3D Picnic Uses Intelligence, Wit, Variety to Help Sell Debut Album in a 2D World : Pop: The group, which plays tonight at the Marquee in Westminster, has finally found an obscure San Diego record label for its eclectic approach.

3D Picnic went out and made a debut album that lays out an exceptionally diverse spread of styles and emotional tones, and pulls off each of them exceedingly well.

Big mistake.

At least, that is, in the eyes of too much of today’s music industry, which seems to have forgotten how to think in two dimensions, let alone three. The trick to making it in music nowadays is to fit into one of the ready-made marketing pipelines that record companies and radio use to reach specialized segments of a public presumed to be too narrow and fragmented to accept much diversity.

That made it hard for 3D Picnic--which plays tonight at Club Tangent at the Marquee in Westminster--to find a home for its self-financed album, “Dirt.” The album’s 14 songs (18 on compact disc) range from sumptuous Beatlesque pop to mournful, folk-tinged balladry, with blitzing New Wave and David Bowie-style rockers and novelty numbers such as a hillbilly joke song, “Dirty Feet,” thrown in for good measure.

Given today’s stratified thinking, 3D Picnic’s album is far too pop for alternative and college markets, far too offbeat for Top 40 or mainstream rock markets and far too diverse for just about everybody who thinks in terms of markets rather than music.

After repeated rejections by large labels and small, the Los Angeles band, which has close ties to the Orange County rock scene, found an obscure San Diego label and distributor, Earth Music/Cargo Records, that dug “Dirt.” The album, completed a year ago, was finally released last week.

Over dinner recently at a restaurant in Sunset Beach, band members Don Burnet, Carolynne Edwards and Mickey Ferrel were more bemused than bitter about the problems they had in persuading a record company to take a chance on their album.

“From a marketing standpoint, it’s been difficult,” said Burnet, the band’s main singer and songwriter, whose long, rounded face and fisherman’s cap make him look a little like a young John Lennon.

“We’re not playing the next big thing,” he said. “If the Beatles were around now and doing the ‘White Album,’ they’d probably get dropped by their label.”

Burnet--dubbed “Dallas Don” in the album credits--has been a part of the local rock scene since 1981, when he and his girlfriend piled into a van in Chicago, headed west for their spring vacation and never went back.

“I had been a straight-A goodie-goodie, and all of a sudden I did an about-face,” Burnet said of his decision to quit high school at 17 and settle in Huntington Beach, where he had friends. “I had been really shy and introverted, and I suddenly found all this stuff I liked.”

High on Burnet’s list of things to like was punk rock.

“In Illinois I’d been into it, but there hadn’t been any scene there. Two weeks after I got (to Huntington Beach), I saw the Crowd (the first of the Orange County punk bands) at a party. I said, ‘This is great,’ and I got into the scene and into a band. I got my amp shipped out from Illinois.”

Burnet’s first band, Mox Nix, was “total hard core” in approach. But by 1983, he was incorporating his more melodic rock roots (he cites the Beatles, Neil Young, Blondie and the Ramones as key influences) in a punk band called Plain Wrap. The trio released an album for Enigma Records in 1985, but Burnet decided to break up the band after bassist Bob Gnarly left, complaining that Plain Wrap’s direction was becoming too pop-oriented.

“Bob would say, ‘I just can’t get into singin’ this “She’s Over Me” song (a fetching pop-harmony number that appears on “Dirt”) with all these skinheads standing there.”

While Burnet was figuring out what to do after Plain Wrap, Edwards, who grew up near Glendale, was becoming dissatisfied with her role as keyboard player in an all-woman band patterned after the Bangles. She placed a musican-seeks-band ad that cited the Beatles, R.E.M. and Cheap Trick as her influences. Burnet responded by sending her a homemade tape of his songs. They got together as a duo in 1987 and launched 3D Picnic.

“Here I was, a punk from Huntington Beach, and she was a New Wave girl from the Valley,” Burnet said.

Burnet and Edwards kept 3D Picnic going through many lineup changes and a far-from-clamorous reception as it played the club circuit in Hollywood, Long Beach and Orange County (band members say their peak draw nowadays ranges from 100 to 150 fans). The current lineup features Burnet, 26, on guitar, Edwards, 24, on guitar and keyboards, Ferrel, 27, who joined about a year ago, on bass, and drummer Mike Sessa, 24, who joined six months ago and splits time between 3D Picnic and the Hollywood Joneses.

3D Picnic also had to persevere through a less-than-enthusiastic reception for the tapes it made in hope of landing a record deal.

“They were offering suggestions like, what if you and the girl sang every song together, or why don’t you sing all the songs, or why doesn’t she?” Burnet said. “There’d be times we’d be thinking, ‘Man, maybe we really should change this.’ ”

“We briefly thought about it,” said Edwards, a slender woman with delicate features and dyed blond hair. “But it’s just kind of false if you say, ‘We’re only going to do our fast songs, or our slow countryish songs.’ ”

The lack of interest from the music industry did take some toll of band morale.

“It got really frustrating at times,” Edwards said. “But you’d think, ‘We’ve come this far, it’d be stupid to give it up.’ ”

Burnet said he though of disbanding 3D Picnic “a few times. But when we started the band I vowed not to do what I’d done with Plain Wrap, which was give it up after too short a time.”

Sticking with a varied approach, 3D Picnic recorded “Dirt” in studios in Orange and Costa Mesa. The production cost of $6,000, according to Burnet, was low for an album with a rich, full sound, incorporating many harmonies and instrumental layers that required lots of overdubbing. Burnet said 3D Picnic economized by thoroughly planning out and rehearsing all the song arrangements in advance so no time would be wasted in the studio.

Not everything was planned, though. Riding to a gig at Bogart’s one night, Burnet and Edwards began harmonizing into a tiny Walkman cassette recorder, singing “Dirty Feet,” an oldie from the country music-comedy team of Homer and Jethro. The song, complete with ambient road noise that sounds like waves on a beach, wound up as the joke finale on the album.

It’s a countrified bookend to such other lighthearted numbers as “Party Planet,” with its hangover-in-outer-space sound effects, and “The Last One,” a wry look at bad habits that are too much fun to give up.

On the other end of the emotional spectrum, such numbers as Burnet’s “These Thick Walls” and Edwards’ “Seven Days of Mourning” make light-footed use of language to probe heavy states of depression. Such numbers as “Charles Thinks About It” and “Forget the Words” round out the album with catchy philosophizing about how to cope with a world that’s wound too tightly.

On stage, Burnet said, 3D Picnic takes a leaner, harder approach: “Live, we’re more raw and faster. I think the live situation and the studio situation should be treated differently.”

“Dirt” is starting to earn some good reviews, and the members of 3D Picnic expect to go on their first national tour this summer. Conscious that the band isn’t selling “the next big thing,” the members are keeping their expectations low key.

“We’re definitely looking to move up. We’re not into the idea of being a college-radio, alternative band all our lives,” Burnet said.

But he said the main motivation is still pleasing himself: “I’m doing the same thing I’ve been doing ever since I was in a hard-core punk band, which is doing the music I like to do.”

3D Picnic, Lost Dog and Johnny Monster & the Nightmares play tonight at 9:30 at Club Tangent at the Marquee, 7000 Garden Grove Blvd., Westminster. Information: (714) 891-1971.