Eggplant Dishes Up Its Debut Album : Promising Rock Band to Play Sunday With Other Groups at Benefit

Rock bands tend to name themselves after exotic locales, hip catch-phrases, snippets from Imagist poetry or old blues lyrics. The idea is to find something that sounds dynamic, dangerous, suggestive or alluringly enigmatic.

For obvious reasons, rock bands tend not to name themselves after garden vegetables.

One of the few exceptions is the unassuming local group that honors the humble eggplant. An ungainly, unseductive, odd-looking thing, the eggplant nevertheless is nourishing and tasty in a wide variety of recipes. That makes Eggplant a fitting name for one of Orange County’s most promising rock bands--a promise staked out on Eggplant’s fine debut release, a self-financed cassette album called “Monkeybars.”

Eggplant, which plays Sunday afternoon at Bogart’s in the all-day Benefit for the Homeless of Long Beach, started out humbly enough in 1981 when a group of friends from Westminster High School got together to play “Louie Louie.”

All of the more typically enticing rock band names they came up with sounded “far too pretentious and embarrassing,” singer-guitarist Jeff Beals recalled as he and the other members of Eggplant sat recently at a plastic-covered table in a suitably humble Mexican takeout restaurant in Huntington Beach. So they came up with a name designed to avoid any hint of pretention.

“A lot of names kind of define what you should be,” Beals said. “We figured we could define ourselves and be free to change.”

“Monkeybars” showcases a band that has the musical resources and varied tastes to escape easy definition. Eggplant’s recipe book includes ripping ‘60s-style garage rock and psychedelia, delicate, folkish balladry, country twanging and art-rock atmospherics. The lyrics range between wistful scenes of childlike wonder (“Asunder on the Sun”) and post-adolescent melancholy (“Confidant”), playful fantasies (“Goin’ to Maine”) and satiric pokes at rampant rock egotism (“Rolling Stones,” wherein a Stones sound-alike band tries to keep up its bad-boy image by impregnating groupies and spending “4 hours every night just messing up their hair / So it would look like they didn’t care.”).

Eggplant spices all of this with ambitious harmony singing and striking guitar playing, especially Jon Melkerson’s assured, well-crafted leads. It’s a sound that should find favor with college radio audiences attuned to the likes of Camper Van Beethoven and the Velvet Underground, alternative rock heroes that Eggplant’s members readily acknowledge as influences.

Eggplant’s original members--Beals, Melkerson and John Kelly--are tall, soft-spoken men with short, well-kept hair and friendly but basically shy miens. They come off as everyday guy, charmingly innocent of the brash gamesmanship and promotional savvy that are almost a necessity for unknown bands struggling to gain some notice. Eggplant’s live wire is drummer Dave Tabone, who has a compact build, unruly hair, a boisterous manner, and a blithe indifference to most of the musical influences that the others cite.

“Roxy Music is about the only band these guys like that I can stand,” said Tabone, at 23 the youngest member of Eggplant. Tabone prefers more popular bands like the Smiths and the Cure. “I don’t know what Camper Van Beethoven sounds like, and I probably wouldn’t like ‘em,” he said. “But if a drummer is real poppy, it gives a song a real good back beat. It makes it more commercial.”

The original version of Eggplant that formed in 1981 didn’t make it beyond playing private parties and school concerts, and it broke up when Melkerson went off for what turned out to be a brief enrollment at San Diego State University. When Melkerson returned to Orange County, he fell in with Kelly and Tabone, another Westminster High School graduate. They played as backup players in a band called The Day After, then hung together after it broke up in 1986. Beals, meanwhile, found himself a free agent after leaving a band called the Final Tour Guides.

Eggplant regrouped by accident at a party where Beals found his former band mates and Tabone playing an old Eggplant number. Soon they started practicing again in a back room at the Los Alamitos wholesale costume outlet run by Beals’ mother. The costume business comes in handy when Eggplant wants to adorn its usually straightforward live shows with a touch of visual whimsy to go with the humor that often underlies the band’s songs.

When Beals’ mom got stuck with some 600 miniature plastic tambourines that she was unable to sell as costume accessories, Eggplant inherited them. From time to time, they like to toss bunches of the tacky rattlers to their audience. “It sounds neat,” said Beals, at 26 the oldest member of Eggplant. “We only do that if we’re in a goofy mood. Mainly we try to be ourselves.”

Occasionally, Eggplant will call on an extroverted friend named the Bean to show that vegetables can dance, too. The Bean--real name, Chris Peterson--cavorts on stage in a costume that makes him resemble a 7 1/2-foot green bean. Some have mistaken him for a giant Gumby look-alike.

