Burning Tree Looks to Hard-Rock Past : Rock: The basic power trio that played its early dates at Orange County venues works chiefly from a lexicon of the ‘60s; its songs have a personal, emotional quality.

Doni Gray looks like a cross between a wired Jack Nicholson character and a Sammy Davis Jr. show-biz smoothie as he strides into an eighth floor conference room at the CBS Records office tower in Los Angeles.

Wearing a white dinner jacket that might have been filched from Wayne Newton’s closet, the small, bone-scrawny drummer of Burning Tree does a half-pirouette on the plush green carpet and throws out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“I have no excuse,” Gray, who has arrived an hour late for the interview, says in a humble voice. He then falls immediately to making excuses, pointing the accusatory finger at Burning Tree’s bassist, Mark Dutton. Dutton, it seems, has committed the sin of keeping Gray up late the night before, forcing him to watch Rolling Stones videos until 4:30 a.m.

Dutton accepts the blame without taking affront, then quickly acquiesces when a covetous Gray proposes a swap of jackets: Gray’s Vegas dazzler for Dutton’s eye-popping paisley Summer of Love throwback. Guitarist Marc Ford looks on in quiet bemusement. His own black velour jacket is quite safe, since he stands at least a skinny half-foot taller than either of his band mates.

Late arrivals and wardrobe confusion might be cause for creeping tension in some rock bands, but for Burning Tree it’s all part of a casual camaraderie. The three members have known each other for years, entering and exiting each other’s bands on the Orange County rock scene before finally linking up as a trio early in 1988. There is another strong reason for their current bonhomie: Burning Tree, which headlines tonight at Club Tangent at the Marquee in Westminster, is a band with great expectations.

“Burning Tree,” an extremely promising debut album, has been in the can since last fall. Epic Records has scheduled a June release in the United States, but Burning Tree’s bow as a recording band will take place next week when the album comes out in England. Burning Tree will mark the occasion by flying to London later this month to play some coming-out shows--its first dates outside California.

The hard-rock world could be in for a good, hard shake if “Burning Tree” takes off. For at least five years, most young hard rockers have been under the sway of Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, two bands that, whatever their successes, were emotionally and imaginatively limited ‘70s reworkings of more adventurous British Invasion precursors.

“Burning Tree” snaps out of the AeroZep doldrums and reaches back to more inventive, versatile and fruitful sources: Jimi Hendrix, Cream, the Rolling Stones and Derek & the Dominos-vintage Eric Clapton. Instead of the AeroZep legacy of banshee screams, tromping beats, sassy swagger and exhaustive jams, Burning Tree places emphasis on a lean, trim, unpredictable attack in the playing, deeply felt soulfulness in the singing, and strong, melody-conscious craftsmanship in the songwriting.

The band is an equal partnership in which all three members sing and write songs, but Ford figures to be the main attention grabber. At 23, the soft-spoken, baby-faced La Palma resident is primed to arrive as a new guitar hero, a musician unselfish enough to play within the framework of a song, yet prolific enough to solo with a visceral, blazing hunger.

Ford is still heavily under the influence of such precursors as Hendrix, Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but he plays with transfixing impact and immediacy. Wrapped in tight black pants, shod in pointy black suede boots and crowned with a ‘60s Brit-style mop haircut, the charismatic young guitarist looks as if he might have stepped out of a photograph of the old Yardbirds or Small Faces.

Ford, who grew up in Cerritos, was 10 when his grandmother bought him a barely functional guitar at a swap meet for $8.50.

Ford eventually discovered blues and its rock offshoots, and by his junior year in high school, he knew that there was nothing he wanted to do but play the guitar.

“There were always neighborhood kids who wanted to play, and we’d spend all day Saturday and Sunday jamming in the garage,” he said. “I quit high school as soon as I found out how cool bands were. There was never a doubt in my mind that I would make it as a musician.”

Dutton, 25, and Gray, 26, had other options. As Burning Tree was beginning to gel, Dutton, who grew up in Fullerton, was nearing the end of his course work for a psychology degree from Cal State Fullerton.

“I was in the last semester, then I decided, ‘Hell, I don’t want to get this degree--I might be tempted to use it,’ ” said the curly-haired bassist, who goes by the nickname Muddy.

Gray says he went through a similar conflict between the urge to rock and the attraction of the steadier working life he could lead by falling back on his college degree in graphic design.

“I was contemplating just turning into a normal person,” he said. “Inside somewhere I was bumming out that (after) 17 years of (art studies) I had given it all up for the band. But somewhere inside I also knew something would happen with the band.”

Dutton and Gray began their musical association as teen-agers infatuated with the revival of British Mod fashion.

“Doni was just this weird hermit guy who stayed in his room and painted his windows black,” Dutton recalled. “You’d go over there at 4 o’clock and he’d be just crawling out of his cave. He comes from a family of actors that was pretty strange.”

Gray, from Cerritos, said he fell in love with the drums when he saw an old film of the Benny Goodman orchestra on television when he was 12. “Gene Krupa blew me away. It was the first time I ever saw a drummer go off. A week later I had a garage sale so I could make enough money to buy my first kit.”

