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THE DARKER INFLUENCE ON THE BONGOS

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When it comes to the Bongos, there’s more there than meets the ear. On the surface, the Hoboken, N.J., quartet sounds like a playful pop-rock band performing a fanciful brand of post-punk bubble gum. But head Bongo Richard Barone insists that the group’s light, breezy sound is infused with some decidedly darker influences.

“I always wanted to be in a band that did pop music,” Barone explained during a recent phone interview. “But I’ve always had influences, friends, peers in other types of music--not just this sugar-pop garbage. When we were first starting this band in New York, we used to play with the ‘No Wave’ people like James Chance, Lydia Lunch, the Bush Tetras. We were friends with Throbbing Gristle in England. Our whole thing is to consider what we do as experimental as what they do. For us, writing pop songs is just as experimental as writing a dirge or creating a wall of noise.”

Since the group’s beginning in 1980, the Bongos (Barone, guitarist James Mastro, bassist Rob Norris and drummer Frank Giannini, with Talking Heads percussionist Steve Scales sitting in on a tour that brings them to the Palace on Saturday) have found that its brash brand of pop doesn’t quite fit in with any prevailing trends.

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The group released a string of singles, toured Europe and put out an independent album before being picked up by RCA, which released “Number With Wings” last year. That mini-album was a college-radio hit, and a video of the title song was one of the only clips by a non-platinum group to be nominated for an MTV video award. But the Bongos have yet to achieve the kind of mass acceptance that other modern guitar bands like R.E.M. have found.

“I’m not frustrated,” insisted Barone, who resembles a cherubic cross between Paul McCartney and Donny Osmond. “To me, we’re very successful. My whole goal when we started was to put an album out. Now, we’ve put out many records, and we’re quite happy with all of them.

“It’s funny: What we’re doing now would have been considered really commercial in the ‘60s, but the way things have gone after the--pardon the expression--new wave has made what we’re doing extremely uncommercial. I find it very amusing. Anyway, a lot of the bands we really like never sold a lot of records, like the Velvet Underground.”

The Bongos’ influences are literary as well as musical: Barone cites writers like William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams alongside musical heroes like T. Rex as sources for the Bongos’ fanciful sound. The title of the group’s new album, “Beat Hotel,” is a reference to Burroughs’ residence in Paris.

“I don’t want to make a big thing about it because it’s such a trend now,” Barone said, “but, when I started writing songs, my biggest influence was reading things like Burroughs’ ‘Wild Boys.’ Burroughs worked in the Beat Hotel, and I thought that would be a good title for the album. It’s not like a permanent residence, and I think all our records are transient things--they’re so different.”

According to Barone, an unexpected influence materialized during the recording of “Beat Hotel”: the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. Barone claims that when the Bongos were working on the record at Hendrix’s old New York studio, Electric Ladyland, strange sounds kept popping up on the tape.

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“We’d hear stuff, and the engineer would say, ‘Oh, that’s the echo chamber on the second floor.’ We’d laugh and say, ‘Oh, right,’ but I slept over there one night and kept hearing stuff from the ‘echo chamber on the second floor.’ Some of the people who worked on Hendrix’s last album hold seances at that studio on the anniversary of his death, and the ambiance is really frightening. Some of the things on the record we didn’t play.”

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