Before there was Watershed - before the big contract with Epic Records and the full-length debut called Twister that falls into stores Tuesday - there was the Wire, 360 pounds and 192 inches spread among three 15-year-old boys. They first practiced in Herb Schupp's cramped bedroom. For want of a stand, they dangled a microphone from a hole in the ceiling and sang Billy Squier covers through a rickety guitar monitor.

In the fourth grade, Colin Gawel got his first guitar. Never practiced much. His instructor forced his preternaturally long fingers to play "Swanee River" and crap like that. When a kid down the street could whip off "2,000 man" without sheet music, Colin was astonished. God, if he could ever do that. He took guitar more seriously. The first rock 'n ' roll song he could play with mild competence was the Ramones' cover of "Time Has Come Today."
He used to sleep with his triple-album copy of the Kiss Originals, and his mom drove him to Cleveland to see the 1979 Dynasty tour. He still has the tour book.

His blond hair leaves the ponytail only when the band plays a show. The curls, his slight build and baby-blanket blue eyes invoke a Tommy era Roger Daltrey. He jogs and adheres to an unmercifully low-fat diet. Baseball and Budweiser are his vices of choice, both used to elevation, but not to abuse. He can talk about his favorite OSU linebackers and the sweetness of Barry Larkin's swing until last call. He watches the Weather Channel with odd rapture.
Joe Oestreich bought a bass in seventh grade. His parents' house in upwardly middle-class section of Worthington was within walking distance of Colin's; they practiced before they ever had a drummer. The name Oestreich is of German derivation. For the band, he used to spell it phonetically - Joe A. Strike - to avoid anyone calling him Joe Ostrich. He gave it up after reading too many interviews with the ridiculous "Stike says" at the end of his quotes.
He's dated the same girl for about five years (they all have long-term sigs) and can't look at anything - a book, a slip of paper, a CD - without picking it up, inspecting the corners and understanding why it exists. His hair started falling out right after high school. Before he shaved the remaining patch down to a soft fur, ha wore a backwardly turned baseball hat onstage to shelter the fading scalp. After the band got signed, he gave up hats, all of them. At his first bare- headed Newport show, fans wondered if he was sick. When he sings, the veins on his forehead bulge like the tummy of a panting frog.

Herb Schupp was the last to select his instrument, the drums. In the early practices - six arms thin as bananas, barely strong enough to keep their equipment aloft - the best songs were "Rock and Roll" by Zeppelin, "Do It Again" by the Kinks and "Come Together" by the Beatles.

Ambidextrous and athletic, Herb was accused by Hoaky Rathbone of the immortally Southern Dash Rip Rock of hitting the snare drum as if "he found it in bed with his wife." Under 5 feet 9, he can dunk a basketball and wears developed muscles without lifting a barbell. He's impatient, laughs infectiously and cooks gourmet. The van rots of curry after he eats a Hades-like Indian dish, and the sharp-smelling spice leaks through his sweat. Herbert is his middle name; he favors it to his first name, Henry.
It's hard for me to fathom that Colin, Joe and Herb are now listed in the asset ledger of the Sony Music Corporation. Colin and I belonged to the same Indian Guide tribe, and I've known all three since junior high. Together, we played little league, wondered cluelessly about pretty sophomores, drank cheap beer and eventually lived in the same apartments. Our mothers still call us - me, the band, and a handful of others - "the guys." It's only one step up from "little buddies."

The Wire, in high school, had two singers. One moved away shortly after joining, the other was the star receiver on the football team and the only kid in our grade with stones to wear red suspenders and dance around like a frat version of Mick Jagger. He walked to the stage once with a flank of bodygards, all meaty offensive lineman. After he left to play football at an out-of- state college, they asked the biggest Aerosmith fan in the school, Mike McDermott, to sing. He declined and instead became the manager. "In the loosest sense of the word," he still says.
We graduated from Worthington High School in 1987. None of us lettered in sports, dated cheerleaders or set the school ablaze with fabulous grades. We drove old Corollas and Pintos. Only half of us could fit in the limo we rented for the prom, and we practically had to rent our dates. Colin and Mike were named biggest rock 'n' rollers in the senior issue of the school paper. None of us have gone back to see our teachers; none of us attended the five-year reunion.

