Gutter Response

No record company can produce street buzz, but it's the sound they're all listening for. Patti Smith had it in the seventies when Clive Davis signed the spitting "Rock N Roll Nigger" at Arista. Now it's Gutterboy. The band's hard-core nights at New York's CBGB (the historic sweatbox on Bowery and Bleecker) are packed with shaved wolves in black leather jackets squeezed up against wimpier fashion victims and talent scouts. The group's star defender is lead singer Dito—a tough-sensitive boxer from Astoria, Queens, who occasionally works as a security guard at the door of the club M.K. He and his beefy brothers howl at a moon that is inside all of us. The upshot: a-recent bidding war among record companies to press all the rage. Elektra won with its largest deal ever for a new band. Rumors put the numbers as high as $700,000. Will the buzz translate to spin?

BRAD GOOCH