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Retro rockers, on top with 'World,' staying grounded in love, roots

By CARY DARLING
Miami Herald
Posted: Sept. 20, 2002

Some performers vary from their public personas. There's always the occasional headbanging rivethead who prefers Shakespeare to Slipknot or the bespectacled, would-be intellectual who's really masking rampant idiocy.

But in the case of Jimmy Eat World, what you see - and hear - really seems to be what you get. They're just four average Arizona Joes, who grew up amid the suburban sprawl of endless sky and sweltering sun that is Mesa, near Phoenix. Four guys who make crunchy, accessible pop-rock that - faster than you can say "rock is back!" - is suddenly all over the radio and MTV. More mature than Blink-182 yet more youthful than Creed or Korn, Jimmy Eat World is for people who like a hearty helping of hooks, hope and heartbreak.

The group's fourth album, "Jimmy Eat World," is platinum and has spawned two radio hits, "The Middle" and "Sweetness." So now come the parties and the pretties, right? In the case of singer Jim Adkins, guitarist Tom Linton, bassist Rick Burch and drummer Zach Lind, probably not.

"Jim and Zach are married. I have a girlfriend, and Rick has a girlfriend. I was raised Mormon, but I'm not religious at all. I don't know, I've never been into the rock backstage party thing," says Linton, 26, in a phone interview from Mesa. "That's not really us."

And that seems to be Jimmy's world in a nutshell; it's a band that runs from the dreaded "emo" tag faster than a chicken at a barbecue but hews close to the style's original intent: dewy-eyed, down-to-earth boys-next-door playing emotional rock about love's ups and downs.

"I don't think I've changed at all," Linton says about the seemingly sudden stardom. "I don't think anyone in the band has. It's been like a slow growth, with our fans and stuff. We're not that big."

As is nearly always the case, the success of Jimmy Eat World - who took the name from a drawing by Linton's younger brother of another brother, Jimmy, eating the world - was a slow process and came close to not happening at all.

Formed in 1995, the band quickly signed with Capitol but, because of executive turnover, soon found itself without a champion at the label. Two albums, "Static Prevails" and "Clarity," came and went without a trace.

Well, not quite. Thanks to touring, word-of-mouth, sporadic radio play and the Internet, Jimmy Eat World built a cult following.

This was especially true in Europe and an independently released compilation, "Singles," helped raise money for the recording of "Jimmy Eat World." By this point the band had been dropped by Capitol and needed financial help. "We were, like, so broke. We were barely scraping by," Linton remembers. "We had $100 in our band checking account."

Even so, he can't bring himself to totally trash Capitol.

"It was kind of cool; they bought us a van. They gave us money to record," he says.

With a new CD recorded, the guys went shopping for a label but this time were a little wiser. Says Linton: "We pretty much knew what we wanted. We said, 'If you're going to change us at all, we're not going to sign with you. The record's finished. Here it is'"

Jimmy Eat World signed with DreamWorks, and "Jimmy Eat World" was released last fall, steadily gaining in popularity through this year.

Today, Jimmy Eat World is considered part of the back-to-basics rock revival that includes White Stripes, The Vines, The Hives and south Florida acts such as Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory.

So far, Linton is happy about being thrown in with such company, but he's also cautious.

"There's been a lot of bad music on the radio lately so the White Stripes and The Hives are a good thing," he says. "We'll see what happens. It's kind of hard to tell."





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From the Sept. 20, 2002 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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