No Vacancy at Finn's Motel
By Daniel Durchholz
SPECIAL TO THE POST DISPATCH

Joe Thebeau has been a musician - and an adult - long enough that he doesn't have to kid himself about his musical accomplishments or his standing in the world. His soon-to-be released CD, "Escape Velocity," recorded under the band name Finn's Motel, is, according to a biographical note on his MySpace page, "the product of a pushing-40 married-with-children rock guy."

"You write about what you know," says Thebeau, seated in his basement recording studio with two of his Finn's Motel bandmates, bassist Steve Scariano and guitarist James Weber. The band also includes drummer Patrick Hawley.

"There would be no point in me trying to sit down and write a bunch of songs to tailor them toward a certain audience," Thebeau says.

When he started making demo recordings for the songs back in 2003, Thebeau wasn't thinking about a possible CD release. He was merely escaping from his erstwhile day job in software development, and tinkering with computers and other equipment he'd accumulated.

"The goal was just to get through the process of writing and recording," he says.

St. Louis rock fans with a longish memory know Thebeau best as the leader of the late-'80s/early '90s power-pop outfit the Finn Brothers, later known simply as the Finns. The Finn moniker comes from a motel sign on Interstate 44 near St. James.

More recently, Thebeau has become active on the music scene again as an adjunct member of Magnolia Summer and Prisonshake. But in the past decade or so, little of Thebeau's original music has been put before the general public.

"I don't think I ever stopped writing songs," he says. "I just stopped playing them for anybody."

Once Scariano and Hawley heard his demos, however, their positive reinforcement kicked the project into a higher gear.

"I was at a low point in terms of confidence, and these guys said, 'Oh, these are good songs, we'd play on these,'" Thebeau says. "And that kind of brought me up out of the doldrums, and we started making it into a real thing."

Another friend, Robert Griffin, owner of the intrepid yet quirky independent label Scat that relocated to St. Louis from Cleveland a few years back, also heard the music and offered to release a CD.

Thebeau says of working with Scat: "You can't even imagine how many times I've gone through the cycle of 'intimidated by/befriended by/angry with' and back again. But the reason I thought it was a good idea to go with Robert is because the contentiousness resulted in some creative energy. That sounds kind of hippie, but I don't care."

"Escape Velocity" went through a number of permutations before it reached its final form.

"It's gone back and forth between being just a collection of songs to being three EPs that were going to come out as a three-act play," Thebeau says with a laugh. "There were even spoken word bits! We opted for the more conservative approach rather than letting me completely indulge myself."

The CD theme of corporate disaffection, suburban malaise and dreams of escaping to a better life are expressed through rich and complex language. There's everything from a paean to Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen to a circle-of-life-style mediation on roadkill. But the music is direct, electric and melodious, reflecting the influence of bands such as the Beatles and Cheap Trick, whose posters hang on the walls of Thebeau's studio.

"Once those sounds become a part of your DNA, it's unavoidable that when you're expressing yourself, you're going to use that language, too," he says. "My favorite records are probably showing through whether I want them to or not."

And yet the whole of the album sounds like nothing so much at Thebeau himself, that pushing-40 married-with-children rock guy.

Scariano says: "I go way back with Joe, from when he was in the Finns. When I first heard the demos, having heard nothing new from Joe in a long while, it struck me that, wow, this is exactly where someone who keeps progressing and getting better, taking that original Finns sound and maturing 10 years, would do. That's what you would hope an artist would do. And it blew me away."

Thebeau says now that the spotlight is back on him and he's no longer just a sideman or a guy tinkering in his basement, he's not nervous about the album's impending release Sept. 19 nor his band's upcoming tour, which will take them eastward to New York and back.

"I would be freaked out if we were going up there and doing something I didn't think was worth doing," he says. "I've been in situations before where we forced it, and it didn't feel right. But I feel a surge of energy from this. We're going to have fun."