Not Out of the Woods Yet : No Strangers to Stress, T.S.O.L. Singer and Wife Foresee New Challenges From Solo Careers

The first time Joe and D.D. Wood met, he praised her beauty and she slighted his singing.

“He said, ‘Well, the rumor’s true--you’re as pretty as everybody says you are,’ ” D.D. recalled with a laugh. “I said, ‘Thanks, but I still think my brother was better in T.S.O.L. than you are.’ ”

The debate over who was better in T.S.O.L. has been going on since 1983, when Joe replaced D.D.’s older brother, Jack Grisham, as the band’s lead singer. Some local rock fans still prefer the original Huntington Beach/Long Beach punk band led by the charismatic, mercurial Grisham. Others favor T.S.O.L. as fronted by Wood, a far more stable band that progressed in a dark, gritty, blues-and-metal, hard-rock direction.

Back when the band first had been revamped, Wood said, some of Grisham’s old fans would come to the shows and spit on Wood while he sang. Jack’s sister was more forgiving. Within two months of their first meeting, she and Wood were living together at her mother’s house in Long Beach (which made for an interesting domestic configuration, since brother Jack continued to reside under the same roof).

Six years later, the Woods are a married couple with two children, a place of their own, and a promising shot at launching separate recording careers.

These are hopeful days for Joe, a big, burly, 30-year-old tattooed rocker with a raspy voice, and D.D. (for Deidre Darleen), a winsome, straightforwardly sexy 25-year-old folk-pop performer who puts a country twang in her singing. Both were upbeat during a recent interview at their small apartment in Lakewood. The mood was brightened further by the rambling, gurgling presence of their merry 13-month-old son Dylan (they also have a 7-year-old daughter, Alexis, from D.D.’s previous marriage).

But the Woods also were open about how difficult it has been to stay together through more troubled times. They have had to withstand Joe’s frequent absences while on tour, and his bout with heroin addiction that ended three years ago (“I was tempted several times to just walk out,” D.D. said. “I just felt like Joe had so much potential, I couldn’t let him disintegrate”).

Now, they say, the success that could lie ahead may also bring new strains. There are potential professional jealousies to be dealt with, and the prospect of having to manage a marriage around conflicting touring and recording schedules.

D.D., who wasn’t involved in music when she and Joe met, is scheduled to begin recording her debut album next month for Hollywood Records, a recently established Disney subsidiary. Joe, after years of talk about making an album apart from T.S.O.L., has hooked up with two veteran songwriters who have helped him move in a bluesy, pop-rock direction that could lead to far greater commercial returns than T.S.O.L. (the long-running band, which also includes drummer Mitch Dean, bassist Dave Mello and guitarist Scott Phillips, is still in business, with Wood dividing time between T.S.O.L. and his own work).

D.D. came to rock ‘n’ roll awareness a decade ago, during the punk rock days when her brother was rousing the slam-dancing rabble at T.S.O.L.’s often-riotous concerts.

“I was a terrible teen-ager, a terror. I just went wild,” D.D. said. In one episode, she helped a boyfriend swipe a yacht to abet his escape from pursuing police; there also was a dip into the drug scene that surrounded punk. But by 17, D.D. said, she had become bored with the wild life, and settled down to pursue literature studies at Cal State Long Beach, with the goal of becoming a college English teacher (she recently received her bachelor’s degree and says that if her musical career dwindles, she’ll be content to return to academia).

Four years ago, D.D. was singing and strumming to herself on her front porch when she was overheard by Robbie Allen, who had played with her brother in Tender Fury, a band Grisham had formed after leaving T.S.O.L. Allen invited D.D. to join his band, Gypsy Trash, a country-accented group in which she began developing as a singer and songwriter. Joe, meanwhile, was less than encouraging, offering cautionary tales drawn from his experience of the music business as a hard living fraught with disappointments.

A year ago, while Joe was on a long tour with T.S.O.L., D.D. made a simple, homemade voice-and-guitar tape of four of her songs. Eddie Sedano, a keyboards-playing friend who had helped her with her music, brought the tape to Julian Raymond, a staff producer for Hollywood Records.

“I didn’t know anything about her. I listened to it and went nuts,” Raymond said. “It was just real honest and really to the point. I just believed it.”

A round of further demo recordings and contract negotiations ended in February when D.D. became the first woman signed to the Hollywood roster (don’t look for her to duet with the label’s only other female artist, Roseanne Barr).

