Story Made for TV, No Doubt

Early in tonight’s VH1 “Storytellers” episode on No Doubt, singer Gwen Stefani comments on the irony of the band’s appearance on the show.

“The funny thing,” Stefani says, “is that we got into a band so we could play music, dance around and entertain, and here we are telling stories, which is kind of awkward and weird. But who cares? Here we are.”

The irony, then, is doubled, because the four band members’ smarts and very human-sized (as opposed to rock-star-scale) egos make them ideal subjects for a show such as “Storytellers,” which examines the creative process behind hit songs and albums.

Take, for instance, bassist Tony Kanal’s anecdote about the genesis of “Sunday Morning,” from the Anaheim band’s breakthrough 1996 album “Tragic Kingdom.”

Rather than emerging during an outburst of divinely inspired musical creativity, Kanal notes he was goofing around with an acoustic guitar “playing the only four chords I know” to Stefani, who was in the bathroom feeling decidedly un-rock goddess like. From his off-the-cuff lyric about “somebody is feeling quite ill” developed the signature hook in “Sunday Morning.”

The hourlong segment, which helps launch “Storytellers” into its fifth year this weekend, includes half a dozen other songs, among them No Doubt’s big hits “Don’t Speak,” “Ex-Girlfriend” and “Just a Girl.”

Most fun for No Doubt fans should be the early versions of “Don’t Speak” and “Ex-Girlfriend” the band samples to demonstrate how songs evolve, often quite dramatically, from the way they started out.

“Don’t Speak” had a lilting calypso pulse at first and different lyrics, which Stefani says she rewrote after the breakup of her long romance with Kanal. “Ex-Girlfriend” began life, as Stefani points out, “as another bummer No Doubt song--just what we didn’t need” before turning into the driving up-tempo number with attitude that ended up on “Return of Saturn,” No Doubt’s latest album.

(One priceless moment from the taping that didn’t make the final cut: After singing a couple of verses of the original lyrics to “Don’t Speak” and then switching to the hit version, Stefani flubbed the song’s revised lyrics and had to sing it three times before getting through it, after which the audience erupted with the out-sized ovation heard at the end.)

Among other revealing moments in the show is the group’s first performance in five years with Stefani’s older brother, Eric Stefani, who formed the band and was its keyboardist and main songwriter but quit--just before “Tragic Kingdom” became a massive hit--to work for a time as an animator on “The Simpsons.”

The show closes with a rollicking performance of “Trapped in a Box,” the group’s first single. The band is joined by a horn section, and Eric Stefani happily pounds out boogie-woogie piano riffs as the song ends in a roaring Dixieland jam.

* No Doubt is profiled on VH1’s “Storytellers” tonight at 10 p.m.