Bettie Serveert: Success Is All in the Timing

Dutch band Bettie Serveert, featuring Carol van Dyk, is seeking to match the success of its 1992 debut, "Palomine."

"It's true, America picked our music up long before any other country," says Bettie Serveert vocalist and lyricist Carol van Dyk, quite thankfully. "When we sent that demo out in 1991, we immediately got attention."

Which turned out to be a blessing and a burden for the Dutch guitar-pop band whose name -- pronounced BET-ty Sea-VAIRT and translated as "Bettie Serves" -- comes from a line in an instruction manual by Betty Stove, the '70s Dutch tennis star still best known for losing a Wimbledon final.

That might have been a sign: Despite a substantial following built on constant stateside touring, Bettie Serveert's reputation still rests on the group's 1992 debut, "Palomine," a classic of '90s jangle rock marked by van Dyk's Chrissie Hynde-like mix of swagger and vulnerability and Peter Visser's tangled, raggedly melodic guitar playing. Signed to ultra-cool indie label Matador, Bettie Serveert was part of a promising Class of '92 that included label mates Pavement and Liz Phair. Rock journalists championed the group, and college radio embraced such songs as "Tom Boy" and "Kid's Allright."

Yet despite 25 or so American tours (the group stops at Iota on Friday) and six subsequent albums, several critically lauded, the band never had a hit bigger than its debut. Even that, van Dyk says, was down to good fortune attached to a seven-song demo she had felt dubious about making.

Calling from Amsterdam last week, van Dyk admitted with a laugh that "it was our first shot. We hadn't tried anything! So there's always the factor of coincidence."

Visser and bassist Herman Bunskoeke had been in a band called De Artsen (the Doctors), while the Vancouver, B.C.-born van Dyk worked at an animation studio and occasionally did live sound engineering for De Artsen. She'd known original drummer Berend Dubbe since high school, "so we were already friends and played in several small formations with Peter, who I've known for 24 years now -- we grew up together. We all moved to Arnhem, in the center of Holland, and lived there because of art school."

At the time, music was more of a lark, says van Dyk, a once-shy performer who had started writing songs with no intention of actually performing them herself. Early on, bandmates had to drag van Dyk onstage -- a phase long since passed, by the way.

"When we started, we had no plan," she recalls in a charming accent that's part Canadian, part Dutch (van Dyk's family moved to Holland when she was 7). "There was no goal apart from doing some gigs, and all of a sudden people started talking about 'Let's make a demo.' I was like, 'What for? Why should we make a demo?'

"Obviously we did, and a friend of ours [working in an indie record shop] sent it over to Gerard Cosloy at Matador with a letter saying, 'Don't throw this out right away, listen to it first.' And shortly after that we got a contract, and that's when we started saying to each other, well, maybe there's more to it than we actually know ourselves."

In fact, van Dyk adds, "we only had a couple of gigs before we did our first tour in America, so it really went very, very fast." And they eventually gave up their safety jobs (two as club DJs, one selling shoes and van Dyk coloring animation).

The timing was good: Matador was entering a distribution deal with major label Atlantic; the group's raw, rough-edged, bittersweet but pop-smart material, with echoes of the Byrds, Crazy Horse and Big Star, fit into the looser rock radio formats of the era; and van Dyk's tomboyish good looks and onstage guilelessness seemed to position Bettie Serveert for a run at success.

Three years on the road gave the band a leg up but may have tested its stamina: When it came off the road and immediately went into the recording studio, Bettie Serveert was creatively spent, trying to conjure an album as it was being recorded. Given the high expectations and goodwill built up by "Palomine," the Daniel Lanois-produced "Lamprey" proved a critical and commercial disappointment, as did 1997's "Dust Bunnies," produced by Bryce Goggin (Pavement). Soon after, Matador dropped the band.