Eclectic Zapp and Lindley to Ring in New Year in O.C.

Nobody wants to have just a routine night out on New Year’s Eve.

It’s fitting, then, that Zapp and David Lindley are among the concert headliners local music fans can turn to as they party toward a new decade. It would be hard to find two more lively and eccentric musical companions.

Zapp, which plays at the Celebrity Theatre, has spent the ‘80s living up to song titles like “More Bounce to the Ounce” and “I Can Make You Dance” by making its shows into nonstop funk extravaganzas. Leader Roger Troutman has an eclectic streak, which means that the music can veer into George Benson-style jazz-guitar scatting, or detour into some straight-ahead blues. The Dayton, Ohio-based band also has a zany side, which comes out in Troutman’s two performing trademarks: his many costume changes and his use of the voice box (or vocoder), an electronic device that contorts his singing into a robotlike, computerized warble.

Lindley may be best known as an ace sideman for the sober-minded Jackson Browne, but his own shows with his band, El Rayo-X, are lighthearted and light-footed excursions into unlikely musical terrain. An impish performer, Lindley might take a familiar Motown hit or R&B; oldie and transform it into something funny and new by applying a quick-stepping reggae beat and some rock ‘n’ roll licks from the arsenal of strange, Middle Eastern instruments that he likes to employ. Lindley doesn’t change costumes during his shows, but given his penchant for wearing the loudest, most clashing polyester combinations he can find, a single outfit is quite sufficient to occupy the eye.

For New Year’s Eve, Troutman said in a recent phone interview, Zapp likes to strike up a Hendrix-style feedback guitar version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

“It creates a lot of havoc,” he said.

Troutman said he makes a special point of touring during the holidays.

“I could never see the logic of spending money on Christmas when I could be making money on Christmas,” he said.

Meanwhile, he figures, all the folks who run around like mad spending money and building up holiday season stress need an outlet that Zapp is happy to provide.

As Troutman tells the story, the capacity of music to make people feel better is what drew him to performance in the first place.

“As a small child, I noticed that Monday through Friday my parents wouldn’t be very happy. But on the weekend they would be extremely happy, and all my aunts and uncles would be with them having a good time. I thought it was because they were listening to music. I didn’t (understand) it was because they had got paid and were off work.” So on weeknights, little Roger would serenade his parents, mimicking the records they played on weekends in hopes that the music would take away workday blahs.

Soon Troutman was winning talent shows and forming bands of his own. When his sidemen kept quitting, his father suggested that his four brothers would make more reliable accompanists, if he would just teach them to play.

“I taught ‘em to play, and one thing led to another,” Zapp said.

His big break came when George Clinton and Bootsy Collins of Parliament-Funkadelic saw the band and offered to help it make an album. Zapp’s 1980 hit, “More Bounce to the Ounce,” established it on the funk scene and confirmed Troutman’s notion that the voice-altering vocoder was a useful gimmick for holding an audience.

Troutman said he had begun dabbling in the early ‘60s with the vocoder, in which a mouth-tube is used to mold voice and instrumental sounds into a strange, futuristic form of singing. In the ‘70s, performers like Stevie Wonder, Joe Walsh, Rufus and Peter Frampton all had vocoder-driven hits, and Sly & the Family Stone employed it in the late ‘60s. Zapp, which was working the Top-40 circuit in those days, would use the voice box to lend a new twist to the familiar songs it was playing.

“People on the dance floor would stop dancing and take note,” Troutman said. The gimmick remains an integral part of his sound, appearing on most of the tracks from “Zapp V,” the group’s latest album, and on “I Want to Be Your Man,” the fetching hit from Troutman’s 1988 solo album, “Unlimited!”

“It’s not easy to let it go,” said Troutman, who acknowledges that branching out into record production for R&B; singer Shirley Murdock was “my escape from the voice box.” With Zapp, the electronic voice distortion remains a leading effect, along with the costume changes and unrelenting funk. “There’s no more to say other than, ‘God, it works.’ ”

Troutman isn’t making any resolutions for the new year.

“I’m just not a holiday-oriented person,” he said. “I like to do shows. I’m a ham. That’s what I live for. I always saw holidays as a bigger and better chance to do shows.”

As for David Lindley, his resolutions are to practice more and to see gray more often--a strange choice for a guy whose stage wardrobe is a chaos of clashing colors.

The explanation, Lindley said, is that for him, gray represents special musical moments.

“One of the greatest pleasures in my life is playing until everything turns gray, and you don’t see anything except the instrument,” the guitarist said over the phone from his home in Claremont. “It happens a lot of times in performance. You sit back and watch it play.”

Lindley had one of those nights in November, when he teamed up with fellow guitar ace Ry Cooder for a duo set in an environmental benefit in Santa Monica. Now, he said, he and Cooder are considering touring together in 1990 as an acoustic duo. Acoustic shows with Jackson Browne, most likely in Europe, are another possibility, Lindley said.

He is less eager to jump back into recording on his own again.

“I don’t think I will for a while,” said Lindley, whose last album, “Very Greasy,” came out in 1988. “Recording contracts now are getting more and more repressive and weird.”

In his last round of record company negotiations, Lindley said, he had to fight for the right to play on other people’s records--a big part of his career for the past 20 years.

If Lindley has a dim outlook on the music business, he is encouraged by one of the musical trends that has gathered momentum throughout the ‘80s: the increasing prominence and accessibility of “World Music”--the pop and folk music styles from places like Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

With his buoyant and idiosyncratic deployment of reggae rhythms, and his use of such instruments as the oud, the saz and the bouzouki in a pop format, Lindley has been doing his part to keep his audiences alert to new musical possibilities and combinations.

He applauds rock stars like Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and David Byrne, who have taken on the role of patrons presenting musical groups from Africa, the Middle East and Brazil. Lindley figures he’s doing something akin to that in a more modest way.

“In a way, I kind of bring people over from another country,” he said. “I try to become part of them by learning their instruments and playing their stuff.”

If Third World influences color his playing, thrift-shop purchases are what color Lindley’s stage persona.

“I started doing that when I watched a videotape of myself playing in Germany” during the early 1980s, Lindley said. “I didn’t move. I just stood there, and it wasn’t real fun to watch. I tried to figure out the actual worst combination of things to wear, and that did it--I could just stand there, and my clothes moved for me.”

Zapp and Michael Cooper play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $21.50. Information: (714) 999-9536. David Lindley and El Rayo-X play Sunday night at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets for a 7:30 p.m. early show are still available at $19.50. The second show is sold out. Information: (714) 496-8930.