NPG, Bill Ward Make Points With Video Ventures : Music: Two local rock acts maintain their integrity in a bid for MTV exposure. A live release from a now-defunct edition of the James Harman Band goes beyond mere nostalgia.

With just-released debut videos, two Orange County rock acts, National People’s Gang and Bill Ward, leap into the relatively new world of musical marketing via MTV. Both emerge with their integrity intact in clips that make a point instead of merely mongering a salable image.

Meanwhile, local bluesman James Harman’s new album of old live tracks reminds us that video images are no substitute for the old-fashioned impact of a great band forging a succession of unscripted, personality-filled moments in a sweaty nightclub.

The ratings range from * (poor) to ***** (a classic).

*** 1/2

National People’s Gang

“Gettin’ Close to God” video

(Dr. Dream)

All rock video is advertising, and NPG could hardly have done a more appealing job of selling itself than it has with “Gettin’ Close to God.” The scenario moves between kinetic concert footage, shot at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, and the offstage doings of a weird, wired evangelist, played by singer Chad Jasmine. The concert sequences establish each band member as an interesting performing personality as NPG cranks out the edgy, funk-flavored track that leads off its recent album, “Orange.” But Jasmine is beyond interesting. Not only does he wear the most outlandish rock headgear since Peter Gabriel’s days with Genesis, but he wears it with a Gabriel-like charisma, grabbing the viewer with a theatrical performance full of alluring ambiguities.

It’s the ambiguity that makes the video more than a sales tool for the band. Jasmine’s portrayal of the preacher holds a degree of mockery, which is the expected, by now trite rock ‘n’ roll take on evangelism. But there is also magic and mystery in the characterization. Jasmine, painted like one of the decadent priests of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” makes his character too vibrant to dismiss. There’s a power in extremist religion, as well as a madness, the video suggests. In its most telling moment, we see a bare-chested, joyfully shamanistic Jasmine on stage at the Coach House, hacking a watermelon into slices and sharing the fruit with his audience--a Eucharistic ritual that is a regular part of NPG’s concerts.

Without betraying the song’s ambiguity, the video focuses its meaning with the suggestion that a charismatic figure in the pulpit and a star on a rock stage both conduct rituals and gather flocks drawn by hunger for a god of some sort. That suggestion raises some interesting questions: If we dismiss the preacher as a sham, then shouldn’t we be suspicious of the rocker as well? Lord knows that some rock heroes are as brittlely dogmatic as some religious fundamentalists. To its credit, National People’s Gang would rather explore mysteries and ambiguities than proclaim simplistic answers to what ails our spirits.

***

Bill Ward

“Bombers (Can Open Bomb Bays)” video

(Chameleon)

When his debut album, “Ward One: Along the Way,” was released early this year, the former Black Sabbath drummer vowed that if any video of his included pouting, scantily clad models or any of his old band’s demonic imagery, “you can come over to my house and smack me over the head with a big shovel.” Well, Ward’s close-cropped noggin is safe. The “Bombers” video eschews the poses, cliches and come-ons that make most headbanger video such an embarrassment. Instead of fantasies, “Bombers” offers horrific newsreel realities, ranging from an elephant hunt to enough wartime cannonade and bombardment footage to induce shellshock.

These grim scenes--and occasional contrasting glimpses of beauty and family love--play out behind the ghostly, superimposed image of the song’s well-known guest singer and ace video ham, Ward’s old mate Ozzy Osbourne.

The video starts with a boy and girl walking carefree through an idyllic park, then being confronted suddenly by a blank white screen. It soon becomes a video monitor for them, depicting a graphic lesson about the nature of peace and violence and the individual’s responsibility to choose the humane path. In a hopeful final vision, the idyllic scene is restored.

Although there’s no arguing with content like that, the “Bombers” clip underlines the way in which video so often narrows and diminishes a song. Ward’s album is a highly personal concept piece about his alcoholic decline and fall and his struggle for recovery and renewal. In that context, “Bombers” is about the damage that an out-of-control individual can wreak on himself and those he loves. While the video’s escalation to questions of global insanity is valid enough, I’d rather think of Ward’s own story when hearing this excellent, hard-chugging song--as I do when I listen to the record.