But Eggplant uses such theatrics sparingly. “We kind of thought we had to do something because we don’t dance around all the time,” Beals said. “It takes the pressure off. But we don’t like to get old, and over and over again, it gets old.”

“I’m real self-conscious about how we come off (on stage),” admitted Melkerson. “But it gets easier all the time.” With experience, “we’ll be great entertainers,” Tabone said, half-facetiously.

Before they become entertainment greats, Eggplant’s members are trying to figure out such music business basics as how to approach record companies with their tape. Their immediate hope is to win financial backing to do some more recording. Paying for the “Monkeybars” recording sessions with $800 saved from live shows, Eggplant had to cut the album short when the money ran out after 8 songs.

Eggplant’s ultimate aim is the one shared by most alternative rock bands: to quit their day jobs and hit the road as a touring band that can manage to make a living through music. For now, Tabone works at an auto body shop, and Beals, the only member with a wife and child, is a photographer for a landscape architect (his toddler son, Jonathan, is the cover boy of “Monkeybars”). Kelly does odd jobs, and Melkerson is a clerk at a pawnshop.

On “Goin’ to Maine,” Beals has a reverie about taking a trip across the country to see new sights, without being sure whether he will ever get to go: “Do you know what it’s like to miss a place you’ve never been / And wantin’ it is almost like a pain?”

For most aspiring local rock bands, it’s a key question. Eggplant is clearly one that deserves a ticket to ride.

Eggplant plays Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at Bogart’s, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach, in the Marina Pacifica Mall. Admission to the all-day benefit show is $6. Information: (213) 594-8975.

Eggplant is one of 32 Orange County and Long Beach acts who will donate their talents to the Benefit for the Homeless of Long Beach on Sunday at Bogart’s. The concept is similar to last year’s successful “Music for the Needy” Christmas benefit at Bogart’s, with performances going on simultaneously in the nightclub’s main room and its adjoining cafe. Admission is $6 or its equivalent in non-perishable food or clothing, with proceeds to be distributed through St. Francis Church in Long Beach.

The musical lineup and schedule is as follows:

Main Room: Brave Tears at 12:45 p.m.; Eggplant at 1:30; the Bolsheviks at 2:15; Finsbury Pavement at 3; Medicine Man at 3:45; the Sleepers at 4:30; Rattlin’ Bones at 5:15; the Chase at 6; Nervous Touch at 6:45; Violet Burning at 7:30; Gypsy Trash at 8:15; Chain Gang at 9; Hard As Nails, Cheap As Dirt at 9:45; Cactus Jack at 10:30; Psych Out at 11:15; Lost Souls at midnight.

Cafe: Pivot Foots at 1 p.m.; Don’t Mean Maybe at 1:45; Nick Pyzow at 2:30; Mark Davis at 3:15; Jamie Klee at 4; Don Burnett of 3D Picnic at 4:45; Lovingkindness at 5:30; And How at 6:15; Peter Fahey at 7; Dave Pedroza and Tim Brogden of the Scarecrows at 7:45; Joe Wood and Dee Dee Grisham at 8:30; Lance Whitson and Gary Williams of Wood and Smoke at 9:15; National People’s Gang at 10; Lost Dog at 10:45; Ann De Jarnett at 11:15; the Zagabonds (formerly Respectable Street) at midnight.

Incidentally, National People’s Gang’s set at Bogart’s will be its first with its new bass player, Peter Deyo. He replaces Chuck Morris, who, according to manager Sam Lanni, left the band by mutual agreement with the other members. Morris “needs a nice, stable life, somewhere to come back to every night,” Lanni said. “Touring just does not offer that, and the band is probably going to tour consistently for the next couple of years.” National People’s Gang is set to record its second album for Dr. Dream Records in July, Lanni said. After that, the band will tour Canada.

ALOHA!: Paul Sanders, a veteran booking agent and promoter on the local rock scene, has left his job as talent booker at Night Moves in Huntington Beach. Sanders, who specialized in booking hard-rock fare in 2 1/2 years at the Huntington Beach club, says he is heading to Hawaii to help run a record company with a far more mellow musician: Henry Kapono of the soft-rock duo, Cecilio & Kapono.

Sanders is putting together a combination “retirement party” and benefit for himself at Night Moves on June 5, his 35th birthday. Gherkin Raucous will serve as house band for the evening, with members of Social Distortion, T.S.O.L. and Tender Fury putting in guest appearances. The show starts at 9 p.m., with admission $7.

Before booking Night Moves, Sanders had done shows at the Golden Bear, the Whisky A-Go-Go and the Roxy Theatre. Booking at Night Moves has been taken over by Ezra Joseph, the club’s owner.