This weekend one of Eugene’s
most buzzed-about music
exports returns home.
With their major label debut on the horizon and MTV cameras in tow, homegrown Rock n Roll Soldiers will play a show at the WOW Hall on Friday before leaving for an East Coast tour. But flirting with mainstream success hasn’t made the band feel like rock stars triumphantly returning to their hometown.
“We’re just going to feel stupid,” lead singer Marty Larson-Xu said, referring to the fact that an MTV camera crew will follow the band for an upcoming documentary show. As awkward as the cameras will make the band feel, their presence signifies just how far the group has come.
The band picked out its name, Rock n Roll Soldiers, before any of them knew how to play an instrument. And if the title sounds like a grade school garage band, it’s because the original band members adopted the name while attending Roosevelt Middle School.
“We were a terrible band,” Larson-Xu said. But the moniker stuck, and the band slowly began honing its sound.
Though the mainstream resurgence of punk and garage rock was still several years away, the band members spent their youth idolizing Iggy & The Stooges and especially the Australian punk band Radio Birdman. Today their sound mixes the aesthetics of those bands with the classic rock sensibility of the Rolling Stones, a band Larson-Xu said he got into during high school.
By the time they were seniors in high school, they were playing regular shows at John Henry’s, where they garnered a reputation not
only for their raw frenetic sound,
but also for their unpredictable
performances.
“Back in the day we’d play one show every four months, so we always wanted to make it an event,” Larson-Xu said of the band’s early concerts, which often included crudely constructed pyrotechnics.
After graduation, the band left for Seattle, Wash., but couldn’t quite break the city’s music scene. A year later it returned to Eugene and began playing before huge crowds at the WOW Hall. Rock n Roll Soldiers released a pair of EPs for San Francisco, Calif.,-based Gearhead Records before signing a deal with Atlantic Records in August.
The band’s current lineup includes original members Oliver Brown (drums), Evan Seroffsky (bass) and Larson-Xu, along with Kevin Sciou (lead guitar) who joined the group last fall.
Over the past few months the band has been working feverishly on its debut album, tentatively titled “So Many Musicians to Kill.”
“We are sort of trying to stand for what we deem as good music,” Larson-Xu said of the album’s title.
Larson-Xu said the album should be out by late August or early September. In the meantime, East West, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, just released a compilation of the band’s two previously released EPs.
Though the oldest band member is only 23, it is a road-tested group, having logged more than 45,000 miles on its tour bus over the past eight months, according to Larson-Xu. The tour included shows at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, several concerts with the Donnas and a performance at the Playboy mansion.
But even after Rock n Roll Soldiers’ appearance at the Hefner
residence, Larson-Xu isn’t ready
to proclaim that they are full-fledged rock stars.
“We are in the beginning here,” he said. “We’re more setting out.”
The WOW Hall concert begins at 8 p.m. with performances by Danko Jones and Paper Tiger. Tickets cost $5.

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