Stroke 9

After all, the San Francisco-based group has been working on its career for a decade. That time has been spent building a regional fanbase, releasing independent albums and even mounting a tour while keeping their day jobs. Certainly, it’s more than just one song that’s responsible for bringing Stroke 9 to a national audience.

The band started as a high school senior project. Singer/guitarist Luke Esterkyn told POLLSTAR the four original members went to an “artsy” school just north of San Francisco where they were fortunate enough to take a class called Rock Band. For their senior project, the quartet recorded six original songs. Esterkyn doesn’t remember what grade they got on the assignment, but he doubts it was an A+. It was probably more like a “see me after class,” he joked.

After graduation, the members dispersed to different colleges – not one music major in the bunch. However, the music bug that bit them would not die. Each summer, they would re-form. They recorded their first independent album, Boy Meets Girl, in the summer of 1993.

After completing their college studies, they reunited for good in 1995. Their second indie recording, Bumper To Bumper, was released that year and sold more than 10,000 copies.

The following year, the musicians decided it was time to venture outside California. So they bought an old ambulance and a fine piece of literature called “Book Your Own Tour,” and they hit the road, playing about 50 shows over a few months.

Since hardly anyone outside of the Golden State had heard of Stroke 9, the band found it was no easy task to support itself on tour. To make ends meet, the members would hang out in malls and ask kids to listen to their album on a Discman. “We’d usually sell between 20 to 25 copies a day doing that and make like $200,” Esterkyn said.

Though the tour was a great experience, it was a bit of a rude awakening for the hard-working band. “We realized that it was really impractical and expensive and basically impossible to do for a band like us,” the frontman said. “After that, we just stayed in California and played around the Bay Area and we’d go down to L.A. and San Diego a lot but, other than that, [we didn’t do] much.”

Things took a turn for the better when Stroke 9 was offered a slot on a BMI showcase in Los Angeles. A music industry attorney was so impressed with the performance, he asked to work with the group. “So we gave him our demo and then within a few weeks, we had label interest,” Esterkyn said.

As the offers rolled in, the bandmates decided to go with the one label that understood their music right off the bat – Cherry / Universal. A day after receiving a copy of their demo, Cherry A&R rep Daniella Capretta flew to San Francisco to check out the band’s live show.

“She came and she loved it and she’s like, ‘I want to sign you guys.’ She got it from right then,” Esterkyn said. Plus, the group liked the fact that Cherry was a boutique label under the Universal Music Group umbrella.

“You have these five or six people at Cherry who are focusing all their energy on us instead of having 20 different bands that five or six people are trying to work on. So it just really gave us a great opportunity to make the record we wanted to make without having to go through the whole huge label system,” Esterkyn said. “And they gave us a really good opportunity to spend a good six months just writing songs and getting ready before we had to go record, which was really nice.”

The members of Stroke 9, having controlled their own career for so long, are eagerly learning how the music industry machine works and trying to influence their own destiny. While “Little Black Backpack” is a modern rock hit, it didn’t turn out to be a big crossover hit. And believe it or not, the band feels fortunate about that. They’ve seen fellow bands that have had a debut single hit big and cross over right away.

“It’s kind of hard to come back after something like that,” Esterkyn said. “But I think that for us, we definitely have songs on the album that have the potential to do better at Top 40 radio. We definitely see that there’s still room to go up. So we’re pretty stoked about getting some new songs out there.”

Stroke 9 is touring nonstop, as it has been for about six months now, and is getting ready to release its second single, “Letters.” In the meantime, band is up for a California Music Award for outstanding debut album and will perform at that ceremony in April, as well as provide major league baseball’s opening-day entertainment at San Francisco’s new Pacific Bell Park.