WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Music - Lashes frontman eyes rock history
By Brian Truitt
Examiner Staff Writer
Published: Monday, February 20, 2006 9:23 PM EST


Like many future rock stars, Ben Clark spent some of his younger years plying his trade behind the clerk's desk at a record store. Instead of becoming a hipper-than-thou record-store snob, he opened his mind to anything and everything.

"I'm the guy who will back up No Doubt if I get a chance to," Clark says with a laugh. "My guilty pleasures I'm not that guilty about."

He'll tell you all about his guilty pleasures if you ask, from the Archies to bad dance-party hip-hop, and the lead singer of the Lashes has let all sorts of bands - including ones he wouldn't be caught dead listening to at one time, like the Cure - become influences on his band's music.

"Get It," the major-label debut for the Seattle six-piece, offers 11 songs with varying themes - but mostly having to do with women Clark has or had a crush on, he says. "That story doesn't change. Even though all the other stuff goes well, there's always at least one girl who's not into me that I get to write songs about."

Years before he put down his thoughts about his female trouble du jour and started doing crazy dance moves on a stage, sans guitar following a flaming amp incident in 2003 ("I kinda liked how dangerous it was," he says of not hiding behind an instrument).

Clark worked at record store in his hometown of Spokane, Wash. Already a music fan thanks to his Beatles-loving parents and listening to oldies radio stations, he was able to embrace obscure bands and music he wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise.

"In high school, all the kids wearing Cure T-shirts looked really scary and I was like, 'Man, I don't think I'd be into the Cure. I don't look scary,' " Clark recalls. "Lots of those bands that I'd grown up having strong opinions on and arguments at 4 in the morning about, about what their purpose was in rock 'n' roll, working in a record store and being with people who all have completely different styles that they're into and everybody has a chance to play stuff for the rest of the people, I definitely gained a lot of understanding for a lot of different things.

"Some people go to record stores and they get more jaded and more snobby. I went to the record store and I decided to actually learn what the snobby people were listening to."

What's he listening to now? Small late '70s power-pop bands like the Raspberries.

"We're all such music fans and we buy so many records and it's what we geek out on," Clark says. "It's what we love."