It's safe to say that Local H's Scott Lucas won't be appearing on VH1's upcoming I Love the 90s. "That disgusts me so much that it's laughable," he says when told about the program, a sequel to the channel's popular I Love the 80s and I Love the 70s nostalgia-fests. "I just want to go down there and strangle somebody, because I cannot remember the last time I saw anything relating to music on that station that wasn't the most superficial thing of all time."
You might expect someone like Lucas to be a little more gracious, considering that his band had just one hit in the alt-rock era and then faded from pretty much everyone's memory. "Bound for the Floor," from Local H's 1996 second album, As Good as Dead, was a relatively modest hit on modern rock radio back in the halcyon days of grunge. Doesn't ring a bell? Maybe the chorus will jog your memory: "And you just don't get it / You keep it copacetic / And you learn to accept it / You know it's so pathetic." It's the kind of tune that would show up on an alt-rock station's Flashback Weekend and get a few "Hey, that sounds familiar" from listeners.
But unlike so many one-hit wonders of that time, Local H did not go gentle into that good night. Singer-guitarist-songwriter Lucas and drummer Joe Daniels put out a follow-up to As Good as Dead, 1998's Pack up the Cats, before losing their major-label deal, just as plenty of their peers did. When Daniels left the band, Lucas persisted, recruiting drummer Brian St. Clair and releasing two more albums independently, the latest of which is Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?
Lucas takes the band's flirtations with success in stride, simply focusing on playing music and not harboring any regrets. "It's kind of always been the point of the band, to never get yourself into a situation where you have to regret anything," he says. He doesn't mind trotting out the one hit, but he's just as happy to leave it behind. "When we get tired of it, we stop playing it," he says simply. "We did a couple tours where we didn't play it, and no one's really seemed to mind. We just brought it back recently, and I've enjoyed playing it. It is what it is. I don't think we place too much importance on it one way or the other," he adds.
At the same time, the title of the band's latest record, a reference to '80s teen actress Soles who appeared in films like Rock 'n' Roll High School and Halloween, seems to imply that they've got a certain degree of bitterness about their fall from fame.
"It's more of a reaction to the kind of cult of celebrity," Lucas says of the album title. "I don't equate our band with P.J. Soles at all." Rather than bemoan being out of the spotlight, Lucas hopes to criticize the spotlight itself. "That's kind of one of the points of the record," he says, "that just because people don't know where these people are anymore, or they don't have people shoved down their throats like we have Jennifer Lopez shoved down our throats, it doesn't mean these people aren't alive and aren't living productive lives."
As for the inevitable Local H mention on VH1, possibly snarked on by Hal Sparks or Michael Ian Black, Lucas has no time for it. "I have no idea who these people are that are commenting on these things," he says, clearly impassioned. "Who is this person that they're always asking for quotes from, and what have they done? That's what really bothers me. It's like, who are these smartasses, and what have they done, and what kind of contribution to culture have they made? What gives them the right to comment on anyone? They've got to make some snarky comment about Vanilla Ice? He's done more than they have, and that's saying a lot."