Powerful Emotions Shine Through Lyrics of Sun-60 Album

The album was actually finished, ready for delivery to the record label, when Joan Jones and David Russo of the band Sun-60 paused to write and record one more song. It was something called “Out of My Head,” and through its energetic messages of hope, Jones found herself emerging from the emotional fog she’d suffered since the death of her brother from AIDS.

To the fast rhythm of Russo’s acoustic guitar, the song came together almost spontaneously, as she sang: “This is for holding on, you reeled me in when I was gone/I owe you so much more than this; until then, I give this song.”

“He was very inspirational to me, and he became HIV-positive,” Jones says of her older brother David Jones, a landscape artist and writer. “That was something that I had to come to grips with. He was very supportive of my band, and he passed away two weeks before we got signed. That was a pretty heavy thing to deal with.”

The song was ultimately chosen to open “Sun-60,” the band’s debut release on Epic Records, and an album that often mixes lyrics of serious emotion with an uplifting stew of rock, pop and folk. “It’s not like we wrote the song,” says Russo. “This was there, and it just came out.”

It was recorded in their own studio, in a small rented space beneath a house in the Hollywood Hills.

The sudden creativity that led to “Out of My Head” reflected the pace that the two main members of Sun-60 say they’d grown accustomed to during the last four years performing on the Los Angeles club scene. But unlike the immediacy of their live dates, the record company chose to delay the release of the album for nearly a year.

Their music was changing and developing quickly, Russo says. “And then we did the album, and it froze time. Then a year goes by. That was a really weird vertigo to have to deal with, to have to stop moving.”

Rather than wait at home, Sun-60 embarked on its first national tour, opening dates for Crowded House and Paul Weller, and sometimes playing to festival audiences of as many as 10,000 people. The band also stopped in San Francisco to appear briefly in the upcoming Mike Myers film “I Married an Axe Murderer.”

The duo had begun collaborating on songs in the mid-1980s, after individual experiences in a variety of bands. “It’s actually kind of a small community, even though L. A. is such a big city,” Russo explains. “You meet a lot of people and you keep seeing a lot of the same bands over and over again. We tried collaborating at one point and it worked out real well. It’s really rare to find somebody you can actually write with.”

Jones adds: “To keep a band together is really difficult. And to even collaborate with somebody is difficult, because it’s really hard to take your clothes off in front of somebody, and that’s what writing is. It’s like creating another world, and you expose everything.

“We’d fight, but we’d continue to write. In other bands I’ve been in, we’d fight and forget it, it’s over, and slam the door.”

Both singer-songwriters now live in Hollywood, where Jones grew up, and where her first musical experiences were as a trumpet player in the high school orchestra, and then in a series of melodic garage bands. Russo, meanwhile, was growing up in Calabasas, in an isolated housing development.

Russo had always dabbled on guitar and piano, but it wasn’t until after he finished his communication studies at UCLA, and after his older brother drafted young David into his band, that he thought of playing professionally.

There were many creative arguments between the two brothers in the Desperate Dreamers, a rock guitar band influenced by the Rolling Stones and the Clash that lasted about four years in the early ‘80s. The band had even played at Madame Wong’s West with Guns N’ Roses, back when the future hard rock stars were still in their glam-rock makeup stage.

With Sun-60, “It’s our music and it’s our band,” he says. “And in many ways it’s my religion. It’s what I believe in. Instead of howling at the moon, I howl on stage. The record is just how we see our lives, how we see the world, and how we see our city. A lot of our inspiration we take from the beauty and tragedy of our city.”

During the first four years that Jones and Russo performed as a band, at first known as Far Cry (before they discovered another band with the same name), Jones ran a catering business at the Hollywood Bowl to support herself until the recording of Sun-60’s debut album.

On record and in live performances, the central duo are joined by bassist Glen Holmen and a drummer--they’ve gone through at least four in the last year. Along the way, Jones and Russo decided that another element was needed, and Jones made an unexpected return to the trumpet.

She had played trumpet in high school because her mother happened to have one around the house, she says. And yet, after forming Sun-60, she spotted a small pocket trumpet in a music store one day, and became newly interested in its possibilities. “In high school I didn’t want to practice. I was like the clown in orchestra, just sitting back there and messing around with everyone. It was great. But this was a whole other thing, another way of expressing yourself.”

The trumpet is a greater element now in the band’s live shows than on its few appearances on “Sun-60,” though it may loom larger on the band’s next album, which is to be produced by Scott Litt, veteran of albums by R.E.M., U2 and others. “It’s like a voice to me,” Jones says. “That’s how I play it, as if I were singing.”