U.S. Magazine - April 1998

Singer Rob Thomas is roaming the halls of L.A.'s Universal Amphitheatre sporting a distinctly Rabelaisian grin. He has come here tonight to perform for KROQ's acoustic benefit concert, and as he maneuvers his way through the corridor's claustrophobic crush, he passes a veritable Who's Who of music: Beck, No Doubt's Gwen Stefani, Bush's Gavin Rossdale. Suddenly Thomas stops, takes my tape recorder and holds it up to his mouth like a microphone. "We're not a very good band," he announces, "But we try...and we're spunky dressers!"

It's a joke, but Thomas' self-deprecation seems out of kilter in light of his band's recent success. Matchbox 20's debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You - a collection of the kind of post-midnight confessions that keep company with smeared mascara and Southern Comfort - has reached triple-platinum sales and resulted in a Grammy nomination for its big hit "Push." "It was written about a girl I was living with," says Thomas. "She treated me like shit, but I didn't care, because I was so gaga."

Heartache, it seems, has been the least of Thomas' worries. Although the 25-year-old singer is amped by the recnt success of the band - which includes guitarists Kyle Cook and Adam Gaynor, drummer Paul Doucette and bassist Brian Yale - his situation just a few years ago serves as a reality check. "I'm seconds away from being this loser that never got a job and sat around writing songs," he says.

Thomas' childhood was not of the Norman Rockwell variety. When he was 2, his parents divorced and he was sent to South Carolina to live with his grandmother, who ran the town's social hub and sold bootlegged liquor. "Every now and then she'd have to run somebody off with a gun," he recalls. "It was a weird way to grow up."

By age 12, Thomas had moved into a Florida trailer park with his mom, who had been diagnosed with cancer. "By the time she had gone into remission," he says, "I was just dying." He pauses, carefully measuring his words. "I tried to stay there, but we just weren't getting along. So I took off."

At first, Thomas stayed in high school, sleeping on park benches and friends' couches, but he eventually dropped out and was soon hitchhiking around the Southeast. "During a two-day span, other kids would have woken up, gone to school, played football, woken up, gone to school, played football," he says. In the same two day, he would have met a girl at Burger King, spent the day with her and slept on the beach. "When you're 17," he says wistfully, "it's the vagabond dream."

It was music that would force Thomas to settle down. A friend taught him to play the piano, and the pair formed a band that peformed Richard Marx and U2 covers in Florida-area hotels. By 1995, Thomas had joined an Orlando group called Tabitha's Secret with Doucette and Yale. Record producer Matt Serletic caught the act and was impressed. "To me, Rob sounded a little like Van Morrison and, songwriterwide, like Burt Bacharach," recalls Serletic. By the time the group morphed into Matchbox 20, a record deal had been sealed.

"Music saved me long before Matchbox 20," says Thomas. "It was the thing that made Rob, Rob:a defining quality that said maybe I wasn't such a fuckup after all."

Now, faced with the growing pressures of rock fame, Thomas strives even harder to avoid becoming the kind of victim of emotional distress populating his songs. "I have enough to keep me humble and laughing at my own situation," he says. "I look at it like a satire. There's a humor in this business. You just have to find it."

- SARA SCRIBNER