O.C. Singer’s Winding Road Ends at Home

The music on David Lee Porter’s debut album, “Can You Play Any Foster & Allen?,” is nothing like the story behind it.

The music is pleasant, straightforward soft rock--its main virtues being tunefulness and a direct emotionalism. But the story has its share of twists, intrigues and bitterness. It’s the story of an aspiring Orange County singer-songwriter who wanted so badly to move forward in the music business that he got himself into debt and a good deal of hot water.

There’s a happy ending: Porter was able to finish his album and see it gain a modest release late last year on Catalina Records, a small West German label. While the debts are still being paid, the hot water has cooled, and Porter, 26, is in a position to move ahead, after learning how to make a record the hard way.

From the time he started writing songs and playing the guitar as a Fullerton teen-ager, Porter was atypical. In those days (the late 1970s), while his friends were leaping into Orange County’s burgeoning punk rock scene, Porter was playing the part of an urban cowboy.

“I did beer-drinking country and Western,” he recalled in an interview this week at his apartment in Anaheim Hills. “I used to wear Western clothes, and I’d be hanging around with all these punkers.”

While his friends set out on the usual path, trying to establish a following in their hometowns before attempting to get the music industry’s attention, Porter took his singing to more exotic locales.

After high school, he joined the Merchant Marine and hired on for voyages to China and the Caribbean. After returning to Southern California, Porter was riding a bus when he found a leaflet put out by the Danish government, recruiting American workers for Denmark’s film industry. Porter was soon in Copenhagen, where he worked at a Burger King after the film job expired.

“It looks like the old Joseph Conrad thing”--pure wanderlust--said Porter, a hulking, soft-voiced man who stands well over 6 feet tall and weighs 285 pounds. “But at the time, I didn’t think of it like that. I was grabbing at a brass ring that I knew was out there, if I could only go to the right place.”

Porter says he virtually established a second home in Denmark and found a network of friends who would help him with his music. After traveling back and forth between Orange County and Denmark several times during the mid-1980s, he decided to make his first serious bid to establish himself as a musician. With money from a British label, he recorded an album in England. But the label folded, the album was never released, and Porter found no other takers.

Better to go through the hard knocks overseas, Porter figured, than at home. “The music business is just one rejection after another. I guess psychologically it’s easier to take rejection not in your own back yard. I’ve asked myself, ‘Why go all over the world like that?’ I guess it’s just a hope that (foreigners) will see something in you that people in your own back yard don’t see.”

Last summer, Porter tried again. When RCA Records showed some interest in paying for him to record on a tryout basis, he booked time at the British studio where he had worked before and where the owners had become his friends and cheerleaders.

But the RCA deal fell through. And instead of telling his British studio friends that he would have to call off the project, Porter went ahead with it, getting financial backing from friends in Denmark and asking the studio to extend credit.

Porter admits that he deceived the studio into thinking that RCA was paying for the sessions by forging a letter on RCA stationery. He says he simply didn’t want to admit his setback to friends who “were the first people in the business who said, ‘Yeah, Dave is going to make it, he’s going to stick with it.’ ”

Porter figured that it was an innocent enough lie: RCA wouldn’t lose anything, the studio would get paid with money from his Danish sources, and he was confident that this new batch of songs would land him a recording deal with another label.

“I said, ‘I’m going to make this happen, any way it takes,” Porter said.

But soon afterward, he found himself shut out of the studio (where he had been living as well as recording), and the recordings he had made were being held hostage by an angry management that no longer viewed him as a friend.

According to Porter, it all stemmed from a falling-out with another Orange County singer he had brought over to sing backing vocals on the album. (Porter will refer to him only as “the co-vocalist.”) After their blow-up, Porter said, the other singer told studio owners that the RCA letter was phony--which was true enough--but also vilified Porter in other ways that Porter says were not true.

The studio’s owner threw Porter out and, because he owed $6,000, denied him the tapes he needed to complete his album. He retreated to Denmark, the project apparently in ruins. Then his luck changed. Based on rough tapes he had sent to Catalina Records, the German label expressed interest in releasing the finished project. And then the recordings that had been locked away in the British studio arrived, along with a note from an anonymous studio employee who felt that Porter had received a raw deal.

“I came home, tail between my legs, hat in hand,” Porter said, but he had the basic tracks to continue working on his album, which he finished last fall with local producers. He said he has been paying off his English studio debts by monthly installments.

Along with his recording misadventures, Porter got to tour for the first time while he was making the album, playing a series of barroom shows in Britain, Denmark and Germany. The shows were significant, Porter said, because he learned not to feel self-conscious about his girth.

“I was so scared it was going to be a disadvantage, and it proved to be an advantage,” he said. “It’s almost like Jimmy Durante’s nose: It’s something people can latch onto. Even in daily life, when people see me once, they recognize me. In my shows I’m very physical. I run around, I jump a lot, I do things that you wouldn’t expect somebody this big to be doing. In England, people would come up to me and say how much they liked it.”

Porter’s next step is to see how Southern California audiences will like it. He is planning a special showcase concert with a band in September, but he also wants to start doing more informal solo shows in local clubs. Until now, Porter has played only three public shows in Orange County, and a handful in Los Angeles.

“After having tried everything else (overseas), that’s the way it’s going to end up--a full circle,” Porter said. But he doesn’t regret the circuitous route that took him to Europe to begin his recording career. “Would I have an album now in Tower Records, two years after I started this thing in a real way? I’d have to say no.”

But Porter said the strain he went through in making his album taught him a lesson about the need to be straightforward in the music business:

“If it’s going to happen, it will, and if you hang in there long enough it will,” Porter said. “You don’t have to complicate it with Wizard of Oz tactics and smoke-screens. Everything has its audience. I’ll find mine, or they’ll find me.”