POP MUSIC REVIEW : D.I. Flails Away at New Stanton Club

The two things evident in D.I.’s show at Manhattan’s here on Wednesday were that the recently rocked-up venue has almost limitless potential for kicking more life into the county’s original music scene and that D.I. must have exhausted its own potential a long time ago.

First the club: A renovated pizza parlor, Manhattan’s is unlikely to win any awards for style, with its walls painted with adjacent images of a New York skyline, a Polynesian island setting and a star chart. But the sight lines to its low stage are generally good and the sound is fair. There is a mid-size checkerboard dance floor in front of the stage.

Located at Katella and Beach Blvd., a mere block from a sheriff’s station, the 18-and-over establishment has made it through a month-and-a-half of original music bookings without major friction with authorities.

The club has a capacity of 500 (though, be warned, there are seats for only one-sixth that number), giving it the potential to draw some national talent. It falls to a variety of outside promoters to fill the place.

The adventurous bookings on Wednesday nights, when the place is dubbed “Club Tangent,” are being handled by longtime underground party organizers Kitty Bash and Octavious Orona. (Upcoming shows include Too Many Joes, Raga Bash and Linz on Nov. 1; Greenland, D’Santi and Red House on Nov. 8, and the Swamp Zombies on Nov. 15.)

The presentation wasn’t without its drawbacks Wednesday, but these may have been parcel to the Halloween-in-hell atmosphere desired for D.I.’s holiday and album-release festivities. One can only hope the dry-ice fog, lasers squiggling non-stop at eye level--for those not already getting enough radiation in their lives--and nearly-as-incessant strobe light aren’t permanent features.

That flashing battlefield murk may have been the ideal setting in which to experience the veteran North County punk band, given all the musical carnage that was taking place onstage.

While most contemporaries of D.I. have moved on to post-punk--that flowering stage where bands catch on that inarticulate three-chord rage can wear a mite thin after a decade or so--this fivesome seems to think it’s still 1977 (which seems about as on-the-edge now as the Beach Boys thinking it’s still 1963).

D.I. (Drill Instructor? Dad’s Investment?) concluded their show with that band’s “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” with vocalist Casey Royer reworking the lyrics to express how wretched he thinks the beach is. During the rest of the group’s one-hour set he chiefly got across the idea of how very much he thinks everything else sucks as well, to use one of Royer’s kinder terms.

While it was pretty much all thrash city, the group also offered a limp version of “The Monster Mash” and sported white mime makeup while careening about the tombstone-littered stage (the bass player evidently takes his fashion tips from Charles Manson, having painted a swastika on his bare chest for the show).

Royer’s rants weren’t without a certain crude charisma. One of his more intelligible between-song word constructions included different formations of an obscenity. Such verbalizations seemed ideally matched by the band’s musical statements, which most often struggled to be saying, “My, don’t I have a mighty big amp?”

Such efforts impacted on the 60-or-so customers with a tidy symmetry, matching a band that couldn’t play with an audience that didn’t applaud.

Saying the group couldn’t play isn’t haggling over Royer’s inarticulation or band’s lack of technical musicianship--bluesman Big Joe Williams played every song of his career in one key and you needed a Bessamer converter to decipher his words.

But unlike D.I., Williams was able to create a life-filled range of feelings and impressions though his music, though Big Joe’s ghetto-bound, racially proscribed life most certainly “sucked” much more than anything Royer & Co. could imagine in Orange County.

Even at what was certainly not one of its better shows, the opening Don’t Mean Maybe (reviewed in depth recently) was worlds removed from D.I. Signed this week to Dr. Dream Records, the trio’s Beefheart and Minuteman-derived rhythmic excursions were crowded with urge and adventure.