By BRIAN TRUITT
Journal staff writer


Sauri returns to his rock roots

Leaving a band can be hard for any musician, due to the deep bonds and friendships one forms with bandmates-in-arms. For Michael Sauri, making the decision to leave Fighting Gravity was even more difficult because of the group's impending national exposure. Yet departing from the popular Richmond, Va.-based ska band and forming his own rock outfit, Cinema8, was something he said he had to do to be true to his own musical vision.
"It wasn't like I was sitting there, chomping my teeth, [saying] `God, I hate this stuff,''' Sauri said of his 14 months with Fighting Gravity, which he left in November 2000. "[But] I definitely have rock 'n' roll and loud guitar and big, flailing D chords in my veins.''

Cinema8 is Sauri's harmonic tribute to the Beatles' music, '70s-era Aerosmith arena rock and '80s guitar gods who he grew up listening to, with lyrics that often have a strong foundation in literature and mythology. "When I left Fighting Gravity, though I missed my friends very much and miss those guys a ton, I just wanted to write a rock record that was cinematic in scope,'' said Sauri, who was Fighting Gravity's lead guitarist. "I wanted to write tunes that go from one end to the other in where my influences come from. I know that every musician says this, `I don't want to be labeled in a genre, I don't want you to typecast me,' but I wanted to try and write a record that took all those different things that somehow worked together,'' he said.

Performing Saturday at Centreville, Va.'s Shark Club, Cinema8 has booked a busy local concert schedule to gain a stronger fan base and prove that the band - frontman Sauri, bass player Colin McGough, Boogiehawg's guitarist Buddy Speir and ex-Egypt drummer Tony McGee - wants to be ``more than just your average `Yep, they're playing in the bar and it's 9 to 1 and let's go to Billy Bob's Bar and Grill' [band],'' Sauri said.

Taking a page from fellow area native Dave Grohl, who formed Foo Fighters after being one of Nirvana's founding members, Sauri recruited several of his friends to travel up to New York and record Cinema8's debut disc, which was released on Telegraph Records March 12. The studio players didn't want to be in the live band, Sauri said, so the singer/guitarist decided to let the finished record speak for itself. Soon after, he recruited Speir, McGee and McGough.

Sauri wrote some of the tunes while hanging out in the back of the Fighting Gravity tour bus, but most originated in the three months leading up to the recording sessions. ``Bleed,'' for example, was finished during recording, after Sauri's girlfriend visited him in New York. During one of his days off, Sauri received the call that her father had passed away unexpectedly and had to break the news to her.

"That chorus - `Every time you walk through the door, I bleed/Everything I've got, is what you need' - is just completely from seeing somebody lose this man that means everything,'' Sauri said. "I don't think I've ever seen a relationship closer than that.'' And anybody who's had an experience where everything they see, hear and smell reminds them of a lost love may identify with "Thoughts of You.'' "One of the things that I do as a musician is try to put into [music] those things that relate to everybody's experience,'' Sauri said. "You've had it, I've had it, we've all had that thing happen to us, like, `Where did you come from and what the hell just happened?'

"What's been so fun for me is as I've been working on things ... I'm letting that art take on a life of its own. And I think that's something that happened on `Thoughts of You,' where here's this thing that happened to me, and now it's not even me anymore.''

A double major in music and English at Towson University in Baltimore, Sauri shows off his literary interests on the album, which includes a song titled "Icarus'' and a Homer-inspired lyric in "Thoughts of You'' ("Siren's voice called me sweetly''). His background in liberal arts was helpful for the songwriter, but made for a hairy schedule: In the weeks leading up to his graduation recital,
Sauri said he spent six to eight hours a day practicing classical guitar pieces and then tending to his literature homework. Sauri read a bunch of mythology books around the time he was penning the Cinema8 tunes, but said he laments the fact that great stories from mythology and even the Bible are missing from much of today's culture.

"For artists, they were common trade,'' said Sauri, who has recorded with David Byrne of the Talking Heads and once played classical guitar in an opera directed by Placido Domingo. "You knew that everybody knew the story of Noah's ark, and now, if you make a reference to that - like I just threw in a couple of mythology references - you may or may not get them. It's not my job to pound the pavement and be, `Look how intelligent I am!' You either get it or you don't. Most people, when they listen to `Wrapped Around Your Finger' by The Police, they have no idea who Mephistopheles is. I'm not nearly as smart as [Sting] is, and good thing he can write `Mephistopheles' and `De do do do, de da da da.'

"It has been a good muse for me, and it has been good in that I don't want every song to be about me and this chick who just broke my heart.'' Born on Long Island, N.Y., Sauri moved to Annapolis, Md., when he was 6, the age when he started playing guitar. Well, that's according to him. "My mom would say I was 18 months old when I got my first pink plastic guitar, which I don't really count,'' Sauri said. ``And she's like, `Oh, you were playing then.' And then Poison came out with pink plastic guitars and I thought, `Well, OK, maybe I am alright. I need some silly string.'''

While attending a Christian high school so strict that "if you were within 6 inches of someone of the opposite sex, you got a demerit,''' Sauri said, he started playing in church groups with veteran rockers of '70s and '80s garage bands when he was 12. "Talk about an education for me,'' Sauri said. "Here's this little twerp, and I'm like, `What's an E-flat chord?' They didn't bap me in the head or anything, but it was a real good setting for me to learn.''

Prior to making bands his full-time career, Sauri began teaching guitar at Annapolis' Key School, but these days gives private lessons only two afternoons a week for extra cash. "I can take my girlfriend out to dinner once or twice a month at least. We go to Roy Rogers,'' he said, joking.

As a teacher, sometimes the best thing you can do is shut up, he said. Two weeks ago, a student with Technicolor hair came in wearing sunglasses and letting his "freak flag fly,'' according to Sauri, and refused to sit down. Sauri recalled how he had read something about a guitar player who never sat down in the studio, and he didn't question his youthful charge. "I would be a fool to say that these kids have nothing to teach me,'' Sauri said. "Whether it's keeping you up on some new band they heard about or checking in with something you didn't get before or even just about being a human being, there's so many good things we manage to downplay as the `adult' perspective.''

Sauri is learning how to cope with a Fighting Gravity-less musical life, and he said he feels blessed to have the opportunity to front Cinema8. "The first couple of gigs after leaving playing for however many thousands of people those guys play for regularly, and going from, let's say, the 9:30 Club to clubs that aren't that big, it was like, `Wow. Alright, here we go,''' Sauri said. "But the reason that we do what we do is that we've been given these gifts and we have to use them. "It was tough going from having a guitar tech and having a big van and trailer and screaming people to like, `OK, we've got to build this.' When you're being true to yourself, it's easy.''