Gherkins Survive Career Pickle, Seek Fame : Raucous Orange County Band Hopes That Mocking Metal Will Prove a Dilly of a Successful Shtick

From the outset, Gherkin Raucous was a band designed to make an immediate impression.

There was, for starters, the name: How many rock groups are named after a variety of pickle?

The band’s pedigree was certainly in order: All four Gherkins had previously played in bands that had built followings in the Orange County rock scene.

The sound? A proven crowd-grabber: heavy metal with booming beats, authoritative banshee-wail vocals and mercurial guitar solos.

The band’s best quality was its impish attitude. While walloping away with crunching, Led Zeppelin-style metal, the aim of Gherkin Raucous was to ridicule the genre’s bombastic stage conventions by carrying them to comic extremes.

Singer Darren McNamee might copy some macho-man poses from the David Lee Roth manual of metal-arts, but he would undercut them with farcical facial expressions more befitting Pee-wee Herman or Monty Python slapstick.

Guitarist Warren Fitzgerald eschewed the grave, titanic manner favored by most metal musicians. Instead, he played the part of a scamp, engaging, at some personal risk, in impromptu, madcap acrobatics that raised the possibility of a Gherkin Raucous performance taking an unscripted detour to the emergency room.

But by the end of 1988, after having established its popularity on the Orange County/Long Beach club circuit, Gherkin Raucous was ready to give up. It had not made an impression where it counts most: among the Los Angeles-based record executives who decide whether a band will be signed to a label and heard by the world at large.

Disheartened by several years of unsuccessful striving, drummer Miles Gillett announced that he was going back to his native New Zealand to start over in the burgeoning rock scene Down Under. The other members--McNamee, Fitzgerald and bassist Dan Wallis--didn’t want to go on without Gillett, so on Dec. 17, Gherkin Raucous headlined at Night Moves in Huntington Beach in what was billed as the band’s farewell show.

Without ever having had a real whirl at the record business or a go-round of showcases for record company talent scouts, Gherkin was turning into a pumpkin.

As it turned, out, though, Gherkin Raucous had a fairy godmother.

More precisely, it had a late-emerging benefactor named Don Muller from Triad Artists, one of the major booking agencies in Los Angeles. Just as Gherkin Raucous was breaking up, Muller stepped forward with the sort of insider connections that the band had never mustered.

Muller, who has already orchestrated one Hollywood showcase concert for Gherkin Raucous, said he will set up others and will help guide the group as it continues to take its shot.

Nobody has waved a magic wand of guaranteed success over the band, but it appears as if Gherkin Raucous will at least get a full chance to be heard and to find out whether the slipper fits.

It was late in 1987 that members of three different county bands decided that they made a good fit and started Gherkin Raucous. Fitzgerald, 20, and Wallis, 23--old school friends from Huntington Beach--had been playing together in the funk-rock band Double Freak. Gillett, 25, came from the locally popular El Grupo Sexo. McNamee, 23, was recruited from a band called Electric Kool Aid on the strength of his eccentric approach to performance.

Gherkin Raucous got its name from Fitzgerald’s eccentric approach to Thanksgiving dinner.

“I saw these little things that looked like green slugs,” the guitarist recalled recently at a Garden Grove warehouse honeycombed with rehearsal studios for rock bands. “My dad said they were gherkins. I was fascinated by them. I was staring at them and playing with them the whole night.”

While Fitzgerald and the other members of Gherkin Raucous spoke, noisy blasts from the sort of earnest, fashion-conscious heavy-metal bands they’re out to spoof intruded from neighboring cubicles.

“Gherkin” became a favorite word for Fitzgerald, a silly inside joke. The band paired it with “raucous,” long a favorite word of Gillett’s, and the band had a name to match its aims.

McNamee’s aims did not have much to do with rock music when he began singing in bands at UC Irvine on his way to a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.

“I just did it for fun,” he said, in staccato-speaking cadences. “I’m pretty uninhibited. I’ll do just about anything if it’s something I’ll get off on.”

Then again, next to Fitzgerald, he is only a mild eccentric. In the course of a concert, the bantam-size guitarist will wander from the stage, clamber on railings and table tops and more or less behave like a heedless, dangerously hyperactive tot, flailing all the while at one of his cordless electric guitars. Sometimes Fitzgerald breaks objects or falls. It’s a bruising method of performance--for himself and anyone who happens to be in the way.

McNamee began ticking off the hazards of sharing a stage with Fitzgerald, who “hit me in the face when he was wearing a helmet, dragged me across glass that he’d broken.”