Among D.D.’s songs are “Lexi’s Room,” a wistful piece about the consequences of domestic strife, and several other songs detailing marital up and downs. “Places are hard, people are harder, they will take you down and leave you lying alone. . . . Leave it all and come back home,” she pleads in one song. But another song, sung from her perspective as a road-widow, declares that despite her husband’s absences, “I’ve got everything I could ever need. I’m no stranger to your love.”

When D.D.’s six-figure contract came through four months ago, her husband admits, he had mixed feelings.

“I was jealous. It took me a month to get over it,” Joe said. “It was a blow to my ego. She takes one tape from a ghetto blaster and gets the major label record deal that I’ve been working to get 10 years.”

At the time, Joe seemed farther than ever from that major deal. T.S.O.L. was in a regrouping phase. The independent label Enigma (now defunct) had dumped the band in mid-1990, shortly after T.S.O.L. delivered a fine album, “Strange Love.” Wood also was being irked by a new round of reunion shows by the original T.S.O.L. members. He regards the reunited lineup as a pesky doppelganger that haunts the current band, causing confusion as to which band is which, splitting the potential audience, and dredging up comparisons between the “old” and “new” T.S.O.L.

With all those problems facing his band, Wood decided it was time to pursue the solo career he had only talked about. T.S.O.L.’s manager, Mike Zoto, turned to contacts at a song-publishing company, Famous Music, who in turn introduced Wood to the songwriting/producing team of Michael Des Barres (a much-traveled British rocker and actor) and Steve Caton. They and Wood have been working together since late February, recording material with an eye toward landing a deal for Wood.

Wood says he didn’t know precisely what musical direction to pursue apart from T.S.O.L., except that he imagined a big, bluesy sound like Joe Cocker’s. When he heard some of the songs Des Barres and Caton had written, “they had exactly what I wanted. It’s real bluesy, and still real rock. The time is right. As soon as I gave it any effort, it came together. I’ve had more success in the past few months than in the eight years with T.S.O.L.”

The demo recordings Wood has made replace the glowering, gutter-level grit of his T.S.O.L. style with the commercial pop-rock appeal of a Bryan Adams. Such songs as “The Last Man” and “Don’t Get Me Wrong” feature big, insinuating, instantly hummable melodic hooks.

Des Barres thinks Wood offers “an arresting male voice, which is so lacking on the radio. Joe is the antithesis of bleached (hair) extensions and Spandex. There’s honesty and integrity in the tone of his voice. I tried to write (the songs) about him. I loved the duality of him being on the wrong side of the tracks, but also a family man. I’m utterly confident that we can secure him a record deal with (this) music.”

Wood says he will not leave T.S.O.L. (which plays June 29 at Night Moves in Huntington Beach), but he does plan to make his own career his main pursuit. He envisions doing “more accessible music” on his own, pitched to the commercial mainstream, while using T.S.O.L., with its well-established cult following, to make edgier, alternative music.

Mitch Dean, who has been Wood’s partner in T.S.O.L. for eight years, says he is “completely behind” Wood’s solo career. “I think he’ll do well--if the tattoos don’t scare all the little kids away. He’s always had a lot of love songs that didn’t fit the T.S.O.L. mold, but were still good songs. This is a vehicle for them. If Joe’s (own career) took off and he didn’t have time for T.S.O.L. anymore, I would have no hard feelings.

“But I think Joe would always have time for T.S.O.L. He’s just got too much blood invested in it.”

Dean said that T.S.O.L. is preparing a 1983-1991 retrospective collection for release next fall on Restless Records. Tentatively titled “Hell and Back, Together,” it will include a few new songs along with the band’s most popular oldies and some previously unreleased live recordings and other tracks from the vaults.

Joe and D.D. Wood hope that as the T.S.O.L. retrospective comes out, they will be moving forward with their new careers. But they know their simultaneous and independent bids for success will call for adjustments and sacrifices.

(Anyone doubting the difficulties faced by a couple pursuing separate recording careers might consult the collected works of country singers Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell. Easily the best independently working husband-wife tandem in pop music, their albums--especially Cash’s “Rhythm and Romance” and “Interiors”--lay bare a relationship fraught with pain, distance, suspicion, and a constant need for rapprochement).

“The thing that stresses me out is when we both start touring,” D.D. said. “I think it’s hard for people to stay together in that situation. It’ll be difficult and sad, but we have been through so much together. I can’t see us breaking up over it. We like to write together, play together. We have so much pulling us together. We feel confident with what’s to come.”

“There’s one thing harder to deal with than failure--success,” Joe said, picking up his wife’s conversational thread. “I believe we can make it through all that, and it’s gonna be fun trying.”