Dutton started rocking later in life.

“I wasn’t really into music in high school. I was kind of athletic,” he said, noting that skateboarding and cycling were his favorite sports. “Then I got bronchial pneumonia shortly after high school. Suddenly, I had nothing to do with my life. I went down to my friends’ house one day and they were jamming, playing songs like ‘Last Train to Clarksville.’ The bass player left and I picked it up--and bam, it changed the course of my life.”

Dutton and Gray first played together in a Mod band called the March.

“I went to see them at Radio City (a now-defunct Anaheim club) and most of the crowd didn’t want to go in because they were too loud,” Ford recalled with a laugh. Dutton and Gray then formed a band called Exobiota, named after a song Gray had written, entitled “Exobiota Delicacy.”

Dutton carried on with Exobiota after Gray left and recruited Ford to play in one version of the oft-changing band. Gray and Ford, meanwhile, became steady playing partners in the Cerritos bands Citadel and Head. Ford also served a hitch in Cathedral of Tears, the gloom-rock band led by former T.S.O.L. singer Jack Grisham.

In late 1987, Ford, who had never sung, decided that he would try becoming a front man instead of a side-player.

“Stevie Ray Vaughan is the one who made me decide I could sing,” Ford said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I saw him at the Greek Theatre and there was just something about him, the spirit he had, that made me decide I could do it.”

Ford recruited Gray as his new band’s drummer, then remembered the offer Dutton had made to him at the time he left Exobiota: If he ever needed a bass player to jam with, feel free to call. Ford called, and Dutton reported for some musical woodshedding in an Azusa warehouse where Gray was living at the time.

“We drank a big bottle of Jack Daniel’s and started jamming,” Dutton recalled. “From the first note I knew this was going to be it.”

Trying to launch a band with three singer-songwriters can be a touchy thing, as the history of such bands as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds and Blind Faith makes clear.

“In the very beginning it was a little uncomfortable--egos and everything,” Ford said. “But after a while, we accepted that everything we play is (all of) ours.”

Burning Tree played its early dates in Orange County but quickly shifted its focus to Los Angeles.

“You can play around Orange County all your life and never get heard,” Ford said. “As soon as we started playing up here (in Los Angeles), everything happened. Here, (record company) people’s job is to drive around and go to shows. They’re not going to drive to Orange County.”

In short order, A&M; Records asked Burning Tree to record on a tryout basis. Dutton says the band was on the verge of signing with A&M; last year when Epic began an avid, ultimately successful courtship.

Epic suggested several producers for Burning Tree’s album, among them Tim Palmer, who produced the first album by David Bowie’s hard-edged new band, Tin Machine.

“We put on the Tin Machine album, and looked at each other: ‘This is the rudest production we’ve heard in years. This is our man,”’ Dutton said. Palmer rounded out Burning Tree’s power-trio sound by bringing in Booker T. Jones, the great Memphis R&B; player from Booker T. & the MG’s, to play Hammond organ on several songs. Dutton and Ford also added piano dabs of their own. Live, the band continues to play as a basic power trio.

Burning Tree’s songs benefit from a personal, emotional quality. Gray’s love-lost ballad, “Bakers Song,” with its convincingly aching vocal, and Dutton’s elegiac “Crush,” which expresses doubts about the motives of the people who follow a rock band--from fans and business associates to the band members themselves--show that Burning Tree is comfortable on quieter, more intimate musical ground.

Elsewhere, Burning Tree pretty much lives up to its name with incendiary rockers. In one of Ford’s recurring lyrical themes, playing music is seen as a source of comfort in the face of sadness, social rejection or material want.

“A lot of people think if they only had money, their troubles would be over. But it’s something inside that you have to deal with. Things aren’t going to fix it,” said Ford. “I do want to be a rich man, but you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not a necessity.”

Earning a living with his guitar is crucial to Ford: He and his girlfriend, Kirsten Konte (a talented singer who sings backing vocals on Burning Tree’s album, and also performs with the rock band Children’s Day), have a year-old son, Elijah.

For now, Burning Tree’s prospects for success depend on how rock audiences and radio formats attuned to ‘70s-derived sounds will respond to a band working mainly from a lexicon of ‘60s sources.

With its close parallels to the music of Cream and Hendrix, the band may find itself being dismissed in some quarters as derivative.

“We never make a conscious effort to sound like somebody,” Gray said. “We never listen to a song and say, ‘That’s a killer riff, let’s make a song out of it.’ If it really works, you’re not going to say, ‘That sounds like Jimmy Page, so I’m going to change it.’ ”

Ford openly admits that Burning Tree is still perhaps too dependent on its roots. But he looks forward to growing and branching out with time.

“Hopefully, as our songwriting develops, we’ll be able to get away from it, but you have to learn some place.”

What’s impressive is how well this young band has absorbed its lessons from some of rock’s most educational chapters.

Burning Tree, Marshes of Glynn and the Screaming Sirens play tonight at 9:30 at Club Tangent at the Marquee, 7000 Garden Grove Blvd., Westminster. Information: (714) 891-1971.