Hype’s No Turn-On to Earthy Harman Band

The folks at Rhino Records are anticipating big things with this week’s release of “Those Dangerous Gentlemens,” the sizzling new album by the James Harman Band.

Pictures of Orange County’s dynamic quartet virtually leap off the cover of the new-product newsletter Rhino is sending out to radio and press people around the country this month.

And come January, after the hectic Christmas holiday is over, the Santa Monica-based record company best known for its superb rock reissues will focus its marketing savvy and promotional energy on the Harman Band’s album.

Rhino, the label that helped veteran bar belter Billy Vera land his first hit in two decades in 1986 with “At This Moment,” feels that the Harman Band is strategically poised to follow in the commercially successful “roots-music” footsteps of Los Lobos, the Robert Cray Band and the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

But don’t think that Harman, guitarist David (Kid) Ramos, bassist Willie J. Campbell or drummer Stephen T. Hodges are preoccupied with reaching for the heavens in this new phase of their long partnership.

They would still rather be reaching for a plate of ribs and an ice-cold brew.

Indeed, while Harman is every bit as pleased as his three cohorts about the rapt attention they are getting these days from Rhino, he laments that some everyday pleasures are getting lost in the hustle.

“I miss my barbecues,” Harman, 40, said during a recent interview at the Huntington Beach home where he lives with his wife, Ella, and their sons Jimmy, 2 1/2, and Jordan, 7 months.

“That’s my least favorite part of this,” said the Anniston, Ala., born singer and harmonica player extraordinaire. “Basically I’m a family guy now. I should have more time to goof off with my family; more time to party with my friends; more time to have those famous traditional barbecues. My favorite one was the pre-barbecue barbecue to make the tape to play at the barbecue--just a panel of experts to pick the tunes that would be on the giant reels of music we play at the big barbecue. Those are the greatest.”

That sense of uncontrived earthiness is at the heart of the Harman Band’s music, a lip-smacking gumbo of blues, rock, R&B; and gospel that has grown out of each man’s unflinching love for any music born of someone’s soul, not their pocketbook.

It’s also helped keep them from surrendering to all manner of professional and personal setbacks--including the death of former Harman Band guitarist Mike (Hollywood Fats) Mann--over the seven years since the group began frequenting Southern California bars and clubs.

“I think we have a built-in safety factor because we’re all real guys,” Harman said. “Nobody here has ever had stupid teen-age fantasies of being rock stars. We’re all into cars and welding and painting; getting together and playing records at a barbecue--real stuff. It’s not based on something happening after we make it and we get all this money. It’s always been, ‘Let’s get together at so-and-so’s house and do a brake job.’ ”

Commented Ramos, taking a respite from installing a new seat on his beloved motorcycle at his house in Anaheim earlier this week: “Personally, I try not to take myself so seriously on this music that you start thinking you’re some great thing. I’m just another guy who is playing music instead of digging ditches or running drill presses. We’re just lucky enough to love what we do.”

That’s not to downplay the band members’ hopes that their first record in four years will attract as big an audience as possible, a goal that should be helped along by the varied musical ground covered in the album’s nine songs. (The compact disc will include an extra song--”No Count Dollar”--not found on the LP or cassette.)

The group’s rock muscle comes through strongest on “My Baby’s Gone,” a reworking of an old country song, and the Bo Diddley-influenced “Kiss of Fire,” a riveting show-stopper often used to climax their gigs.

The band’s R&B; roots can be heard on “Won’t Be Going Again,” a gritty ballad that spotlights Hollywood Fats’ monumental talent. Fats also turned in exalting guitar solos on the relentlessly swinging “Jump My Baby,” in a remixed version with a new vocal from the track that was on the band’s 1983 EP “Thank You Baby.”

But the tracks that perhaps best capture the essence of the James Harman Band are “Voodoo Love,” “Snakes” and “Goatman Holler,” songs with differing musical textures and tempos but that share a compelling down-home swamp-bred charm.

Because “Those Dangerous Gentlemens” album--the title is the group’s longtime nickname--was designed to sell in the commercial rock marketplace, the group is also readying a straight blues album. Entitled “Extra Napkins,” this rip-roaring second album is aimed at the hard-core blues fan and due for early 1988 release from Orange-based Rivera Records.

