Success Remains Sweet

Four years ago, only the most foolhardy gambler would have wagered on Sugar Ray’s career continuing after the catchy strains of “Fly,” its surprise 1997 hit single, faded from the pop airwaves.

Yet the Southland band not merely has survived, it’s thriving. “Sugar Ray,” its fourth album and the follow-up to the multi-platinum “14:59,” entered the national sales chart three weeks ago at No. 6, making it the group’s highest-charting album yet. Its new single, “When It’s Over,” appears to have enough momentum to give the group its fourth Top 10 single.

“I think Sugar Ray is a band that is consistently underestimated by people,” says Jeff Pollack, one of the nation’s top radio consultants. “It’s very hard to have hit singles and still maintain some credibility. . . . I’d given them up for dead several times, but they’ve [come back] three times in a row now. That is difficult.”

It was considered next to impossible after “Fly” turned into one of the big hits of the summer of 1997.

When it came time to produce a follow-up to the “Floored” album that yielded “Fly,” the band, which plays Universal Amphitheatre on Wednesday, was anything but blindly confident in its newfound role as a hit-maker.

“We were kind of like lambs to the slaughter,” recalls fast-talking singer Mark McGrath, 32. His magazine-cover looks have helped increase the band’s popularity among female fans, but they’ve also stopped some industry skeptics from noticing the brain behind the face.

“After ‘Fly,’ there were so many one-hit wonders like ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba and [Aqua’s] ‘Barbie Girl,’ ” says McGrath, sitting with bassist Murphy Karges at their record label’s West Hollywood offices. “For some reason, we became the poster children for that whole year.

“I don’t just live in my little Sugar Ray cocoon, like ‘Oh, we just sold 2 million records, man, we’re the greatest.’ I was thinking, ‘OK, I can feel the heat,’ ” as they worked on “14:59,” which became an even bigger hit than “Floored” and produced two more hit singles, “Every Morning” and “Someday.”

McGrath graduated from USC with a degree in communications, not comedy, but his expertise in the art of the joke assuredly helped “14:59,” whose title alludes to the proverbial 15 minutes of fame, defy industry expectations.

“We had started writing and I felt pretty strong about the songs,” he says, “but I knew no one would hear them. I wanted people to know that we knew what position we were in.

“We were recording and we took a break,” McGrath says, “and I said, ‘How about we call the album ’14 minutes, 59 seconds’ . . . like a digital display: 14 with the little colon and a 59. . . .

“It was poking fun at ourselves,” he says. “And no one’s going to tell you a joke when you know the punch line.”

The move, says Karges, “let people take a breath and listen to the album before they made their judgments.”

That hurdle behind them, McGrath and Karges say that the band’s goal for the new album was to extend the songwriting strides they made between “Floored” and “14:59.” That period saw Sugar Ray’s dramatic musical evolution from an alternative-rock band of fairly limited scope to a pop-rock band with widespread appeal.

“The impetus in this record was to write something we could all listen to from top to bottom,” McGrath says. “I don’t think we achieved that goal collectively on the last three. There’s a song or two that one of us will fast forward through on each of the last records, but on this one there isn’t. That was a goal and we met that.”

Despite their punk/hip-hop origins in Newport Beach, Sugar Ray’s members--also including guitarist Rodney Sheppard, drummer Stan Frazier and DJ Craig Bullock--don’t mind being labeled a pop band now, as long as that label is applied evenly to all the acts who get pop radio play, says McGrath, “from Eminem to Lonestar.”

It’s common in alt-rock circles to say, “We don’t care about radio,” but McGrath feel differently. “You know what? We do. We released two records where we got minimal airplay and two where we got a lot of airplay. You don’t want to say this is strictly a commercial product, but we had it in mind that yes, we’d like to be on the radio, it was very enjoyable.”

One more aspiration was to reinforce the image of Sugar Ray not just as McGrath’s band, but as a musical democracy among five friends, all of whom contribute significantly to each song in varying and unpredictable combinations. It is, McGrath and Karges concede, a huge relief to find that pop fans remain interested in Sugar Ray, something that forever remains an uncertainty with the shifting tides among public taste and rock-radio predilections.

“We weren’t just born with the talent and the songwriting ability,” he says. “My singing is marginal at best, and the studio certainly helps me out a little bit. To have the will and to stay with it with all the same band members, [the success] has been that much sweeter.

“I understand that it could all end tomorrow,” he says. “But it hasn’t ended today. So we’re going to enjoy every moment of it.”

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* Sugar Ray, with Uncle Kracker and the Start, plays Wednesday at Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, 7:15 p.m. $30. (818) 777-3931.