JABARA PINS HOPES ON HIS WACKY POPERETTA

Paul Jabara, renowned as a talented maverick, is fed up with the music business.

“It’s driving me crazy,” said Jabara, who’s primarily a songwriter but also sings, acts and produces records. “I can’t win. I’m tired of beating my head up against a stone wall. If this new album doesn’t work, I may jump off a cliff, or I’ll go sell shoes--I don’t know which is worse.”

Typical Jabara melodrama. It’s the kind of line you’d expect from this excitable, unpredictable, flamboyant New Yorker. But his frustration is understandable. His up-and-down career has been mostly down in the ‘80s.

His new album, though, was expected to be his salvation. It’s an outrageous, campy, racy disco opera--he calls it a poperetta--on Warner Bros. Records. Titled “De La Noche: The True Story,” the scenario is an eyebrow-raiser. De La Noche is a woman--a woman of the night, according to one of the songs--who has a one-night stand with a 7-foot-2, 300-pound black man. The result is female octuplets.

“They’re stolen and for 21 years she searches for the De La Noche sisters,” said Jabara, relating the wacky tale in the living room of his Hollywood Hills home. “They’re all separated at birth and stolen and sold on the black market. Deena DeMarco is the one who stole them and sold them. They’re all branded with a D.” The details are comic, but some are too lascivious to reveal in a family newspaper.

“The De La Noche sisters are the ultimate all-girl group,” he continued. “They’re mulatto, they’re black, they’re white--there’s even one who’s Chinese. We don’t know how she got there. There’s Delilah from Duluth, there’s Delores from Damascus, there’s Donna from Des Moines who’s divine, there’s Darlene from Disneyland who’s desperate. These characters are wild .”

Though one of the year’s most adventurous and fascinating albums, “De La Noche” is off to a rocky start. The problem stems from the constant references in one of the songs, “Ocho Rios,” to “that Negro from Ocho Rios.” Some blacks consider the word Negro offensive. Dance clubs played the single but radio snubbed it. So did MTV. Too controversial, Jabara was told.

Bleeping the word Negro out of the single seemed the obvious answer. But Jabara was against this, insisting it would ruin the song: “If it was blacks talking, they’d say I met a Caucasian in Ocho Rios. That’s funny. If they said ‘I met a white boy in Ocho Rios,’ that’s not funny. The word Negro is funny in ‘Negro From Ocho Rios.’ It’s not a hate word, like all those other names for blacks. What’s all the fuss about?”

Actually, there was no fuss. Just the threat of a fuss killed the single before it developed any momentum.

It comes as no surprise that getting a record deal for this project wasn’t easy. “I went to all the record companies and they turned me down,” Jabara recalled. “It was alien to them. I’d get up in some executive’s office and act the whole thing out, playing all the parts. They were flabbergasted. It’s not often they saw some guy in their office lip-syncing a song about a Negro in Ocho Rios.”

Somehow Jabara was able to interest Warner Bros. in the project. “Those executives were dumbfounded when they heard it, just like all the others,” he said. “But they weren’t scared away. They took a chance on it.”

Jabara’s credentials certainly helped. First of all, he won both an Oscar and a Grammy for composing the Donna Summer disco hit, “Last Dance,” from the 1978 movie, “Thank God, It’s Friday.” Among his other compositions is the disco classic, Barbra Streisand’s “The Main Event.” And with Bruce Roberts, he co-wrote the Streisand-Donna Summer duet, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” which some disco devotees consider the genre’s finest song.

His Broadway credits include a plus and a minus. The plus is his role in the original cast of “Hair.” What he’d like to forget is that he wrote the book and starred in one of Broadway’s most famous flops, “Rachel Lily Rosenbloom.”

His last album, “Paul Jabara and Friends,” was a 1982 disco-oriented variety package that featured the debut of those two tons of fun, the Weather Girls. Their notable single from that album was “It’s Raining Men,” which was a dance hit in several countries but didn’t get much attention in America.

So far, the Weather Girls have made only a modest mark in the music business. But the other featured singer on “Paul Jabara and Friends”--Whitney Houston--has done considerably better.

Jabara wasn’t idle while waiting for a record company to agree to release his disco opera. He produced three songs on Streisand’s “Broadway Album” and wrote a song, “Two Lovers,” for Julio Iglesias’ hit “1100 Bel Air Place” album. Currently Jabara is producing “Some Enchanted Evening” for the new Iglesias album.

“I can always do producing and writing to survive,” he said. “I’m not worried about myself surviving, I’m worried about my album (‘De La Noche’) surviving.”

With “Ocho Rios” failing, Warner Bros. will try another single, “This Girl’s Back in Town,” featuring vocals by an odd assortment of singers--Mary Wilson, Donna Summer and Beverly D’Angelo.