’ . . . Dylan Is My Father, Baez Is My Mother . . . ‘ : John Wesley Harding’s lyrics point to the brash British rocker’s roots

What do you say to an Englishman bold enough to drop out of a Ph.D program at Cambridge University to pursue his rock ‘n’ roll dreams, and one daring enough to take his stage name from the title of an old Bob Dylan album and then write his own ‘90s version of a Rolling Stones classic?

The man is John Wesley Harding and the thing you say to him is, “How about a recording contract?” At least if you’re Seymour Stein, the Sire Records chief whose discoveries include Talking Heads, Madonna, k.d. lang and the Pretenders.

“My manager went into Seymour’s office ahead of me and said, ‘Here’s the future of rock ‘n’ roll’ or whatever it is managers say,” Harding said good-naturedly when recounting his audition early last year at the Sire office in London.

“I played two songs and he said, ‘Fine. . . . Do you want the contract before or after lunch?’ ”

When asked in a separate interview to confirm the account, Stein, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a stickler for accuracy, paused when the story was repeated to him. Something didn’t seem right.

“No . . . no,” he said finally, quite seriously. “It was after dinner-- not after lunch. It was dinner, I’m sure.”

But what about the two-song part? Was that really all that it took to get the contract?

“I always respond quickly,” Stein said. “When I hear something, I know it. I remember the time I stood outside of CBGB in New York waiting to see the Ramones and all of a sudden I heard David Byrne singing (with Talking Heads) and I was swooped up.

“The same with Wes. He was just sitting in our conference room, but I was swooped up again. I could picture what the record would sound like and I could picture him in front of an audience. He’s got a great future. He’s young, he’s prolific and he wants to be a success.”

Once you meet Harding, the new brash young man of British rock, it’s easy to see why the compact-disc version of his first U.S. album contains 65 minutes of music, almost 50% more than the average album.

Harding, 24, is a such a waterfall of energy, ideas and ambition that it’s a wonder his U.S. debut collection, “Here Comes the Groom,” didn’t end up a three-record set.

Harding has the good looks and confident aura of a campus leader, speaks with a sprinter’s speed and ricochets between subjects so often during interviews that you wonder if he has disciplined enough to be a meaningful artist.

Born Wesley Harding Stace, Harding claims to have written more than 140 songs in the two years since he dropped out of Cambridge, where he was pursuing a doctorate in social and political science.

Some of the 15 songs on the new album are too wordy and some images collide rather than reinforce each other, but the best songs--including “The Devil in Me,” his lively update of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”--add up to an exceptionally promising U.S. debut.

“With half an eye on history / and half an ounce of hope,” Harding sings in the album’s opening tune, and it summarizes nicely the evocative blend of innocence and savvy in what is the most appealing blend of lyric invention and emotional grace since Peter Case’s “The Man With the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar” album last year.

In songs such as “Spaced Cowgirl,” a reflection on a woman being consumed by her misplaced dreams, Harding asserts the dazzling wordplay and verbal sting associated with another Englishman, Elvis Costello:

You can be a good lover

Hammer nails into hearts

You can be a big loser

When the real horror starts

One of the complaints raised about the album, in fact, is that Harding sounds too much like Costello, both in the lyrics’ irony and wit and in his vocal phrasing. But the comparisons don’t seem to bother Harding.

“If I was worried about being accused of (copying) Costello, I would never have used two members of Elvis’ backing band because that draws even more attention to the Elvis issue,” Harding said, sipping coffee at a fast-food restaurant around the corner from the Palace in Hollywood, where he would later perform an acoustic set on a tour with two other young attractions, the Mighty Lemon Drops and Ocean Blue.

“Elvis is a great songwriter and he has been an influence on me, but not as much as Nick Lowe and Graham Parker, who were both influences on Elvis. I’m not in the same generation as Elvis, but we both heard a lot of the same music growing up.”

