Bettie Serveert: Success Is All in the Timing

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 29, 2006

"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.

"It was a disappointment because Matador didn't have any money anymore -- that was a disappointment," van Dyk says lightly. "At least we left as friends, no hard feelings. But I have to say that Matador was always very open to anything we wanted to try out -- there were no restrictions, we could always make the records we wanted to make and they fully supported us in every way."

After that, the band members started their own company. They called it Palomine and found indie distributors for each new release: 1998's live "Bettie Serveert Plays Venus in Furs and Other Velvet Underground Songs," 2000's "Private Suit," 2003's "Log 22" and last year's "Attagirl." Van Dyk and Belgian rocker Pascal Deweze also formed a side project, country duo Chitlin' Fooks, casting themselves as the Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons of the Lowlands and recording two albums.

Critical opinion of these works has been mostly good, but "Palomine" remains the benchmark. Van Dyk is asked whether it might have been better for success to have come slowly, in more measured doses.

"I never really think about that kind of stuff," she insists. "Life happens as it does, and we're very proud that it happened. It's always a matter of coincidence -- making the right record, meeting the right person, the right moment at the right place. Who knows -- if we'd made the same record 10 years earlier, maybe nobody would have given a damn."

Van Dyk also knows the choppy history of Dutch rock in international waters. On one hand, there's the '70s burst with Golden Earring ("Radar Love"), Shocking Blue ("Venus") and Focus ("Hocus Pocus"). Then, nothing much until the mid-'90s, when it was down to a few DJs (Tiesto, XL Junkie and Ferry Corsten, who will be at Glow on Oct. 21) and Bettie Serveert.

At least their government was behind the group: Its first U.S. appearance, at the 1992 New Music Seminar in New York, was funded by the Dutch Rock & Pop Institute, formed in 1975 by the Ministry of Culture to promote Dutch music at home and abroad. For many years, the institute sponsored Dutch bands at the seminar and distributed "Holland Rocks" CD compilations. Bettie Serveert was one of 20 bands on the 1992 disc, but, van Dyk says, "a lot of them don't exist anymore. It's sad, because we know most of them, and, one by one, they disappeared, dissolved, moved on to something else -- we're one of the survivors."

Put part of that down to changes, sometimes subtle, in the band's sound, the fact that van Dyk sings in English, and incessant touring, "specifically in the United States," van Dyk says. Holland, she points out, is "very small, probably smaller than the state of New York" (the CIA's World Factbook says it's "slightly less than twice the size of New Jersey"). "And it's 16 million people living on top of each other. But if you're condemned, if I may use this word, to only tour in Holland, that is a restriction."

On the other hand, America "is huge and beautiful, and we love traveling and playing live -- that's touring. We have been able to tour for 14 years now in America, and we have a lot of fans over there. All the other Dutch bands never had the opportunity."

Bettie Serveert recently released its eighth album, "Bare Stripped Naked," with an accompanying concert DVD. As the title suggests, the instrumentation is spare.

"First, we're a rock-pop-alternative band," van Dyk says, "but we've always had a more subtle side. On every record, there is at least one quiet, stripped-down song, and a lot of fans were saying, 'We love your rock shows, but why don't you ever play the softer songs?'

"And we went, okay, we can do that. Let's do a whole tour of it, in Holland and Belgium only, playing the quiet songs, mostly in theaters, people sitting down in nice red plush chairs. That was really fun, something we've never done before, so it was a big challenge for us as well. It's easier to make a lot of noise, we discovered, than to actually strip down and be very quiet and very precise, where you can hear every mistake."

While doing that tour, the band started writing new songs and adding them to the show, "and the very last show we recorded is what's on the DVD. After that, we made the CD," says van Dyk, adding that "it was sort of backwards. Usually a band will first make a CD and then start touring; we did it the other way around. We always did things backward and the other way around. It's a tradition for us!"

The band's latest tour is not a continuation of the "quiet" Bettie Serveert, but a 15th anniversary celebration, not unlike the concert filmed in August at the standing-room-only Paradiso club in Amsterdam, with former member Dubbe sitting in on a bunch of "Palomine" favorites. Van Dyk points out that "if people want to see what we're playing on this tour, it's online at http://www.fabchannel.com ." The Amsterdam-based music Web site houses the world's largest online concert video archive, with more than 500 concerts, including three by Bettie Serveert.

Bettie Serveert With E. Joseph Appearing Friday at Iota Sounds like: Melancholy relationship songs with delightfully oblique lyrics, tempered by jangly guitars and peppy percussion, with van Dyk's sweet vocals an intriguing mix of Chrissie Hynde-style swagger and Lucinda Williams-like vulnerability.