“Bombers” posed an unusually tough assignment for the video makers. They had to introduce Ward as the creative force and persona behind the song--despite the fact that Osbourne sings it and appears as its marquee attraction. They squandered an opportunity to establish Ward as a personality right at the start. In the opening sequence, an anonymous mad professor appears on the mysterious screen and beckons the strolling kids to watch. Why not have Ward up there doing the beckoning, and perhaps speaking some suitably Delphic introductory lines? Instead, just as in his Black Sabbath days, the Seal Beach resident comes off as Bill the Drummer, playing backup to Ozzy.

Despite these problems, the sheer strength of the song (the best thing Osbourne has had to sing in years) and the video’s commitment to serious content make it exceptional in the metal field. According to a Chameleon Records spokeswoman, “Bombers” is scheduled to debut this weekend during the first third of MTV’s “Headbangers Ball” program, which runs from midnight Saturday to 3 a.m. Sunday.

****

James Harman Band

“Strictly Live . . . in ‘85! Vol. 1.”

(Rivera/Ice Pick)

The best live albums make you feel as if you were there--and wish that you truly had been.

Harman’s notes on the back cover of “Strictly Live” are right on target in pointing toward the ambient charm of being there that comes through on the album, which was recorded over two nights in March, 1985, at the Belly Up in Solana Beach. “It’s all here, everything a live recording needs. . . . Feedback, stuff falling down, people talking and yelling, (guitarist Hollywood) Fats’ noisy volume control, three guys playing harmonica in the front row, bartenders ringing bells and my favorite . . . some would-be percussionist clanking glasses or ashtrays together--out of time--all the way through the slow blues.”

Also present and accounted for is an astonishingly strong blues band--Harman singing and playing the harmonica, Michael (Hollywood Fats) Mann and David (Kid) Ramos on guitars, Willie J. Campbell on bass and Stephen T. Hodges on drums. In a way, the belated appearance of “Strictly Live” makes it a nostalgic look back at a band that no longer exists--Fats died in 1986 after joining the Blasters; Campbell and Ramos left in 1988, leaving Harman and Hodges to carry on in a revamped lineup that hasn’t made a record yet. But the performances on “Strictly Live” are far too enlivening to let any nostalgic pining for Harman’s old band linger too long.

The album follows the shape of an actual concert by this supremely versatile lineup: ambling amiably at the outset, dipping into some slow, deep, dark-night blues, then picking up rocking intensity. Throughout there is a sense of musicians playing off each other and their surroundings, doing something that was special to that night, that moment. Three songs out of the seven are devoted to the theme of barroom lust--Harman’s way of connecting with the crowd’s own desires and fantasies of the moment.

A flawlessly folksy and vibrant showman, Harman infuses personality into every vocal sally, every cagey and confident harmonica interjection. His singing breathes a smile of pleasure and a lighthearted hankering into such fun, sexy tunes as “By-Yourself Dance” and “Legs (Let the Little Girl Dance).” He shifts to sorrow on the dirgelike “Blues Walked In,” his harp shifting between clean, piercing cries and thick, distorted sobs.

On the nine-minute “You’re Gone,” the Harman Band does what only the great blues performers can: It seizes on the simplest of lyrical sentiments, and turns it into complex psychodrama as cathartic as good theater. There is a moment at the song’s climax that is sheer, time-stopping perfection. The mighty Fats is finishing a devastating, swarming, rhythmically exploratory solo by laying on a meaty, chordal riff. Ramos jumps in with sizzling alarm, paralleling and vaulting above Fats’ line as the rhythm section drives the song to a crescendo. And then Harman ascends to the peak of this mountain of sound and cuts loose with a harmonica cry that is like an arc of electricity.

At this point, a good band simply would ride home on the wave of intensity it had created. But Harman and company do something that’s beyond merely good. Instead of going for the crowd-pleasing rave-up that lies before them for the taking (and which they do indeed deliver later, on the chugging train-rhythm song “Goatman Holler”), they pull back.

That swarming Fats solo, and the lightning bolt epiphany that followed, stood for something: the current of rising, unhinging emotion coursing through a man whose lover has gone. An Othello or a King Lear would rage on into insanity, but this is the blues, and the blues is not about tragic fate. The blues is about finding a way to cope.

So the band reins itself in, and Harman’s voice steels itself, just as a sorrowing soul must steady itself and try to regain control. Then, at the end, with rage spent, but control too hard to maintain, the song breaks down in tears signaled by Harman’s falsetto vocal cries and Fats’ moist, barking guitar punctuation. The progression has gone from abject, stricken sorrow at the start, to dangerous anger at the climax, to a potentially cleansing grief at the end, with each stage eloquently stated and fully felt. A band can’t do any better than that.