— by Corey Moss
After struggling with gigs as a limo driver, a plumber's assistant and a Gap greeter, Scott Thomas finally thought he was onto something when he started designing clothes for celebrities.
And then his designs starting showing up on awards shows.
"I'd be watching the Grammys and see people picking up awards, and go 'Hey, that's my design. Too bad they aren't picking out clothes for me, and I was going up there, picking up that thing,' " Thomas recalled.
The envy eventually drove Thomas to leave behind clients like No Doubt and Sean Penn and dedicate his time to his longtime love, music.
The Lafayette, California, native (he usually calls nearby Berkeley home) has been obsessed with rock and roll since his childhood, when an uncle willed him a massive album collection that ranged from the Rolling Stones and Neil Young to Cat Stevens and Nick Drake.
"I would get into the whole ritual of playing a record and I'd just sit and figure those chords out and everything," Thomas recalled. "I never realized that I was learning how to write songs, but I guess I picked something up."
Apparently, Thomas also picked up a rocker's rebellious spirit, and after getting into a fight with his high school dean, he was expelled. So he moved down to Los Angeles to live with a cousin. Eventually, he moved out on his own, living out of a 1982 Camaro and crashing on friends' couches.
Through one of those friends, he was introduced to actor Balthazar Getty of "Lost Highway" fame.
"His mom was having a party with some real interesting types in the Hollywood Hills, and we went downstairs, and had a smoke and he turned me on to the [esoteric vocal group] Bulgarian Voices," Thomas recalled. "He was like 14 at the time, and we sat down cross-legged on the floor — actually, Timothy Leary was there at the party and he came down, and from there it was like instantly best friends."
Thomas and Getty, who were both making (quite different) music at time, eventually moved in together. "He'd be doing beats upstairs and I'd be downstairs writing songs, but we never thought to put it together until recently," Thomas said.
Initially, Thomas considered their collaboration a side project from his solo material, but after the music got such a positive response from friends, he decided to bring even the most personal of his songs to Getty. The end result was a hodgepodge of singer/songwriter and electronic elements in a vein similar to the Postal Service.
Inspired by a pair of miniature boxing gloves hanging from Getty's rearview mirror, they named themselves Ringside. "For six months we tried to come up with another name — and we just couldn't beat that name that we came up with in 13 seconds," Thomas said. "That name kind of goes with the music. It feels active, it's fun, we're not taking ourselves too seriously. When we made this record, the more absurd the sound or the beat or the lyric was, the more excited we'd get about it."
As demos circulated, the duo started getting record-label interest.
"I was actually getting kicked out of my house and I asked for an additional 24 hours, and that night, we got a call that we had an offer coming in from a label," Thomas said. "And that made it a lot easier to ask for another 48 hours — which turned into another four months, but I was able to stay."
The offer came from the most unlikely of places: Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst and his Flawless Records (home to Staind, Cold and Puddle of Mudd).
"I was really feeling like I had been pigeonholed into signing bands that fell into rock, and I was more interested in other things," Durst said. "I'd signed an artist named Kenna, who eventually dropped off the label, but he'd come back and say, 'Hey man, these guys are doing this thing and it's really cool. You'd like it a lot.' So I listened to it and I loved it immediately."
After meeting and bonding over vintage furniture and a mutual love for Joy Division and Depeche Mode, Durst signed the group. Instead of giving them a recording budget, he paid for them to build a studio, and then let them be.
"We didn't use another producer or nothing," Thomas said. "And the great thing is, most of the record was written by the time we got the deal, so most of what you hear on the record, we're just making music that we liked and never had to worry or think about what a single should be or sounds like. We just made music that we liked."
That music, including the single "Tired of Being Sorry," is featured on the band's self-titled debut, due April 19.
"I know Balthazar is in the band and it's Hollywood they signed to Fred Durst's label and all these things, but if you take it all away, it's still the real deal," Durst said.
As for Thomas' future in fashion? "I'm following P. Diddy's footsteps, I'm going to wait until I can go big," he joked.
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