mom's in the audience, so I've got to clean this up a bit," Pander says before launching into an utterly unique version of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer," changing Trent Reznor's original "fuck you like an animal" to the more sedate "love you like an animal." It's a good thing Pander spotted her -- sometimes Mom has yelled at him from the crowd to clean up the lyrics. It's cold, hard proof that while you may have Backstreet Boy good looks and a unique voice to make the girls go wild, the woman who changed your diapers is always your ultimate critic.
Pander and Wolfe first met in the mid-'90s while playing in an improv jazz band at San Jacinto College. Wolfe also had an eight-piece funk cover band, and Pander came aboard as a drummer. "We were doing all the standard funk covers, but I hated playing 'Brick House' and 'Play that Funky Music' over and over. I can't stand them to this day!" Wolfe laughs.
Eventually the pair began writing more originals, and Pander morphed into a lead singer as the group -- then called Slide -- began exploring smoother sounds, more Jamiroquai than Ohio Players. Pander and Wolfe also began to incorporate their own influences, ranging from the straight jazz and Donny Hathaway-style soul that Pander prefers to the hard rock and fusion that is Wolfe's passion. But they found out that a Virginia group had trademarked the name Slide. Meade had previously made some flyers for the group extolling its music as "original soular funk," so in August 1998 the band officially became Soular Slide.
"It means Houston, Space City music, but it also means soul music," Pander explains as he turns a table tent over in his hands. "Plus, it sounded good -- even if it's usually spelled wrong." The band began to circulate a four-track demo to find gigs but has since dismissed it as "garbage."
In 2000 the band (along with saxophonist Vince Lawrence) entered South Coast Recorders to lay down Too Tasty, a six-track EP that nicely and accurately captures Soular's sound, even if it's a bit conservatively produced.
With frequent local gigs, some traveling and a CD, Soular Slide joined the ranks of other Bayou City bands struggling to inch their way toward larger fame and fortune. And that's where the group might have stayed had it not made two very important decisions. The first was to alter the style and direction of the music. While they still play the funky dance tunes of Too Tastyin concert, they also have produced a three-song sampler that hints at a move toward an even smoother, more commercial and radio-friendly ballad sound.
"There's a huge difference between the older music and the new stuff," Wolfe says. "We've become less dependent on sax," though the band is looking for a new player, "and more focused on chord changes, melody and dynamics than filling out parts with horns and solos. We're also writing more poppy songs; pretty different from what we started off with."
Asked just how far they might go to change their music for a lucrative career, Wolfe notes that there is a fine line between maintaining their integrity and doing something that can sell. "You can't just swing too much one way or another," he offers. "We're not at a point where we can just go off and be artists and do things we love ourselves, [because] that brings two people to a show."
