Music DetailsOn September 11, 2001, hearts and time seemed to stop. Everything changed immediately, maybe forever, and the frustrations of the modern world slinked back to their proper place as people embraced concepts such as family and religion. But, as everyone's been told countless times since, life must go on, as must work, no matter how meaningless the tasks might seem. Greg Divine's job with his band Thrust is to rock out with wild abandon, and while that might sound simple, it's certainly not inconsequential to him anymore.

There was a time when Thrust might have taken its ability to rock for granted. The group was riding high from winning countless battles o' the bands, basking in the increasingly radiant glow from adoring crowds. With its rocket-fueled, meat-and-potatoes blend of classic metal, garage rock, trucker speed and middle-finger-in-the-face attitude, Thrust sounds bold, tough and almost invincible. But any illusions of immortality were shattered instantly six months ago when Divine felt himself skidding out of control.

"I was coming around this corner on my motorcycle and hit a patch of sand," Divine says. The singer's body had been dragged along a ditch in the side of the road before coming to a stop more than 17 feet from the initial incident. "By the time the paramedics got there, they pronounced me dead at the scene.

"They took me to the hospital, and I had broken four different spots right behind my ear on my skull, plus I cracked my jaw, busted my ear drum, broke my thumb and lost my sense of smell," continues Divine, describing his injuries with the understated pride that comes from surviving death. That litany of physical woes might be enough to give any musician heart murmurs about ever playing again, but music was not his greatest concern when he regained consciousness.

"As soon as they told me what had happened, I told my wife to bring my daughter up there because I had no idea what would happen or what was going on, and my girl's only four...." At this, his voice trails off, as parents' voices do when they're forced to consider any combination of mortality and their children.

But now, after spending a week in the hospital, keeping a month's worth of doctor's appointments and consuming countless bottles of pain-relieving pills, Thrust has returned, some would say with a vengeance. In the group's first publicized show since Divine's brush with the great hereafter, Thrust revisited its old stomping ground, America's Pub, in hopes of recapturing its Battle of the Bands title. However, there was more on the line -- Divine had some Jacko-after-the-Pepsi-fire type rumors that needed to be put to rest.

While Thrust was away, some of its fans -- and maybe even enemies -- started producing overblown explanations for Divine's lengthy absence. "We would just try to have fun with it all, so the guys in the band would come up and tell me stuff like, 'Your ear's supposed to be tore off, or your eyeball's supposed to be out now,'" Divine says. "So here I come walking out on stage, and everyone wants to get a glimpse of the monster, but hell, there wasn't nothing there to look at, just the same old Greg, ya know?"

And apparently the same old band as well. Thrust walked away with top honors at the Battle of the Bands final a few weeks after its comeback gig, but its reward didn't come without controversy. Some persistent theories, in heavy circulation around the local hard-rock scene, propose that Divine's inspiring story guaranteed Thrust a win no matter who else showed up or how well they played.

"What went down there?" Divine asks rhetorically when questioned about the brouhaha being raised over this battle. "Well, we won. There's a lot of controversy, and you're going to have that in those situations, but we won, and a lot of people were pissed. There's bands that respect us and there are bands that hate us. I mean, everybody loves us, and if not, everybody else hates us.... We're a band that everybody loves to hate."

That claim might be a frightening omen -- after all, the last person to put it on record was Ice Cube, and now he's mired in B-movie hell (see Anaconda, or, um, don't). But Thrust is too busy for such distractions. Its latest disc, Parade of Idiots, arrives later this fall, and Thrust is also preparing for the opening slot at Freaker's Ball. (This one-of-a-kind Halloween-season event brings aggro-rock from the likes of Static X and Marilyn Manson to the Kansas City International Raceway. Thrust earned a space on the bill by virtue of its Battle of the Bands triumph.)

This year's Freaker's Ball headliner has yet to be announced, but whoever it is will have a hard act to follow in Thrust, whose notoriously vocal fanbase will surely make it feel right at home at the unorthodox venue. Not that Thrust will be suffering from any anxiety -- it's already opened for everyone from Megadeth to L.A. Guns. Out of all the big-name acts for which Thrust has opened, only one has made Divine stop and pinch himself: Mötley Crüe.

"I was like, 'Check it out -- I've seen these guys on TV,'" says Divine who, like any faithful VH-1 viewer, has marveled at Mick Mars' half-Manchu a dozen times on Behind the Music. "And then you meet 'em and they're six-foot-something, and you're like, 'Holy shit! Didn't you die, Nikki?'"

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On February 20 at 10 p.m., the unthinkable happened: 98.9 KQRC The Rock, the station that moves more Pink Floyd catalog albums than Wizard of Oz-related rumors, the station that keeps grunge's comatose corpse-to-be on life support and provides sanctuary on the dial for otherwise gone and unlamented artists such as Ugly Kid Joe and Skid Row, played a song by a Kansas City band. And that group wasn't Puddle of Mudd, Fred Durst's local-boy-fronted Frankenstein's monster; that outfit's KC connection is as tenuous as the long-departed Sacramento Kings'. No, it was a tune written by four musicians who still have phone numbers prefaced by 816 and 913, who continue to play regularly in town instead of just throwing one-night parties whenever their national tours route them into the area, who proudly promise that if they ever score an album on a prominent label, they'll title it Kansas City, in the tradition of Slipknot's home-state-touting Iowa.

