From Films to Concerts

Olivia Barash is probably best known to audiences from her role as Emilio Estevez’s UFO-nut girlfriend in the perpetually rented cult-film favorite “Repo Man” (in which she uttered the “Casablanca”-like immortal closing words, “I’m glad I tortured you!”). It was a somewhat sexy role, but one contrived to make her seem even more girlish and certainly more naive than her age at the time, which was a young 18.

Now, on hiatus from acting and fronting a band called 13th Step five years later, Barash is a regular on the local rock club circuit.

“I always play younger” in the movies, she says, but on the concert stage she seems to be playing much older, much more world-wise--exuding the betrayed fury of a Melissa Etheridge, but with a tougher, meatier musical edge.

“People who come knowing me as an actress probably don’t expect that it’s going to be as moving an experience,” says Barash, “because a lot of the actresses who sing do the disco kind of songs that are written for them. And this stuff really comes from the heart and soul and gut.

“I consider myself a musician first. This sounds really corny, but I think it’s my calling. But there’s this taboo about being an actress and a singer, and since I had films out before my music is out in front of the public, I’m gonna have to really prove that I’m gonna knock their socks off as a musician.”

Still, if being an actress is a slight liability to one’s legitimate rock rep, having been in “Repo Man” isn’t: “The people that are into that movie are people that would be into our music.”

Barash’s next film role (her first since playing an SLA member in Paul Schrader’s “Patty Hearst”) will be a cameo as a Sunset Strip folk singer in the Oliver Stone’s upcoming “The Doors.”

But right now acting remains secondary to 13th Step. The guitar-based quartet has finished a six-song EP to be released in April; the live schedule includes stops tonight at Al’s Bar, Wednesday at Club Lingerie and frequent appearances at the Coconut Teaszer.