They enrolled at Ohio State; the Wire was now one of a hundred campus bands. The best you could say is that they were loud and they wrote their own songs. Their first campus show was at Apollo's, a bar which later banned them twice, once for not turning down the volume, the other over money. Their tight-knuckled friendship innocently deluded their thinking; they thought they were the best band in the world. "We always did," says Colin "Always. We always thought we just rocked. We couldn't get it. We couldn't understand why we weren't conquering people by storm." Only the bartender and Joe's dad saw their first Stache's show.
In spring of 1989, the Wire was voted best rock band over Scrawl and the Royal Crescent Mob by readers of the Ohio State Lantern. Dubious editors gave them the prize but suspected the ballots were rigged. Turns out, the fifth floor of Harrison House apartments was a ballot-rigging factory. "We must've won by a thousand," says Colin. "I mean, we were stuffing it."

Willie Phoenix took a shine to the Wire after hearing one of their vastly improving demos. One Super Bowl Sunday in a cold storage space, the band and Willie worked on one song for 12 hours. He produced a tape, calling the change in the band's sound a watershed. They talk about Willie as a humble athlete remembers his godlike mentor; the one who could kick your ass at any game and then explain how he did it.
The guys moved from Harrison House into both sides of a charming duplex on East Patterson Avenue. In 1991, when I moved in, the place was a train wreck. Doors were snapped off hinges, one of the kitchens had a standing inch of water, and a raccoon used to watch TV in the living room until one of us ran him over with a car.
The band quit school, Colin and Joe a year shy of graduating and their parents nearly bribing them to finish. They bought a maroon and gray Chevy van and committed to playing out-of-town gigs no matter the bad pay and even worse crowd response.

We grew up a little. A new place near Tuttle Park - just Colin, Joe, Mike and me - was kept with more care. The posters of Woody Hayes and the Replacements now had frames. We bought groceries and paid the cable bill. An upstart local label called Palas put out Watershed's first full-length album, The Carpet Cliff, in 1992. It meant jumping off the suburban treadmill; where they was grinding restaurant and factory jobs.
The major Label Thing started with a friend of a friend at a management company in New York whose chief client is Jim Steinman, the master of Meat Loaf's bloated pop ballads. Steinman wrote all the songs - and those dreadful lyrics - on Bat Out of Hell and its sequel. Watershed signed a speculation deal with the New York company; if the managers got them signed, they got a cut of the deal. It's not the most appealing way to be discovered, and they know it.
The spec did land them a contract with Epic Records, the old home of their favorite Cheap Trick. Watershed says this is a logical progression. After the small-fry hardships they endured for years - the debt of running a band, the cracked van engines, the weekends away from home to play before no one - this was their props. A vogue independent deal would never have happened; they just don't have the sound.

"I'm not in awe of Sony Music or anything, but for what we're doing, we needed it," says Colin. "I don't have the patience or the time to play all the games. I'll take whatever they got."

Steinman served as executive producer for Twister. Like most executives, his presence was sporadic but palpable. He's a strange, but pleasant, fellow with long, dry gray hair and creepy fingernails. "He always sides with the band," says Colin. "He'll argue with you, but he'll back you because, obviously, his stuff is real self-indulgent. "Shit gets down when Steinman's in there. People cower to him."

In January, the band began recording at Power Station in New York City. They kept vampire's hours - going on after dark and leaving at dawn - to cash in on cheaper studio time. During the day, they slept in a one-room Manhattan apartment like preschoolers at nap time. There were no iconic images of Big Label stardom, no lines of cocaine on women's breasts. For fun, they bought 40-ouncers, played cards, watched cable and called their girlfriends.

