Rave Magazine
Written by Corey Levitan
July 12-18, 2002 Issue
Shakespeare, Rattle and Roll.
Lava Diva provides the music for “Romeo & Juliet”
In the new Shakespeare Festival/LA update of “Romeo & Juliet” direct by Dani Bedau, the Montagues and Capulets run rival record companies, competing to sign cookie-cutter boy-band types (one of whom Juliet’s parents try to marry their daughter off to).
Casting the record industry as the environment against which the star-crossed lovers rebel made Lava Diva a natural to provide the music for this production. The rock group, formed in 1992 in Reseda, was offered exactly one major-label record contract in its career and balked.
“When we got to their office, it was in a really expensive part of town, with marble and hard wood, and they had secretaries for their secretaries,” Lava Diva singer Dawn Fintor tells RAVE! “It was apparent that all the money was goin to rent and none to their artists, because the advance they offered wouldn’t have been enough for gas money to get to the studio.”
Chatting at a sports bar across from downtown L.A.’s Pershing Square - where “Romeo & Juliet” runs through July 20 before moving to the South Coast Botanic Garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula - Fintor says a record deal is usually no deal to a fledgling band, even if a decent advance is offered.
“You’re paying for everything they’re putting into you,” she says. “You’ve got to pay it back before you see any of the profit. And they’ve got to start seeing a profit before you see a profit.
“It’s a little like going to a loan shark for a loan on a house. You’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Is that house worth it?’”
Then there’s the matter of creative control. For new acts, there is none.
“They can put a dance loop through your tracks if they want, or they can reject them all and make you keep writing,” Fintor says. “You’re part of their machinery. And you have to be really OK with the intervention of other voices - telling you what to do, how much weight to lose.
“I just want to play music.”
Lava Diva - which includes drummer Greg Berella and female bassist Johnny Berella (husband and wife) - recorded the rock instrumentals wafting from the P.A. as Romeo and Juliet plot their secret nuptials in Bedau’s vision of the tragedy.
“Most of the music is very pretty and has simple guitar, but it’s got some dark chords which let you know something really bad is gonna happen,” says Fintor, whose major formative influences were Elton John and the Carpenters.
Lava Diva also imbued Shakespeare’s famous prologue with a melody.
“Two houses alike in dignity/in fair, fair Verona where we lay our scene,” Fintor sings as a “Dear Prudence”-like guitar riff flits around her wistful voice.
Fintor, 38, attended Reseda’s Cleveland High School with Bedau. (A native of Gardena, Fintor moved with her family when she was 12.) Bedau rang her old friend last year and told her about “Romeo & Juliet.”
“She said she had this idea in the middle of the night,” says Fintor, now a Van Nuys resident.
Fintor has provided music for five previous plays produced by Bedau’s husband, Shakespeare Festival/L.A. Artistic Director Ben Donenberg, including “A Comedy of Errors” and “As You Like It.” But she’s only worked solo before. This is the first time Fintor was asked to round up Lava Diva.
“Dani was envisioning the band as more representative of the angst of the kids, and the separation between the kids and the parents,” Fintor says. With its offbeat melodicism, simmering angst and lo-fi aesthetic, Lava Diva - whose name derives from a nonsense word used by a friend’s Spanish grandmother to mean “a little wash” - was a cult favorite on the mid-’90s Sunset Strip.
Romeo and Juliet do not win their war against the merciless music industry, of course. In fact, they end up dead (Sorry if that ruined it for anyone.) And, truth be told, Lava Diva isn’t exactly thriving these days, either.
“The last time we played out was, I think, six months ago at the Coconut Teaszer,” says Fintor, who makes her living as a sound-effects engineer for movies such as “Insomnia” and “Traffic.” (The best punching sound comes from beating a leather jacket with a knee pad underneath, she reports.)
Although Lava Diva never escaped L.A.’s club scene, it shared stages with countless colleagues that did - including Beck, Weezer, and Rage Against the Machine. In fact, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello used to give Fintor guitar lessons in his one-room Hollywood apartment.
But Fintor says she harbors no jealousy or regrets.
“I couldn’t be ask to be any happier than I am with the music that I get to do,” says Fintor. “In the past, when business has been introduced, I feel like it’s hurt us more creatively than it’s been worth. I think if we had chosen to go that avenue, we would have stuck with it at the time the momentum was there.
“I was a little upset when Tom (Morello) hit it big, though,” she adds, “only because I was never able to find another guitar teacher that I learned as much from.”