Oh, What a Mangled Web We Leave

The rest of the band figured out ways to get by. Ferrari worked as a substitute teacher, and the band did everything from eating out of garbage cans to donating plasma to fund tours. Their base of operations was a fleabag hang nicknamed the Hollywood House.

"We had, like, eight dudes in the same house and we were all just doing drugs and fuckin' the same bitches on the same days, sometimes at the same time, just getting rowdy," Ferrari recalls. "We had a guy living in the laundry room. Jamie lived in the garage. Everybody played in a band."

"You kinda just did whatever you had to do to make it," Decious says. "It was 'all for one and one for all' at that point, y'know?"

They would spend about 250 days a year touring, playing whatever venues would have them. Oftentimes, they'd earn just enough to give everyone a $3 per day road budget—scarcely enough for a pack of cheap cigarettes, and the band smoked a lot. Eventually, they made friends with members of the band Sadaharu, who put them in touch with C.I. Records, a Pennsylvania-based independent label specializing in dour, self-serious bands with names like Once Nothing and August Burns Red. C.I. made room on their roster for the Spiders' cheerfully decadent bubblegum punk, and their debut full-length Hot Pink was released in January 2005.

The album cover was designed to look like the sleeve of a well-worn early '60s teen pop record—all three members posed smiling and stiff-kneed with their instruments. The time warp touch continued on the album, which begins with the pop of a needle hitting a record and hisses and crackles in between songs.

The album found the Spiders refining both their sound and their image. They had become more confident as musicians and more adept at plucking what they liked from the pop music pantheon—shades of Elvis Costello, Mötley Crüe and Cheap Trick creep in—and weaving it into their own lean pop framework. Almost every song is a two-minute romp down a fantasyland Sunset Strip loaded with easy drugs and dangerous women.

It was good enough to raise eyebrows in Los Angeles. Friction re-established contact with Jason Hollis, an old friend from Nashville who had moved to Los Angeles. Hollis put them in touch with Dan Catullo, a well-connected music-DVD producer, and the two took on the role of managing the band. It wasn't long before Catullo had secured them a gig that most hungry young bands would kill for: a private major-label showcase at L.A.'s Viper Room.

Located on the real-life Sunset Strip, the Viper Room is virtually synonymous with Hollywood decadence—it's best known, depending on whom you ask, as the elite nightspot once co-owned by Johnny Depp, the site of River Phoenix's untimely death by overdose in 1993, or the club that filled in for London Fog in Oliver Stone's The Doors. It was the perfect location for the Pink Spiders to strut their stuff to a crowd filled with major-label suits. They called their old friend Dave Paulson, today The Tennessean's pop music critic, who was then scraping by in Nashville on two minimum-wage restaurant jobs while fronting the pop-rock band The Privates. They asked him to come out and play second guitar for the show, and he accepted. The four camped out together in an apartment/storage space above Catullo's recording studio.

On March 2, 2005, the night of the showcase, the band was nervous but confident. Their set was an unqualified success.

"We played...to a room full of suits who were madly texting on their BlackBerrys the entire time," says Friction. "After the set, the curtains closed and Jordan Schur [then president of Geffen Records] ran onstage. He was immediately stopped by security but just barreled through them."

"He was like, 'I gotta have this band!!!' with his arms wide open and all that," says Ferrari, "and we were like, 'That guy's cool!' "

After they finished their set, they moved through the crowd, shaking hands and fielding offers. In a matter of weeks, they had 11 major-label offers on the table. Paulson was in awe—his old friends appeared poised to take over the world.

"I think [the Pink Spiders are] the kind of band that, with the right song, would just translate to radio immediately," says Paulson. "In my head, I was like, 'This is the kind of band where, you know, the machine could work.' "

After meeting with other labels, they walked into the Geffen offices to find themselves greeted by the entire label staff with a pizza party in the conference room. Schur, a fountain of boundless enthusiasm for the boys, introduced them as "the newest artists on Geffen Records." It was Schur's support, coupled with Geffen's impressive rock legacy (Weezer, Nirvana, The Pixies, Guns N' Roses), that sealed the deal. After a period of aggressive negotiating, The Pink Spiders signed their major-label contract.

"The contract we signed was supposedly the best a new band had gotten in years," says Friction. If nothing else, it was indicative of the enormous confidence Schur had in the band's bankable appeal. And what wasn't to like? The band had snappy outfits and jaunty pop-punk pizzazz—and they were ready, in industry lingo, to play ball. Friction was brought on as a songwriter for the label, and they were guaranteed tour support, publicity and a major push for TV and radio. Each member also walked away with roughly $30,000 in label advance money after the businessmen got paid. And they even got to celebrate, major-label style. Sort of.