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-- by Joe D'Angelo
If you've never heard of Kara's Flowers, the band that would eventually become Maroon 5, singer Adam Levine won't be offended.
The Los Angeles quartet sounded like what you'd expect a band named Kara's Flowers to sound like. One of a few dozen indistinguishable alt.lite bands that mushed through the mid-'90s, like the Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket and Deep Blue Something, Kara's Flowers released their first album, The Fourth World, in 1997, and two years later found themselves dropped by their label.
They continued as a band, however, and a few songs into their set one night in early 2000, Levine decided he didn't have much to lose and introduced the crowd to some new material he'd been working on. Not everyone into Kara's Flowers' pop-rock sound was open to their R&B-inspired new tunes, and that was just fine by Levine.
"I craved to alienate those people because they were so dumb," Levine remembered. "I'm serious. It was L.A. and with everything that was going on in music, I had this weird dislike for the kind of close-minded attitude the scene I found myself in had. ... We were really burned out on how everybody was doing the same thing. We wanted to do something that would alienate our fans, but eventually help us develop a more unique sound."
That sound was more Stevie Wonder than Semisonic, and the schism it created was an indication of what waited for them around the bend. One of Levine's future bandmates was at the show that night and witnessed the fans' response.
"I was actually in the crowd when they debuted one of these first songs that started to incorporate soul and contemporary R&B influences," Maroon 5 guitarist James Valentine remembered. "It was like a line had been drawn in the sand among their fans. Some of them were like, 'Wow, that's the coolest thing I ever heard.' And others just completely jumped ship."
From a business standpoint, Levine couldn't afford to lose any of the 5,000 or so fans who bought The Fourth World. Mentally and creatively, however, it was an essential first step in getting Maroon 5 off the ground.
On the backs of two hit singles, Maroon 5's Songs About Jane has been bounding up the Billboard albums chart, going from #120 to #11 since January 1. The funky "Harder to Breathe" introduced the band late last year as R&B-influenced groove makers, while its follow-up, the bouncing, soulful "This Love," strengthened the group's fresh multi-dimensional appeal, and helped position it as one of the year's break-out bands.
Maroon 5's recent success, however, was the result of a long, bloodless battle. When Songs About Jane was first released in June 2002, it dropped amidst little fanfare. By taking a firm hold of their career and adhering to a demanding tour schedule, Maroon 5 managed to claw their way up.
"We've been on the road now exactly two years," keyboardist Jesse Carmichael explained. "About a year ago, we started to get hotel rooms instead of sleeping in a van. Then we got a bus, and at that point we were as excited as we thought we'd ever get."
The bandmembers were absolutely elated, then, to be temporarily pulled off the road, where they'd been opening for friend and frequent tourmate John Mayer, and jetted off to their next gig, a performance on "Saturday Night Live."
"To have 'Saturday Night Live' call is just crazy," Carmichael said the night before the show. "It's not even registering. We're still too excited about having our own hotel rooms."
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Photo: Octone/J
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