POP MUSIC : Beat Farmers Are Beating Chests Over New Album

“It’s so righteous that I’d even buy it. It’s as natural as the hummingbird’s hum, and as excited as Coke when it’s hitting the rum.”

That is how the Beat Farmers’ Country Dick Montana, as quick with his wit as he is with his drumsticks, describes his band’s fourth album, “Poor and Famous.” Montana’s “review” is a little premature: the San Diego rockers are only halfway through recording the album at Indigo Ranch studios in Malibu, and MCA/Curb Records doesn’t plan to release it until next February.

Yet, in light of the Beat Farmers’ enviable track record, Montana’s advance chest-beating is perfectly understandable. After all, critics have raved no end about the band’s three previous albums, on which Montana and his colleagues--bassist Rolle Dexter and singer-guitarists Jerry Raney and Joey Harris-combined the twang of old-time country and the bang of old-time rock ‘n’ roll to come up with a sassy, gut-slamming sound certain to make you shake, rattle and roll like never before.

“The Beat Farmers may be the best rock-country-blues band to come down the pike since Creedence Clearwater Revival,” according to Billboard. “Just reap what these guys have sown any which way you can,” advised Sounds, a leading English music periodical.

“Poor and Famous” promises to yield the most bountiful harvest yet, Montana said. Of the album’s 11 songs, all but three are by the group’s regular songwriting team of Raney and Harris. Montana, as usual, is responsible for the token novelty tune, “The King of Sleaze,” this time in collaboration with talkin’ bluesman (and fellow San Diegan) Mojo Nixon. Sample lyric: “I’m big/I’m bad/I might even be your dad.”

The two remaining contributions come from outside the band. “Time Inbetween” is by Paul Kamanski, the Coronado songsmith whose “Hollywood Hills” and “California Kid” appear on earlier Beat Farmers albums. And “If I Can Hold” is by David and Douglas Farage, the identical twin brothers who in the early 1980s fronted popular local new wave group DFX2.

The Beat Farmers’ next San Diego appearance is Oct. 28, at album-rock radio station KGB-FM (101.5) Halloween Ball in Bing Crosby Hall at Del Mar Fairgrounds.

The five members of Fattburger aren’t about to let success go to their heads. A month after their third album, “Living in Paradise,” was released nationally by Intima Records, the San Diego pop-jazz band continues to play for local audiences each Wednesday night at the Catamaran Resort Hotel’s Cannibal Bar in Mission Beach.

Fattburger’s last album, “The Good News,” came out in August, 1987, and made it all the way up to No. 4 on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz LPs chart. Since then, the quintet has landed bookings at some of the most prestigious jazz nightclubs in the country, including Bon Appetit and the Golden Tale in Los Angeles.

But, whenever they’re not on the road or in the studio, Fattburger can usually be found plying the nightclub circuit in their hometown--just as they did before their rapid rise to stardom.

“The only difference is we’re playing less and getting paid more,” keyboardist Carl Evans Jr. said with a laugh. “But not that much more. If we were a rock band with a Top 10 album, I’d be a millionaire. But, because we play jazz, I’m only a thousandaire--maybe a multithousandaire, at best.”

“Living in Paradise,” which is expected to do as well as, if not better than “The Good News,” is a continuation of the sound that has long been Fattburger’s trademark: a melding of traditional jazz chops, funky rhythms and breezy pop melodies.

“There’s a little more of a groove, a little more Latin flavor,” Evans said. “I think that’s because we’re a better band now than we were when we recorded our first two albums. In a musical sense, we’ve done a lot of growing up--both individually and collectively.”

TIME OF THE SEASON: The spirit of Christmas past has paid a visit to the Jacks. The local blue-eyed soulsters are holed up in Hit Single Recording Services in East San Diego, cutting a new version of Clarence Carter’s “Backdoor Santa.”

The original appeared on “Soul Christmas,” a compilation album of rhythm-and-blues Christmas songs released in 1969 on the Atco Records label. The Jacks’ rendition, promises singer-guitarist Buddy Blue, will come out as a single--on the band’s own label--in time for the holidays.

IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR: Talk about coincidence. Exactly 20 years ago today, two singles by two San Diego rock bands simultaneously reached their highest positions on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. In the Sept. 28, 1968, issue of the international music trade weekly, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s “Over You” peaked at No. 7; Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” at No. 30.

BITS AND PIECES: Berkeley’s psychedelic acid-rockers Wavy Gravy and the Vicious Hippies will bring their “Nobody For President” campaign to San Diego on Saturday night for a concert at Rio’s nightclub in Loma Portal. . . . Even though the city of Carlsbad has yanked promoter Bill Silva’s permit to produce concerts at the Sammis Pavilion in the Batiquitos Lagoon Educational Park, jazz singer Basia’s Saturday night show there will go on as scheduled.