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"Children dream about what they want to be when they grow up, but don't realize what it will take to get there. This was never the case for Katrina Chester, lead singer of LUXX...Katrina's father, Gary CHester, was a famous session drummer from the 1950s until 1987, when he passed away. He played on such hits as "Brown Eyed GIrl" by Van Morrison, "Under the Boardwalk," "Twist and Shout," and "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King, just to name a few...he wanted to instill a work ethic in his daughter that would tip the scale in her favor. "When I was 5, I decided I wanted to be a singer. When I told my dad, the first thing he said to me was, 'You have to live, eat, sleep, and shit music. You have to be able to give people something that they can't get anywhere else. You don't have what it takes.' He was like a boot camp. While I was growing up, he would say, 'All you want to do is party and talk about boys.' My whole life, that's all I heard. 'You're not really serious, Katrina, because if you were you wouldn't be going out right now. You wouldn't be going to the dance at school,' or 'You wouldn't be talking to boy on the phone.' Every minute of my life was priming me for who I am right now, which is a complete workaholic." Despite the discouraging words from her father, Katrina knew that the only reason he said all these things was because he loved her and because he knew her better than anyone else did. "He knew it would get the soul out of me."
Katrina set out to prove to her father and herself that she did have what it takes. She did commercials, started her own rock band at age 13, and played in clubs. About 6 years ago, she started a cover band with her friend Harry. They wer partners, and he was both her acting manager and booking agent. "All the bands that were playing the A rooms were playing Alanis Morissette and all the up-to-date Green Day stuff," she recalls. "I was doing Janis Joplin. I was doing Chaka Kahn: [sings] 'You aint' got no time for what you say...' That's the [stuff] we were doing, so of course nobody was there for a long time. Eventually, it started to get in about a hundred people or so." At this point, she considered herself successful because she was getting paid and surviving on just singing. However, sooner than she realized, she wanted more and remembered why she wanted to sing in the first place.
"As a child I just wanted to sing, but after singing for years and having producers and writers trying to make me into something they wanted, I figured out that I didn't really want to sing what other people wrote or felt about. I wanted to believe what I was saying. I wanted to meet people to write with, to start an original band, to hone my skill, to sing seven nights a week, four sets a night, to be a working musician. Singing in the cover band gave me the discipline and got me into the places that would make this happen." One night, while she was singing in the band, two guys came up to her, complimented her and gave her their card. Katrina did not realize that one of them was guitarist Ian Hatton, formerly of Bonham. "I just ignored them; they really kind of freaked me out. Two months later, Ian had been at every single show, in the back of the room, by himself, never saying a word. I just said, Forget it. I walked up to him and I'm like, 'Let's talk.'"
Everything fell into place after that. Katrina was ecstatic because not only could she sing, she now could sing about things she really cared about. "These guys were going to play it as if I said it. That's what I felt like when Ian played his solo in 'My Indian,' a song from the first CD. I looked over at him, started to cry and said, 'If I could play guitar, that is exactly what I would have said." Shortly after that, Katrina quit the cover band to form Luxx with Ian, not knowing whether or not it would provide the financial security she had become accustomedto. "It was like that movie where Tom Cruise was the bookingagent for the sports thing [Jerry Maguire]. When she stood up and said, 'I'll go with you,' that's what it felt like."
...Finally, Luxx did find the right type of manager and singed with Paul Geary Management (PGM). They don't know when they will look for a deal, but the most important thing is they don't need to take one. Katrina knows that part of what has gotten her to where she is today is luck and knowing when not to do a thing, but she would never have gotten anywhere if it wasn't for all the hard work she did every step of the way. She attributes her incredible drive to her father--the man who taught her to work hard for what she wants.
Katrina makes a guest appearnce on the new Godsmack CD, AWAKE, that is scheduled to be released October 31. Luxx will also be touring with Godsmack (likewise manaed by Geary, former manager and drummer of rock band Extreme--ed.) early next year.
--Colette Tedeschi, INSIDE CONNECTION, October 2000.