“If I’m hurt after a show, I feel like I did something right,” Fitzgerald said. “I love to play music, so if I die while I’m playing music, that would be a statement in itself.”

Emerging last spring, Gherkin Raucous quickly established a following at Night Moves and Bogart’s, but it lacked a focused plan for generating a buzz in the record industry. Early on, the band assumed that a contact at Geffen Records would lead to a record deal, but nothing materialized.

“We were counting our chickens before they hatched,” Fitzgerald said. “I think we’re much wiser now and more realistic.”

“To be honest,” Gillett said, “we got a little lazy” about doing the legwork to generate label interest.

It was Gillett’s 2-week rest-and-relaxation trip back to New Zealand in September that nearly finished the band. The affable, round-faced drummer, who had moved to California when he was 10, fell in love with his native land and decided he wanted to return and build a career from a base Down Under.

At first, the experiment gave Gillett more enthusiasm for making Gherkin Raucous a success: “If Gherkin gets signed, I can buy property in New Zealand, and I could commute back and forth. I had this big rock star kind of dream.”

But instead, Gillett was confronted by one of the harsher realities of life as a struggling, impecunious rocker, one that’s particularly harsh in a high-rent district such as Orange County: He got evicted from his apartment.

“I was sitting in bed one night, just radically depressed,” he recalled. “I said, ‘What am I doing? I’m going to be back on the street again.’ I wanted just a radically different life style.”

He decided to find it in New Zealand, as soon as possible.

The other members of Gherkin Raucous said there was disappointment but no hostility over Gillett’s decision. “We’re not living too high right now,” McNamee said, “and he had a chance to go and live well, live with his family. We understood.”

But another harsh reality of being an impecunious, struggling rocker is that you can’t just pack up and hop the next plane to New Zealand.

“I felt like an idiot, telling people I’m taking off, and I wasn’t ready to leave yet,” Gillett said. He would have to stay and save for his passage, and in the meantime, he told the other members of Gherkin Raucous, he would be open to staying with the band if any solid prospects materialized.

That’s when Don Muller turned up, taking an interest in a band that the booking agent had never seen or heard.

Muller was going by favorable word of mouth generated by promoters with whom he routinely did business. David Swinson of Bogart’s and Rich Meaney, a longtime fan of Fitzgerald who books bands for the Nederlander Organization, were both talking up Gherkin Raucous in hope that someone might step in before the group broke up.

Gherkin Raucous had already played its farewell concert by the time Muller got to hear the band’s three-song demo tape. Impressed, he asked whether they would be willing to stay together while he used his contacts to help them get a record deal.

Most booking agencies make their money by setting up concerts for bands with a proven draw. But Muller said he has been trying to forge links for Triad Artists with bands on the grass-roots level.

Jane’s Addiction and the Rave-Ups are two major-label acts that worked with Muller before they were signed to record deals (though in those cases, Muller said, his role was confined to getting the bands good local bookings, rather than acting as matchmaker between band and record companies, as he is doing with Gherkin Raucous).

So far, Muller’s relationship with Gherkin Raucous is informal: He’ll advise the band on career moves, try to set up good bookings and tout them to his music business contacts.

“Personally, it’s what I like to do,” Muller said. “There might be something that comes from this, and we save the band from breaking up and going away before they had a true shot.

“Hopefully, Triad will represent the band if they get a deal. Right now, for Triad there’s nothing in it. But down the line, they could be huge.”

One instant result of Muller’s stepping forward: Gillett postponed his emigration indefinitely. “I was excited out of my mind,” the drummer said. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve been working all these years at this music bit, and I’m finally getting a chance to make it.’ ”

A late-January showcase at Club Lingerie in Hollywood was the first step. Gherkin Raucous played well in the 40-minute set. The tryout atmosphere resulted in somewhat less spontaneity than usual (McNamee, for instance, confessed that he had to watch his language: “I was thinking of all the things I couldn’t say”), but Fitzgerald still managed to get pretty physical, banging Wallis’ bass so hard that he wound up with a lump on his hand.

Afterward, Muller canvassed the 10 or so industry figures, including scouts for four record labels, whom he had invited to the showcase. Most of the comment was favorable, he said.

“Everybody said the band needed more work, more dates, to get them tighter together” in their stage act, he said.

For now, Muller said, the plan is to get more live work for Gherkin Raucous, perhaps some regional touring. After that, the aim might be more Hollywood showcases and possibly an independent record release to give the band a tangible credential that might attract big-label interest.

“We’re kind of going on faith,” Fitzgerald said. “I have faith that someone will come along and see something good in us, and take it.”

Gherkin Raucous will open for TSOL Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $12.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.