More than the group’s previous two EPs, both new albums capture the empathic, nearly telepathic, musical interconnectedness of the players; their Zen-like sensitivity to the ensemble that in function, more than style or sound, recalls The Band or the early E Street Band.

Although the Rhino album presents the group in its on-stage, dressed-to-kill, play-to-thrill finery, the blues album showcases the band in its backstage, late-night, coats-off, shirt-sleeved, perspiration-soaked splendor.

As Campbell described the blues album: “I think it sounds like an after-hours juke joint; some place in Louisiana where you just play music, drink beer and suck on crawdad heads.”

“We like all the commercial stuff,” Campbell said backstage at the Music Machine in West Los Angeles before a recent show. “But there’s something real about getting back to your roots, to the base of it all. You can’t forget where you came from or you’re lost. “

Ramos and Harman handle most of the songwriting for the group, but Campbell and Hodges add their creative touches to flesh out the tunes when the basic arrangements are brought into rehearsal.

“We invent a lot on our feet, and if we hit on the same thing three times in a row, it’s a song,” Harman said. “When it doesn’t work, it’s called a mistake. When it works, it’s called writing a song. That’s the only honest way to do it.”

Lyrically, their songs are centered closer to the heart than the head, with themes of lost love, found love and no love rather than topical social or political concerns.

After a Dec. 12 return date at the White House in Laguna Beach--the band’s unofficial home field for the last seven years--the group will play an unusually upscale $75-a-ticket New Year’s Eve gig benefiting the Orange County Performing Arts Center. This date is at the request of one particularly avid--and well-placed--Harman Band fan: Anton Segerstrom, son of Orange County developer Henry T. Segerstrom.

But it’s not just with Orange County’s elite that the Harman Band is winning new fans. Since 1985, the group has made periodic tours through the Midwest and Southwest, developing a larger following the old-fashioned way: mileage.

In between, they’ve played everything from thread-bare Monday nights at the tiny Dazzles club in Costa Mesa to a last-minute opening slot at the Universal Amphitheatre for REO Speedwagon in September.

Based on the enthusiastic response the band generally gets from first-time audiences, Harman said: “I think the only reason we’re not there yet is that people haven’t heard the music. If Rhino bought about 5,000 of those doughnut trucks with the big horns on top and drove ‘em around the country playing our record, I think that would do it. All it needs is to be exposed to people, and I think it will happen.”

Hollywood Fats’ death from a heart attack last December, about a year after he left the Harman Band and subsequently joined the Blasters, hit all the band members hard, but it instantly put the most attention and pressure on Ramos, who always stood in Fats’ rather prominent shadow.

Before joining up with Harman in 1981, when pianist Gene Taylor defected to the Blasters, Fats had played alongside most of the blues giants, from Muddy Waters on down, and was himself among the world’s finest blues guitarists. Fortunately for posterity, most of both Harman Band albums had been recorded while Fats was still with the group.

“I won’t kid you about it,” Ramos said, “when he left the band it scared me. It was comfortable for me to stand up there with Fats. Let’s face it: he had it. He played everything you’d ever want to hear on a guitar. On some nights standing up there he’d intimidate me; other nights he edged me on.

“Fats is the greatest. I miss the guy as a person and as a player, but I’m still out there doing it. I just want to carry on and pick up where he left off--not fill his shoes, because nobody can do that.”

For a while in 1985-86, after Fats left, the band was reduced to a trio when Hodges went to New York to play on Tom Waits’ “Rain Dogs” album. But it didn’t take long for all parties to discover that something was missing, and Hodges rejoined the band a few months later.

Recalled Harman: “We were playing one night, and Stephen just walked into the club, spontaneously sat in with us and--bang!--suddenly people were standing on tables and screaming. We looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.

“Musically and personally, we’re one of those little chemically correct combinations that really works.

“The truth is that everything has a way of working out. What if I’d had a record that clicked a few years ago, when this type of music really hadn’t caught on? It might have been a one-time fluke. I’d rather have a looooong career with a steady positive thing than a flash-in-the-pan success that goes away in three years and then you’ve got a big car to pay for.

“I know guys who are waiting all their lives for ‘it’ to happen. But this is ‘it.’ It may get bigger, you may do it in bigger places for more people, but this is the thing you’re doing, so you better enjoy it.”