She Sheila

The Zoo Crew has got She Sheila cranked up on the turntable, and if you are a Zoo Freak who came up on freeform album rock, this one still hits like a cold beer after a long ride. The Producers cut it for the 1982 album You Make the Heat, and it is the kind of power-pop firecracker that never quite got the national crown it deserved. Atlanta boys with sharp hooks, a little new-wave snap, and a chorus that sticks to the inside of your helmet. Van Temple on guitar and vocals, Kyle Henderson on bass and vocals, Wayne Famous on keys, Bryan Holmes on the drums. Portrait Records put it out, Tom Werman produced it, and the single parked at number 48 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart while the video spun hard on early MTV. That is the whole joke and the whole glory of the thing. The song was everywhere on the tube and still had to fight for radio real estate outside the Southeast.

There is a story a listener named Shelia told years later that the Crew still passes around the booth. Back in 1982 she and her boyfriend had a blowup, he stormed out to the car, and when he came back he was even madder. The radio had come on and She Sheila was blasting. Her name, or close enough, ringing out of the speakers while he was trying to stay mad. That is how a record gets into somebody’s life. Not a focus group. A fight, a car, and a chorus that will not shut up. A college jock at WLLI in Joliet later remembered sneaking the same 45 into the rotation in 1991 because the station’s vinyl copy had been starred like it was holy. Zoo Freaks know that feeling. Some records just refuse to stay in the bin.

The big stage version of the story is messier, which is how rock and roll usually goes. The Producers headlined MTV’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve broadcast out of Radio City Music Hall as 1982 rolled into 1983, right when the channel was the new church of the video age. Kyle Henderson later laid it out plain. Martha Quinn hits the intro about sixty seconds early, yells that it is the Producers, and the band is not ready. They rush the count, the take feels off, and a shouting match with the manager follows. Henderson summed the whole ride up as a high level of talent and real opportunities sitting next to constant foul-ups. Fortune and misfortune in the same hallway. The video itself is wonderfully ridiculous and still polished, the kind of clip that looked like a party somebody actually threw. Fans on the old boards still call the whole album fantastic from front to back, and they are not wrong. Breakaway, Dear John, the title cut, Chinatown, Domino. She Sheila is the one that walked out of the house and got recognized on the street.

Tom Werman, the man who had already cut records with Cheap Trick and plenty of other loud companies, has never been shy about this band. He caught them when they were still morphing out of an earlier outfit and said they felt like the greatest thing since sliced bread, or at least since the Police. Spare, mod, smart songs. He name-checked What’s He Got and She Sheila in the same breath and swore the keyboards had their own dialect, the guitar was crisp, the singing was right, and the drumming could stand next to Stewart Copeland without borrowing his clothes. During the first album he was sure all they had to do was let people hear it and then stand back. Portrait, a young Epic-associated label, never quite got the record into enough hands. Werman later called the commercial miss the biggest disappointment of his career and one of the reasons he walked away from CBS. That is a producer talking, not a fan-club newsletter. When the guy who made the record says the songs were the most commercial stuff he had ever done and the band stayed a cult item, you listen.

The sound of She Sheila is half the legend. Wayne Famous, born Wayne McNatt, had come up as a sideman with Billy Joe Royal and then turned into the bald, grinning wild card in this quartet, the Rick Nielsen of the outfit if Nielsen had been wired to a synth. Years before the keytar was a catalog item, he strapped an Oberheim OB-X around his neck, ran an umbilical cable back to the brains of the rig offstage, and danced the thing center stage. He fixed the contraption in front of crowds when it acted up. On You Make the Heat that Oberheim weight sits under the chorus of She Sheila like a second engine. The track runs about four and a half minutes, side one, cut two, written by the band, with Jimmy Dugan and Pam Johnzie on the backing vocals. Sessions bounced between Axis Sound, Westlake, and the Record Plant in Los Angeles, Gary Ladinsky engineering. It is crisp without being cold, which is the trick most new-wave pop never quite landed.

Before any of that, they were a Beatles cover band called Cartoon, working Atlanta rooms and learning how a crowd breathes. The origin yarn that sticks comes from a New Year’s Eve gig in 1979. Kyle Henderson was already out there with Whiteface and frustrated at the speed of the ladder. He sat in with Van Temple, Wayne Famous, and Bryan Holmes, and the room told them something. Henderson has said he felt an affinity right away, a musical connection that could turn into something special. He and Temple started writing in Temple’s apartment living room, up late, chain-smoking, drinking Diet Cokes, folding songs out of whatever was in the air. Within about a year they had an audition in front of a real producer. They set up in a New York studio for Tom Werman, who was polite and busy. By the second song his head was rocking. He leaned over and told somebody they would record the album in November. That is the get-started story in one night and one nod. Club band, sit-in, cigarettes, Diet Coke, and a producer who heard the second song and booked the studio.

Portrait put the self-titled debut out in 1981. What She Does to Me climbed to number 61 on the Hot 100, the album reached 163 on the Billboard 200, and What’s He Got bubbled under. The Southeast treated them like neighbors who had made good. They opened for Cheap Trick and the Motels, played the rooms that still matter in that circuit, and looked for a minute like the next sharp American pop band. You Make the Heat followed in 1982 and gave them She Sheila, the video, and the Radio City night. Then the label dropped them after two albums. Henderson, frustrated that the thing would not grow, headed toward a solo path and a stretch in Los Angeles. Tim Smith stepped in on bass for a while. A later independent record, Run for Your Life, showed up in 1985 and included Can’t Cry Anymore, a collaboration with Kansas. They cut Coelacanth for MCA in the late eighties and got caught in a label purge before it could come out. The album finally surfaced in 2001. Another record, worked up with Tab Benoit, was previewed and then shelved. Bad decisions and bad timing, Bryan Holmes told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when the original four were still taking stages together decades on. Things did not fall into place. Van Temple has kept saying the simple part. They still like playing together. He loves performing. They all do.

That is the long road under a four-minute chorus. A Beatles cover band in Atlanta, a New Year’s sit-in, songs written on Diet Coke and cigarette smoke, a producer who heard the second number and cleared the calendar, two Portrait albums, a video that lived on MTV, a chart position that did not match the noise, and a band that never quite got the national bow. Holmes has said they still book a handful of jobs a year, a side hustle with a long memory, mostly through the Southeast and the Midwest. Atlanta stations that still care about the era will drop a Producers cut when the mood is right. The Oberheim still sounds like the future somebody promised in 1982 and then forgot to deliver. She Sheila does not need the trophy. It needs a room, a stack of records, and people who remember how a chorus can walk into a fight and take a side.

So the Zoo Crew will let this one ride a little longer for the Zoo Freaks. Crank it if you are on the bike, crank it if you are on the couch, and if you want the rest of the freeform mess we keep spinning, come hang with THE ZOO. She Sheila is on. The apartment lights are still on in the story. And the second song is still the one that got them the studio.