The “Groom” album hasn’t broken into the national pop charts, but it is already a Top 20 favorite in the CMJ New Music Report, which surveys playlists of college and alternative rock radio stations and often spotlights artists of commercial and/or critical significance long before the formal pop charts. Harding’s “The Devil in Me” video is also being shown on MTV.

“The Devil in Me,” which has been released as a single, and “Cathy’s New Clown,” a play on the Everly Brothers’ old hit “Cathy’s Clown,” show how Harding uses the literature of rock to his advantage. Elsewhere on the album, he offers a virtual resume of his own musical influences and intentions in a song titled “Bastard Son.”

Bob Dylan is my father

Joan Baez is my mother

And I’m their bastard son ...

Though my roots show through

I’m just 22 ...

And I don’t belong to anyone.

What about the frequent references to rock history in his songs?

“I happen to believe that rock has a history just as literature does and it’s good to use that history,” Harding said. “Some of the best literature reflects on other literature. Some of the best films are responses to other films. So rock should have those same liberties. ‘Cathy’s New Clown’ is a 1990 version of the Everly Brothers tune.

“If I were to sing the original ‘Cathy’s Clown,’ I would be accused of trying to be Jonathan Richman, someone who was very naive or whatever. So this is trying to express the same emotion, but within the context of today’s musical attitudes.”

Harding grew up in Hastings, a town south of London, in a musical family-- his mother sang opera and his schoolteacher father played piano. The highly opinionated Harding cites the Beatles as early rock heroes.

He was heavily into Dylan during his early teens, but Harding didn’t begin thinking about songwriting himself until much later.

“Dylan was too intimidating,” he said. “He was like a genius and he still is to me. How could you imagine ever writing a song as great as ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’?”

Through his interest in Dylan, however, Harding began listening to other folk-oriented songwriters, including Phil Ochs, Steve Goodman, David Blue, John Prine and Eric Andersen--and those records eventually made him think about writing songs himself.

After earning his degree in English literature from Cambridge and then spending a few months in the Ph.D program, Harding gave in to his rising passion for music and dropped out of school in 1988. Within a few months, he landed the opening slot on a tour by the then largely unknown Irish group Hothouse Flowers.

The tour turned the Flowers into stars in Europe and attracted enough attention for Harding that he put out a hastily recorded album on Demon Records, an independent label in England.

But Harding--a name he had adopted playfully in the tradition of Dylan’s and Costello’s appropriation of their heroes’ names--was already looking beyond the cultish, independent record scene. He wanted the exposure and promotion muscle found only on major labels. Thus, the Sire audition.

After the Lemon Drops/Ocean Blue tour ends, Harding hits the road again in the U.S., opening this time for singer Michelle Shocked. That tour is expected to reach Southern California early in June. Then he goes on the road in Europe for the first time with a rock band.

Harding’s themes, laced with humor and commentary, mostly revolve around questions of integrity and values, but he often treats those issues in ways that encompass both personal and social agendas.

“Most of my material is autobiographical, though I try to write them in a way that doesn’t focus on that,” he said. “A lot of my songs make leaps from a political situation to a personal situation. That’s because it is as important to be nice to your mother as to vote labor.”

As feisty as his most biting lyrics, Harding feels alienated from much of modern pop-rock, which he dismisses as lacking in passion and purpose.

“I’m a fan of pop music, but I hate what it has become,” he said. “It’s so rank at the moment, so terrible, the most grotesque thing. There are dozens of artists I love, from Peter Case to John Hiatt. But there are hundreds who are disgraceful and they’re the ones who always seem to be on the radio.

“I just wrote a song called ‘The People’s Drug.’ I got the title from a pharmacy chain in Washington. It’s about how religion used to be called the opium of the people, but now it’s pop music. It is music without ideas or charm . . . music that has been filtered through synthesizers to remove the humanity and the heart. I just think it’s time to go back to what made rock ‘n’ roll important in the first place.”