Not seduced by the big city lights, Colin scoured Manhattan for his beloved skim milk (he drinks it in Big Bear-sized gallons) while the rest of the guys rejoiced when they discovered 50-cent games of pool.

The perceived nightmare of working for a major label is not tall fiction. It is a contest of chutes and ladders. Battles are picked, and then won or lost. The toughest sell is not the public, but the internal machine that make stars out of cardboard and glitter and forgotten fools of blinding talent. "In the most pessimistic view of the Sony Music Corporation," says Colin, "I'm sure if they could punch the song in the computer, come up with a perfect version and slap our faces on the cover, they'd love to do it that way. They're just trying to make a buck."

Colin and Joe are the writers; they forge a song's basic structure, including lyrics, alone. If it has something, the song is brought into the Cleveland Avenue rehearsal site - a warehouse cubbyhole that stinks from the nearby pallets of Kal-Kan - for inspection. "We both write a lot of shit that we never say is good enough to take to the band," says Joe. "We practice a lot of shit before we say it's good enough to play live."

Watershed has no Morrisonesque front man. The deal is, you write it, you sing lead vocals. Seven of Twister's songs feature Colin's grainy twang; five have Joe's high-pitched, slightly nasal tenor. If Twister sounds fractured to some ears, it might be the song selection. The single "How Do You Feel" was written almost four years ago, while some of the songs were slashed out just before they left for New York. Figuring the dates who brought them to the prom shouldn't be left sitting in the car, they committed to the older songs. It creates problems. Four years ago, they never listened to Dwight Yoakam or Johnny Thunders. Now, that influence seeps in without apology.

"Some people are going to be like, 'Omigod, these guys are masters of rock 'n' roll as a whole,'" says Joe. "Some will be like, 'These hucksters have to find where they're going. They don't know what they're doing.'"

"I'm real happy with it. I have a love/hate relationship with everything, but for a first record it's real solid," says Colin. He's been unnerved in the months Epic delayed the release - from September to December to now - waiting for his child to take the field. "At this time, we're treating it like a product. But I feel really good about the product, which I haven't in the past. I honestly believe if you like music, you're missing out. I would be shocked if people didn't think it was good."

Each has seen Cheap Trick over a dozen times. In high school, Colin and Herb were grounded for driving through a snowstorm to see Kiss in Toledo. At the Power Station, they crept into Aerosmith's temporary studio and picked through Steven Tyler's lyric sheets. "It was a total invasion of privacy," says Colin, free of guilt.

Labeled a power-pop band, Watershed really isn't. Their music shares little with groups like the Buzzcocks and the Plimsouls. They are the products of Midwestern rock radio, babes suckling on the Kinks, Cheap Trick and the greatly unappreciated Georgia Satellites.

"I always just wanted to play music and be in front of a crowd. I never really thought about the girls or the drinking," says Herb. "I saw Paul Stanley and that's what I wanted to do, just be a rocker."

"We were such hardcore fans about the bands we liked, we just wanted to be like them," says Joe. "We wanted someone to be that hardcore about us."

Their intense friendship is sometimes ally, sometimes enemy. Five copies of Kiss Alive! sat in our apartment while there were only four residents. They do worry that nourishing on the same dishes, always being together, might make the music stale.

"You do different things on your own, or like a relationship, it's pretty much going to wear out," says Colin, who plays solo acoustic gigs and fools around on harmonica. "If nobody brings in anything from the outside, pretty soon, you're just recycling."

"But we know we're not going to break up over something stupid," says Joe. "We're cooped up in the small van all the time and we know each other so well, if one guy steals another guy's French fry, it's not going to break into a big fight."

"We don't have to worry about the bullshit," says Colin. "If every band in Columbus never had a lineup change, we'd probably never be signed because there would be so many great bands." He pauses. "Tough shit for them. That happens. If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts, it'd be Christmas all year long."

