A&E: Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins is beefing up his resumé

Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins didn't have a double platinum album in high school, but his band's runaway success hasn't changed everything for him: His words are still being used to woo women.

Now they're just better words.

Asked what his high school yearbook quote, "Success - All it takes is all you've got," means to him now, Jenkins laughed.

"Nothing," he said. "I said the things that I thought would get girls in my high school to have sex with me. And I wore the clothes that I wore to get girls. It doesn't mean anything more than that. It's kind of silly."

And as anyone who reads Entertainment Weekly knows, Jenkins now dates Charlize Theron, whom they may recall from a cat fight scene with Teri Hatcher in Two Days In The Valley, an otherwise unremarkable movie.

Jenkins and Third Eye Blind, which has had two huge radio hits with "Semi-Charmed Life" and "How's It Going To Be," bring theBonfire Tour to Meadowbrook Farm in Gilford on Saturday.

For Jenkins, life these days is more than semi-charmed. He said his songs come from "the life I see, the life I lead." He added, "I write songs for all kinds of reasons that are real to me."

"It's been a blur," Jenkins said of the year that's passed since the band released its self-titled debut album. "I think it's made us all sort of crazy, but in a good way. In a lot of ways, it's made us better people. At least for me, it's made me humble and more focused and given me more of a sense of who I am."

Humble and focused seem to be the words for Jenkins, at least in a 30-minute phone interview from Los Angeles. Three separate times, the line filled with static for what seemed an eternity, and Jenkins walked around or waited until the connection improved. Other rock stars might have hung up the phone.

Jenkins doesn't see himself as your typical rock star, though.

"I don't get sick of any of it. "That's really a lame attitude."

He readily admitted he resents giving blocks of his time to talk with reporters, but he said he understands and even appreciates why he has to.

"I want to reach people with music and through you I get to do that," he said. "So in another sense, I'm grateful for the opportunity and I'm also flattered that an interest is being taken in something I did."

Flattered? That shows you right there that Jenkins may not be your regular rock star, despite the fact he found Theron in circles he wouldn't have traveled in without a smash album.

"I think we're still trying to figure out what Third Eye Blind is," he said. "We know what it's not. It's not a karaoke band. It's still something that's still growing. We're finding ourselves in who we are as people and musicians."

To that, add this: "When I say something I want to mean what I say and I want to feel what I mean." Which is a far cry from "I just said it because I thought it would get me (girls.)"

Now consider his lyrics for a song called "Jumper," which will bethe band's next video on MTV: "I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend/You could cut ties with all the lies that you've been living in/And if you do not want to see me again I would understand/I would understand."

Not quite as trite as "Success - All it takes is all you've got," ey? And how about this for heavy?

" 'Jumper' comes from a lot of impulses," Jenkins said. "We all have some things that as human beings we're all ashamed of. And we all have pasts we wish we could walk away from. It's saying, 'Put the pasts away.' And I think we all have a sense of self-destruction at one level or another, and I think that we could all sort of do a little bit more to give each other a break."

Whoa.

Of course the trick to any rock act is avoiding the sophomore slump, and Jenkins thinks Third Eye Blind's next batch of songs will be just as strong as the first.

"We're really excited about our second album," he said. "When they let us finish this tour, we're going to make a record that we're going to be real proud of. Which is what we did on this record, make music that we're proud of. If that's what we do, then at least it will be eligible to travel to other people."

He added, "We already have more material than we could possibly fit on a second record. There's no issue of will we have a lot of songs. It's more an issue of how many songs we can put on a record."

In other words, all it takes is all you've got.

By MATTHEW T. HALL 
    Monitor staff (Concord Online Monitor) 
    Concord Monitor

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