Dramarama May Have Finally Found the Key

Like a lot of kids growing up in the New York City area during the 1960s, John Easdale and Chris Carter used to watch a children’s television show called “Wonderama.”

“Wonderama” had one especially intriguing feature: Every week, a boy or girl from the studio audience would be chosen to sift through a tray full of hundreds of keys and to insert them one by one into an inviting treasure chest. Any contestant who found the right fit would be heaped with a stack of toys, games and prizes that was enough to make any grade-schooler salivate.

As founding members of the rock band Dramarama, Easdale and Carter spent most of the 1980s learning how frustrating it can be to pry at the music industry’s chest of goodies. But as the 1990s begin, it appears that Dramarama may have found the key that fits.

“Stuck in Wonderamaland,” the band’s third album, has gained Dramarama its first national radio and video exposure after years of regional cult status in Southern California. After headlining Saturday night at UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall, the group of five transplanted New Jerseyans will embark on its first tour of the United States.

The album that has brightened Dramarama’s prospects was conceived during a dark period, during the summer of 1988 when the band’s sagging fortunes in the music business had caused it temporarily to break up. The split sent singer Easdale into a gloomy but fertile songwriting cycle--he came up with an album populated by trapped characters whose lives are going nowhere, bewildered lovers who can’t understand why their relationships are in collapse, and cynics who decide that life holds no higher fascination than what can be found in reruns of “The Partridge Family” and “All in the Family.”

Counterbalancing the on-the-brink anguish in ballads like the Dylanesque title song are rockers that often have a humorous edge. In “Last Cigarette,” the song that has won Dramarama airplay on alternative and mainstream rock stations, the grainy-voiced Easdale takes frustration and desperation to extremes where they begin to seem funny. Contributing to the song’s appeal is a strong, headlong rock ‘n’ roll kick that recalls David Bowie’s “Suffragette City.”

Speaking by phone recently from their management’s office in Encino, Easdale, 28, and bass guitarist Carter, 30, sounded upbeat and enthusiastic--not a bit like the frayed, played-out characters populating “Wonderamaland.”

“Right now, if I had to write these songs I don’t think that they’d be as cynical,” said Easdale, who lives in La Habra with his wife and year-old daughter. “I’m happier now.”

Dramarama started out modestly but spiritedly in the basement of an alternative-rock record shop called Loony Tunez that Easdale and Carter ran together in their hometown of Wayne, N.J.

“We grew up loving all these English bands,” Carter said. “When we got the store, we got all our heroes to come by (for promotional visits)--Mick Ronson, Ian Hunter, the Ramones and David Johansen. We started getting so into it that we decided, ‘We don’t want to be selling records. We want to get into this ourselves.’ ”

Dramarama--the band also included a drummer named Jesse (just Jesse), and guitarists Peter Wood and Mr. E. Boy; some of the friendships dated back to childhood--put out its first album, “Cinema Verite,” in 1985.

An unexpected pocket of support developed in Los Angeles, where disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer was pushing the song, “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)” on KROQ. At Bingenheimer’s suggestion, Dramarama decided to go West.

“When we first came here (in 1986) we didn’t know what was going on,” Easdale said. “Our song was on the radio and we had offers for a couple gigs. We just came out for a monthlong vacation.” Very quickly, Dramarama felt sufficiently at home to make the stay permanent. “It was weird,” Easdale said. “Right away we got to open for the Psychedelic Furs at Irvine Meadows, and we heard ourselves on the radio every two hours. It was like ‘Fantasy Island.’ ”

“Then nothing happened,” Carter said, picking up the story’s downward curve. “We didn’t get signed. After the brightness of our first few months here, we felt as if we totally blew it, and we didn’t know why. We couldn’t figure it out.”

On its own, Dramarama put out a second album, “Box Office Bomb,” with songs reflecting the band’s disenchantment with the music business. Then Dramarama went off to play in France, where the New Rose label was marketing its records. Dramarama made its grand tour in a cramped, windowless van.

“Hellish is the word you would use,” Carter said of what until now has been the band’s only extended tour. “We came back to total uncertainty--with no money, no record deal. It was just depressing,” Carter recalled. “It was not the summer of love.” Indeed, by now, band members were at each other’s throats.

Easdale had other problems on his mind. “I had impending parenthood, and I was just petrified,” he said. “Then when we broke up, I got desperate. ‘I’ve gotta have a solo career, I’ve gotta have money for my kid.’ ”

It was in that frame of mind--alienated from his old friends, pressured by the prospect of being a new father--that Easdale created the cast of cornered and betrayed characters who emerge in the lyrics of “Stuck in Wonderamaland.”

But then came Dramarama’s rapprochement. The makers of one of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films were interested in using a Dramarama song in their movie, and they called in Easdale and Carter for a business meeting.

“They wound up using the Fat Boys’ rap instead, but that’s where Chris and I came face to face again,” Easdale said. Ultimately, after a three-month separation, Dramarama’s members decided not to go through with the divorce.

“It was the old cliche--you don’t know what you have till it’s gone,” Carter said.

“The whole thing was personal differences. It had nothing to do with the band musically,” said Easdale. “We learned we could be together and not be at each other’s throats.” After the years of communal living, “we’re all living separately, and we get along much better.

“It’s like the Mott the Hoople story,” Easdale continued, invoking the 1970s British band whose song “I Wish I Was Your Mother” appears in a remade version as the forlorn climax of Dramarama’s new album. “They broke up, then David Bowie (who wrote the hit song “All the Young Dudes” for Mott and produced an album for them) got ‘em together and they had a second lease on life. It’s a new beginning for us. We’re very lucky.”

Given a second chance, Dramarama was able to secure that elusive record deal: Chameleon Records released “Stuck in Wonderamaland” last November. “All anyone wants to do in the band is keep doing it--make records and eke out a living,” Easdale said. “I’d like to be like Todd Rundgren or somebody like that, who just keeps working, year in and year out.”

The realization that Dramarama’s fortunes are finally back on the upswing hit home when the band went back to New Jersey recently for its annual Christmas visit.

“We’d go back each Christmas, and they’d say, ‘Are you still in that band out there?’ ” Carter said. “This time we were on several radio stations, and we were on MTV as guest hosts. Finally people back there could tell we were kind of legitimate. It felt good.”

Dramarama, Dread Zeppelin and Big Drill Car play Saturday night at 8 at Crawford Hall on the UC Irvine campus. Information: (714) 856-5547.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Lenny Kravitz will launch the outdoor concert season with a show March 3 at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa. Tickets go on sale Sunday at 10 a.m. through Ticketron and Teletron and at the amphitheater box office. Information: (714) 634-1300.

Cafe Lido at 501 30th St. on Balboa Peninsula begins groovin’ on Sunday afternoons this weekend with a series of daytime jazz concerts. Plas Johnson plays this Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The schedule also includes Dee Dee McNeil (Feb. 11), Capp-Pierce-Juggernaut (two shows on Feb. 18), Jack Sheldon (Feb. 25) and Johnny Otis (two shows March 4). Tickets will range between $10 and $12.50. Information: (714) 675-2968.