That group is Thrust, and its radio-friendly "Smack" gave the titular treatment to its opponent in KQRC's New Rock Rumble, leaving throbbing scarlet handprints across the faces of Republic recording artists Flaw. The next night, Thrust crushed One Side Zero (a group poised to follow in the multiplatinum footsteps of Warner Bros. labelmates Linkin Park) by a margin that made a mockery of that band's name -- one side had virtually zero support, while Thrust's side garnered 93 percent of the votes.

Opening with eerie distorted guitar reminiscent of Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams" remake, "Smack" strikes suddenly with a shouted declaration of its title and a few massive riffs, then settles back into psychedelia for the verses. Its chorus blends the arena-ready bombast of latter-day Metallica with the vulnerable self-reflection of Staind and other still-chained-to-Alice tortured neogrunge souls, as singer Greg Divine growls I feel that I'm addicted/Does that make me a loser? The backup vocals echo Loser, playing the part of an accusatory Greek chorus. Not the cheeriest sentiments, perhaps, but gloom sells when it comes to hard rockers and old-school metalheads. Factor in gruffly melodic hooks and transitional guitar solos as well as professional-quality production, engineering and mixing courtesy of Wes West (son of Shooting Star's Gary West and heir to a top-notch studio), and Thrust's most accessible offering became impossible for even The Rock to ignore.

"They're not there because they're a local band," says Neal Mirsky, 98.9's program director since September 2001. "It's the quality of the band that earned it a place on the New Rock Rumble." Mirsky admits he hasn't seen or heard many local bands yet (he relocated to Kansas City from Philadelphia to take the 98.9 job), but from what he's encountered, "Thrust seems to clearly be the leading local band within the genre of The Rock's music."

Mirsky's first contact with the group came at last year's 98.9-sponsored Freaker's Ball, where Thrust, by virtue of its controversial (more on that later) victory at America's Pub's Battle of the Bands, earned an opening slot in support of Soil, Sevendust and Alice Cooper. "I was pretty impressed with their live performance, and even more impressed with the crowd's reaction," Mirsky recalls. "So I thought I'd throw 'em in the rumble and see what happened."

That marks one of the first tangible benefits from Thrust's big-venue shows, guitarist Mike Scott says. In addition to last year's Freaker's Ball, Thrust's Battle rewards included a warm-up gig for Mötley Crüe at Memorial Hall in 1998 and a show with Megadeth and Static X in 1999. "We've had a lot of offers from people who say, 'I want so much from your first album and so much of your second album,' and it's like, fuck that."

Now Thrust is concentrating on creating its own opportunities. On Saturday, March 2, the group holds a release party for its new CD, Parade of Idiots (the album on which "Smack" appears), at the Uptown Theater. The goal, Scott says, is to "set up something that looks bigger than what we really are, something that will bring people out to find out what we're all about and what [openers] Bent and the Sound and the Fury are all about." There's a high price to pay for this grand illusion. Scott estimates the band will have to sell more than 1,000 tickets to break even; as of a week before showtime, it had moved approximately 600. Budweiser, perhaps intoxicated by Thrust's tune "One for the Bottle," has chipped in with a few posters and the official-looking "Budweiser presents" endorsement on the event's tickets. The Rock is also a big part of the promotional push, although it should be noted that this isn't charitable assistance -- Thrust pays the station handsomely for ad time.

Thrust also has adopted the up-and-coming musician's version of door-to-door salesmanship, passing fliers to fans outside major shows such as last week's System of a Down concert at the Uptown. (And anyone who watched that crowd knows that this was an appropriate setting for stirring up interest in something called Parade of Idiots.) Finally, Thrust printed 5,000 three-song discs ("Scrape" is included), which it plans to distribute across the metro area as a free sampler.

Contributing further to the buzz about this show is the fact that Bent is on the bill. The groups are reputed to be bitter rivals, with hard feelings simmering after close clashes in the aforementioned Battles of the Bands. After Thrust's most recent triumph, Bent fans cried foul, and some of them still maintain that the club's judges were as fragile and misguided as French figure-skating judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne. But as their collaboration on this double-headed affair implies, the beef between Thrust and Bent, if there ever really was any, has long since been squashed. "There's no animosity at all," says Scott, who voluntarily vouches for the quality of Bent's new disc.

But while its tunes might have inspired unlikely converts, Bent should have a much harder time winning airplay for its heavier, largely melody-free material. For that matter, other local hopefuls might do well not to read too much into Thrust's surprising breakthrough.

"I don't want to kid anybody," Mirsky says. "My job as program director isn't to break bands or to get bands signed. My job, first and foremost, is to get ratings and program the music that's going to gain us the most listeners. If local bands come up with music that's on par with a lot of the national stuff, I'd jump at the opportunity to support them, but that's not our primary purpose. Our purpose is to entertain, not to educate. If a local band makes great music and people get into it, then I'm serving both masters."

For now, Thrust continues to represent local rock nightly in a clash against mediocre MTV metal, a battle with no small symbolic value. Ironically, if Thrust rules the Rumble for two consecutive weeks, 98.9 will retire "Smack," making possible permanent removal from the airwaves the terrible reward for the song's winning ways. However, the song's success could also earn it a spot in regular rotation, a possibility Mirsky doesn't debunk. If nothing else, Thrust's story provides instruction to groups in the area's mostly densely populated musical genre: If local radio programmers won't play your songs, give 'em a "Smack."