"What if I'm just an average guy / When nothin' but the best will do?"
- from Watershed's "Nightshade"

For three months last years, the guys of Watershed sorely tested their long friendship while crammed into a tiny apartment three blocks from the renowned Power Station studio in New York. The Columbus trio - in New York to record the Epic Records debut Twister - had sublet the apartment for a whopping $1,700 a month. "It wasn't until we went to the Sony Building for the first time that I really felt I'd fallen off the pumpkin truck," guitarist Colin Gawel said. "I mean, the elevator that took us up to Epic's offices (on the 22nd floor) was bigger than the apartment we had to sublet." Watershed survived the apartment and a grueling schedule - recording at Power Station from 7p.m. until 4 or 5 a.m. weekdays - to forge an accomplished, captivating pop-rock album.

Twister will arrive in record stores Jan. 31 - with a marquee name attached: Jim Steinman of Meat Loaf fame is the executive producer. Still, the band isn't taking anything for granted. "We've seen too many great Columbus bands get screwed doing this," bassist Joe Oestreich said of signing with a major label. Several popular Columbus acts - Willie Phoenix, McGuffey Lane, RC Mob, Identity, the Toll - have reached the brink of national success without cashing in. "We asked Epic for some time after the album comes out," Gawel said. "We don't want to do a national headlining tour right away. We want to play the Midwestern clubs where we've already established ourselves and build from there." The trio - featuring Gawel, Oestreich and Herb Schupp - has spoken at length to Phoenix ( who produced Watershed's first professional demo in 1990) as well as David Ellison (of RC Mob) and Brad Circone (of the Toll). "It's made us conservative, almost to conservative," Gawel said. "Jim (Steinman) would say, 'Let's do this video; we'll get Spike Jones to direct; we'll hit the top 40 with it.'"

Although the group appreciates Steinman's role as the "big-picture guy," such grand talk was a bit unnerving. "We don't want to get away from what's worked for us so far," Oestreich said. "It's been a very grass-roots thing, very uncorporate." In the spring, Watershed released a six-song EP, Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust - Live, as a move orchestrated by Epic to "prime the pump" for Twister. "We were a little nervous about that," Gawel said during the summer. "They promised they wouldn't care if Three Chords didn't sell well. Then, when it didn't, we could feel them pull back from us a little." Lately, the record company has come around, according to Gawel. Epic seems "behind Twister, ready to support us as much as they can. You can feel it building the closer it gets to Jan. 31" Even though the band has already signed with a major label - something that only a handful of Columbus rock bands has done in 35 years - the jury is still out on the trio's career, at least as far as moms and dads are concerned. "We tried to put it into perspective for them," Oestreich said. "I'd tell my parents, 'We're on the same label as Michael Jackson.' And my mom would say, 'Yes, but does this mean you're not going to school this quarter?"

The Worthington High School graduates have been worrying their parents since 1984, when they formed a group called the Wire. "Hey, we grew up in Columbus without college radio," Gawel said. "We were blissfully unaware of the band Wire... When we found out about them, we changed the name of our group to Watershed." The three are sheepish about what they missed in rock music during the 1980s: They came late to Husker Du and the Replacements, but they now admire both punk groups. Still, Watershed is thoroughly unapologetic about its influences: Cheap Trick, the Georgia Satellites, Aerosmith and the Kinks. The combination, though, may pose a problem to Watershed's fledgling career. "We're not alternative enough for college radio and not AOR (album-oriented rock) enough for AOR stations," Gawel said. "At least that's what we've been told by some people." "The thing is," Schupp added, "we've stuck to our guns for so long, it wouldn't make sense for us to change what we're doing now." Gawel concurred: "If people listen to this (Twister) and don't like it, I can sleep at night knowing we'd made a record I like."

Making the record wasn't easy. "It was really a battle of diligence," Gawel said.

"We survived recording the album. I don't think we'd record another album in quite the same way." Producers Danny Lawson and Steve Rinkoff, for instance, were editing 13 versions of How Do You Feel, the album's first single, into one song. "That took all the life out of it, And it was our best song," Gawel said. "We always joked the name of our band should be 'Watershed Featuring How Do You Feel.'" "So we went back in," Oestreich said, "and cut it straight through in one take. We've been playing these songs for so long, we thought the important thing was getting the feeling right. ...And rock 'n' roll has to have a sense of urgency." These days, Watershed is 'striving to maintain its composure on the eve of its Epic debut. "My favorite album of all time is the Georgia Satellites' Salvation & Sin," Gawel said. " The way I look at it, if a band as great as the Satellites had a huge following in the South or if a band as great as the RC Mob had a huge following in the North and nothing much else came of it - well, that's still a great career."

January 29,1995