Tired of Spinning Wheels, Gyros Get Serious About Fun : The eclectic, playful group, which will focus on landing a recording deal, begins its comeback Friday and Saturday in Sunset Beach.

After two years in the hamper, the Gyromatics, perhaps the only rock group ever named after a washing machine, are about to start a new spin cycle on the local pop scene.

During their initial run from 1982 to 1988, the Gyromatics established a local following with a combination of joke songs and strong musicianship. The musicianship enabled the Gyros to mix and match musical styles like so many different-colored sets of socks and undershorts.

When the Gyromatics played, everything from country to surf music to rockabilly to sax-honking R&B; came out in the wash, along with kitschy, satiric lyrics that placed the Gyros in the rock-as-comedy tradition of such precursors as the Bonzo Dog Band (the wonderful ‘60s and early ‘70s British ensemble that was a forebear of Monty Python comedy troupe), Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Dickies and the B-52’s.

The Gyromatics never made an organized push to win a recording deal and move beyond the Orange County rock scene. This time around, says founder Ron Eglit, they intend to take the job of being funny a little more seriously.

The comeback shows that the Gyromatics will play Friday and Saturday at their old, steady stamping ground, the Sunset Pub in Sunset Beach, are the start of what Eglit sees as an ongoing attempt to win a recording deal.

“I’m going to keep it together,” said Eglit, who also is a longtime member of surf-guitar hero Dick Dale’s backing band, the Del-Tones. “We want to do showcases, because we think people are ready now for the zany stuff we do.”

The reformed lineup is virtually the same one the Gyromatics had in their prime: Floyd Elliot fronts the band with his deadpan baritone, Eglit plays guitar and pedal steel, Alan Palmer doubles on saxophone and keyboards, and John Wheeler plays bass. One of Eglit’s fellow Del-Tones, Steve Aschoff, will play drums at the Sunset Pub, but the Gyromatics’ old drummer, Tim Leitch, is also going to be active in the band’s revival, Eglit said.

Eglit, 41, said that the Gyromatics’ re-emergence grew out of a wider re-evaluation of his life over the past few months. The musician found himself bogged down by the first full-time day job he had worked during a long musical career. He caught the initial surf-music wave as a 13-year-old guitarist inspired by Dale and the Ventures (Eglit also played in the Grateful Dead offshoot band, Kingfish, during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and he appeared on a 1973 album by Ken Hensley, the keyboards player for British heavy rockers Uriah Heep).

“I got lazy and got a real job for a while,” Eglit said. But after a year as a salesman for a beer distributor during 1989, Eglit decided he wanted to go back to being a full-time musician. “It was the first job I’ve ever done in my life, and I absolutely hated it,” the wiry, curly-haired musician said as he sat in his Huntington Beach living room, talking while a Jimi Hendrix album played in the background.

“I quit my beer job two months ago and decided I really want to go after what I want to go after. The Gyros are my first love. It always has been. It’s an incredible band, and it should’ve been signed. I decided the Gyros are too good” not to take another shot at winning wider recognition.

Handily enough, almost all of the ex-Gyromatics had continued playing with Eglit in a part-time oldies band called Dead Men Don’t Surf. The former members were still on good terms and available to play.

The Gyromatics’ error the first time around, according to Eglit and Elliot, was the band’s inability to resist the money it could earn by becoming a regular attraction on the club circuit. To keep a steady club following it had to play a helping of familiar hits instead of concentrating on its own material.

As Elliot recalls it, when boredom set in the Gyromatics would amuse themselves by torturing bar-band staples like “Louie Louie” and “Gloria” into submission.

“You’d do something weird to break up the monotony,” Elliot, whose car had broken down, said in a conference interview conducted over Eglit’s speaker phone. “We were doing 10- to 20-minute atonal versions of ‘Louie Louie.’ I guess they didn’t go over well. We did polka versions of ‘Eve of Destruction.’ We did whatever we felt like doing. As we played clubs more and more, we started taking it further and further out there until it was practically performance art.”

Elliot would work Twinkie gastronomics into the Gyromatics act, presenting and ingesting a new stomach-turning recipe each night.

“It just got weirder and weirder,” Elliot said.

“Until we absolutely flipped out,” Eglit added.

The revived Gyromatics, however, will likely dispense with such treats as Twinkies with anchovies, Twinkies Italiano and Twinkies Hawaiian.

“I don’t think so,” Eglit said.

“Maybe not,” Elliot said.

This time around, the Gyromatics can leave the bar-band cover songs to their opening alter-ego band, Dead Men Don’t Surf, and concentrate on skewed originals. The Gyromatics songbook includes such absurdist nuggets as the ribald rockabilly stomp, “Self-Propelled Love,” and the silly, B-52’s style sci-fi extravaganza “Attack of the Tikis From Outer Space,” the title song of the four-song record on the local Cexton label that was the band’s only release. The repertoire also includes an acerbic honky-tonk satire on family life, “Let’s Get Drunk and Whup on the Kids,” and a smattering of songs built on kitsch-reconstructions of the mystical moods of India and the Middle East.

The band also retains its chief relic: the front end of the junked washing machine that gave the Gyromatics their name.

Elliot said he discovered the old Bendix washer in the Burbank yard of the band’s original drummer, who hosted its earliest rehearsals.

“It was sitting out there rotting and collecting rust, and I would trip on it when I came in,” the myopic singer recalled. “One day I decided to look at it. It said ‘Gyromatic’ on it, and I decided that would be a good name for the band.”

The Gyromatics and Dead Men Don’t Surf play Friday and Saturday night at the Sunset Pub, 16655 Pacific Coast Highway, Sunset Beach. Admission: $3. Information: (213) 592-1926.