Adema is back and aiming to please
By: Rob Bailey - The Arizona Daily Star
October 17th 2003 12:59am
Tim Fluckey had an alarming experience last time he visited Tucson.
The band Adema's wild-haired guitarist has logged at least a half-dozen tour stops in Arizona in the past year alone. He admits that he's been here so many times he's losing track - the number could be even higher.
"We played a show in Phoenix, and Marky (Chavez) mentioned the wrong city, which was pretty funny 'cause worse things can happen," said Fluckey, who's struggling to maintain an even cool after three months of headlining rock clubs, which was preceded by a month of co-headlining with Powerman 5000 and several months in Europe opening for Linkin Park before that.
Adema returns to town Sunday as the opening act for the multiplatinum, double Grammy-nominated rock band Godsmack.
"I was walking to my hotel room the last time I was there, or maybe it was the time before last, but all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off and this guy starts screaming 'Get down! You need to get down,' " Fluckey howled, re-enacting his Tucson trauma. "I'm 6' 9" and my hair was tripping the alarm. I had to crouch down the rest of my time there. They ended up giving me two free nights. I wanna go back and bend over (laughing raucously)."
Leave it to Fluckey to be, uh, accommodating. After all, Adema - frontman Chavez, guitarist Mike Ransom, bassist Dave DeRoo and drummer Kris Kohls - has a rock solid rep as a fan's band.
Fluckey said he and his bandmates especially strive for "fan-oriented tours" via their interactive Web site, www.ademaonline.com
"We have a lot of contest giveaways and stuff, but most of all we meet fans," said Fluckey, as if this practice were common. "We park the bus where fans can come up after the show. On a lot of big shows they're parked away where you can't get at them. But a lot of fans wait by the gate. It's a matter of going out there and talking to the people that got you there. Radio and MTV like you for 10 minutes, then you're gone. You have to make time and treat your fans right."
Some high-profile rock tomes can be included in that growing fan base.
Britain's New Music Express: "Adema's visceral, artfully succinct rock punch comes brilliantly wrapped in killer whistleable tunes."
Rolling Stone: "Moody, hard and melodic, guitarists Ransom and Fluckey go beyond the genre's generic crunch and offer a creative palette of soaring solos, singing lines and textures."
The fact that the band's self-titled debut CD and its new release, "Unstable" (Arista; $18.08), earned solid stripes from critics is secondary, Fluckey said.
"Those are people's opinions - some are good, some are really bad - and we read them for fun," Fluckey said. "We never expected that much. We went out thinking, 'Let's write the best songs we can, tour and get a fan base.' We weren't concerned with radio and MTV because those things really are fleeting."
The riff-heavy band never shies away from baring its emotions amid a vigorous pursuit of melody.
Drawing inspiration less from metal contemporaries than from the likes of U2 and Nirvana, Adema's new CD ranges from the delicate "So Fortunate" (written about Chavez's infant son) to the grim, vitriolic "Needles," which was inspired by a family member's struggle with heroin addiction.
Adema has shared stages with of the biggest names in contemporary heavy and nü metal, from Disturbed and Drowning Pool to Linkin Park, Ozzy Osbourne and Korn (Chavez is frontman Jonathan Davis' half-bro, by the way).
Fluckey claims his band is just an old-fashioned rock outfit.
"But that encompasses a ton of different bands in this day and age," he said. "We're not reinventing the wheel; we just wanna write good songs and put on a good show for our fans. It's redundant, but that's our philosophy. We're not heavy metal; we're just a rock band."
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