Colin, Joe and Herb are not the favorite sons. They don't have the wild admiration the Mob had, the respect Scrawl has always commanded, the fear the Toll inflicted or the street credibility of Gaunt or New Bomb Turks. They were never scene guys, preferring to kick back in a lazy bar like the Library on nights they didn't rehearse late or travel to a distant club in South Carolina.

The cool dismiss them as being too pop-conscious, too professional, too mainstream, too arena- rock, too normal. Some of the hits are valid. Ten personal pronouns appear in the titles for the new record, a feat matched by only the Beatles in their lemonade years.

"It's hard for me to write about stuff that I don't know or doesn't come from me," says Joe. "For now, I'm writing about 'me' and 'you.'"

"You look at guys like Dylan or Springsteen," says Colin, "and they use the same chords and expressions all the time. If I could write a song with one word and one chord, that would be the ultimate goal. I just want to get to the point as quick as I can and not try and be cute."Springsteen still writes about cars."Local critics have mocked the band more often than not in reviews. A Stache's employee, disgusted by their homespun tales of heartache, once threw a pitcher of ice at them. Six years they've applied to play Community Fest, six years they've been rejected, including this past summer.

"I think a scene is important," says Colin. "but it also kills bands too. Do they really want to support bands that are different, or do they want people who fit into their system?"

Waking up late one Sunday this spring, I fixed coffee and noticed the blinking light an the answering machine. It was Colin's voice from a phone at La Guardia Airport. His mother had died earlier in the morning.

Mary Ann Gawel was a delicate woman whose sunny appearance belied her age. Only her voice, graveled from years of cigarette smoke, didn't match the sorority-girl glow. In December 1993, the week the band made the gentlemen's agreement with Epic, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She and his father didn't tell Colin the cancer was terminal. He left for New York knowing she was sick, but never how sick until he visited on an off-weekend. She was in the hospital, slipping.

'This album and that will always be tied," Colin says. "the best thing and worst thing in my life happened all at once."

I picked up Colin at the airport. Wearing his customary light denim jacket, he carried a guitar, a brand new Gibson, red a maraschino and beautiful. In the concourse he unzipped the carrying bag to show it off. I think he wanted to feel as he did when the Sony Music Corporation didn't exist, when there were no uptight producers dissecting his vocals, when making music wasn't such a fight. And when mothers buy their sons used guitars for their 15th birthdays.

Basic tracks finished in New York, Colin stayed at home with his father and his sister. He missed the mixing of the record - the "fun part" - and returned to NYC to record vocals for "Sad Drive," a moody wanderer and the last song on the record. The year before, he wrote it after driving from New Orleans to Panama City, Florida, through the night. He drove steadily while I slept in the shotgun seat, only waking for the riverboat casino in Biloxi. We left our travel money on the blackjack table. Panama City was naked and cold. Before he unpacked his bag in the hotel room, the song was written.

From the Power Station control booth Joe watched Colin sing the overdub. The lines - written before Mrs. Gawel fell sick - talk about a love lost never coming back. It's the best vocal on the album. "It was spooky," says Joe.

We all live apart now. I don't see them nearly as much as I used to. To analyze the music, to recall their story is like unfolding a yearbook that doesn't yet have the must be nostalgia - just pictures of idiots wearing Triumph and Rush tour shirts.

But the band was always something, they were lucky enough to have purpose at an age when most young men are proficient only at eating and masturbating. I felt proud and alive when they let me drive Herb's drums to a high-school show in my ark-sized Buick. They've never blown off me or other guys for the girls in the front row or the suits in New York. Out of all of us, the band dudes are the ones who have changed the least.
The kids are alright because they are still the kids, shooting pool, listening to old Aerosmith, befuddled by girls, writing songs in spiral notebooks, playing in a band because the high-school baseball team didn't want them.
The kids are alright. Trust me.

January 26, 1995