Lost Souls Biker Band Gears for Self-Propelled Run at Stardom : The Long Beach group has financed an album chronicling the life cycle of reckless outcasts. Its members are out for success, but on their own terms.

Forget fluffy hairdos and pretty-boy pouting. The big thing these days on the Hollywood rock scene is motorcycle chic. Grunge is the word, and heavy boots, black leather, torn blue jeans and Harley Davidsons are the icons of the moment for trendy rockers eager to don the trappings of instant street credibility.

All of this leaves the members of Lost Souls feeling more than a bit bemused, and a tad defensive. The Long Beach rock band, which plays Saturday at the Doheny Saloon in Capistrano Beach, was a biker outfit long before it became fashionable for bands seeking upward mobility to sport two wheels. Mike Malone and Scott Atchison, the singer and guitarist who founded Lost Souls five years ago, don’t want anyone to think that they hopped on their Harleys just to jump on a trend.

Malone rolled his eyes and shrugged his broad shoulders at the mention of the new biker chic.

“We were basically a loosely knit club before we were a band, based around motorcycles,” the 31-year-old singer said in a recent interview at the band’s garage recording studio in Long Beach. “It’s part of us, but we try not to play it up.”

“We’re the same as we’ve ever been,” Atchison added from under a mountain of unruly curls that refused to be tamed by a mere headband. “Times just change and turn around.”

Those who pay close attention can tell a real biker band like Lost Souls from a bunch of pretenders, Atchison said.

“We go out and play just as we are when we walk off our bikes. We’ve got road tar on our faces. You see other bands, they go in the dressing room and pretty up.”

The five members of Lost Souls don’t just look like bikers (the classic “Easy Rider” look is best embodied by rhythm guitarist Chris Hardaway, who resembles the late Ron (Pigpen) McKernan, the aptly nicknamed original keyboards player of the Grateful Dead). They often play for audiences of bikers, at such special events as motorcycle shows and swap meets.

As the final proof of Lost Souls’ true commitment to bikerdom, Malone points to his left leg. Four years ago, a hit-and-run driver sideswiped his motorcycle on Santa Monica Boulevard while he was riding home from a gig, leaving the bike a flaming wreck and his leg a fractured mess that had to be rehinged with metal pins.

One might think that would have dampened Malone’s enthusiasm for motorcycling.

“Hell, no,” he said. “(I was) right back on it, just like a horse.”

What makes Lost Souls worth hearing is its ability to back up the biker image with music that typically revs ahead at full power, yet contains enough nuance to avoid turning into a motor-minded cliche.

The band’s self-financed debut album, “Howlin’ at the Moon,” which is due out in July, has its share of songs based in biker myths. In several swaggering numbers, hard-living heroes drive their decidedly phallic machines along a fast-lane of sex and danger until they fly over the edge of sense and restraint into some vroom-vroom Valhalla. That may sound like typical hard-rock myth-making, but Lost Souls carries it off with an unpretentious musical mix of punk rhythms, metal guitar accents and a firm blues-rock grounding. Malone’s gliding runs on vibraphone lend a welcome surprise element. If Atchison’s swarming, throbbing, multitracked guitars evoke the engine’s heavy roar, the fast swirl of the vibes describes another dimension of the motorcyclist’s experience: the airy sensation of moving through the whipping wind.

In their album’s best moments, Lost Souls move beyond biker-hero braggadocio with songs such as “Doors Open In,” a punk - influenced anthem about being treated as an outcast. The furthest departures from biker rock are gripping highlights.

“Death Mask” is a dramatic epic that surges like the Allman Brothers Band in full flight as it moves with mystery and frenzy through a nightmarish scenario crafted by Malone, the band’s lyricist. “Sonja” is a stately elegy that offers a detailed, close-in glimpse of a heroin addicts’ den. Singing in a cracked and gravelly slur, Malone sounds wrapped in a narcotized haze, where the pain of life recedes, lingering in view, but no longer mattering. It’s an exceptionally moving, tender and poetic account of the pain-and-escape cycle that underlies drug abuse.

“Our songs are songs of life--of experience,” Malone said of the on-the-edge, fatalistic cast of much of the album. “You push (life) to the hilt sometimes. But you can live in an extreme fashion and not ruin yourself in the process--by taking a step back and taking it from an observer’s perspective.”

Malone pleads not guilty to romanticizing the live-fast/die-young ethos on numbers like “Ride the 3rd Rail,” which echoes the old “Born to Be Wild” ethos of that early biker band, Steppenwolf,

“It’s (saying) no more than ‘get out of life what you can.’ A lot of it is tongue in cheek,” he said. “I’m a sensitive guy,” the blond singer added, grinning and slipping into the smooth, concerned tone of a radio call-in show’s advice-dispensing psychologist.

Malone said that over the past year-and-a-half he has given up a hellbent, hard-drinking lifestyle not too far from what some of Lost Souls’ songs chronicle. He and Atchison acknowledged that extreme habits, along with Malone’s motorcycle accident, had slowed the band’s progress until about a year ago.

“Mike and I used to be very drunk and very disorderly,” Atchison said, recalling some shows a few years ago that ended chaotically. “But now we’re very into getting it together.”

Malone and Atchison, both 31, spent most of their childhood and teen years in northern California before coming to Orange County in their late teens. They met 10 years ago while taking courses at Saddleback College and immediately began playing together as a vibes-and-guitar duo.

Malone, whose first instrument was the drums, turned to vibes after becoming frustrated with his progress on piano.

“If you don’t have that ingrained dexterity (on piano), it doesn’t happen,” he said. “I started pounding away on it. I figured, ‘If I could just hit this thing with a stick’--and then it just popped into my head. I picked up (the vibes) and just started thrashing away. It seemed like a natural progression to work it into the rock thing.”

Malone played drums in the San Clemente band Din during the early ‘80s. Atchison hooked on as a roadie with jazz-blues fiddler Papa John Creach, and occasionally played with Creach’s band. Even when they weren’t playing music together, the two maintained a close friendship founded on a mutual interest in motorcycles. Eventually they formed Lost Souls as an intersection of Atchison’s metal interests and Malone’s love of traditional blues (a photo of Muddy Waters occupies a prominent spot in his tiny bedroom adjoining the band’s studio).

“We like it both ways,” Malone said. “We want it hard and fast, but keeping the soulfulness, the depth and mystery of the blues. Everything we do stems from that.”

Lost Souls recorded “Howlin’ at the Moon” over the past year, with Atchison playing the guitars, Malone on lead vocals, harmonica and vibes, and Wade Wilkinson on bass. The performing lineup solidified over the past year also includes drummer Roger Beall and rhythm guitarist Chris Hardaway.

While most Southern California hard rockers are obsessed with landing a major label recording deal, Lost Souls was content to proceed on its own. Band members supported themselves with a variety of day jobs (Atchison is a chef, Malone does masonry work) as they completed the album in their own 24-track studio.

“We chose this route for the complete autonomy it affords us,” Malone said. “We were always too punk for the metalheads, too metal for the punks and too bluesy for the both of ‘em. We never had a niche.” And under a record company’s eye they might have been forced into a more limited category that would make the music more easily marketable.

With the album finished, Lost Souls is about to begin branching out, using the cassette and CD release as a calling card to approach record companies and radio stations. Through music business contacts, the band also is lining up a tour of Canada--its first shows outside Southern California.

“We’re going to push the hell out of this (album) for the next six months,” Malone said. “If someone picks it up, great. If not, we’ll do another one on our own.”

Lost Souls plays Saturday night at 9 at the Doheny Saloon, 34125 Doheny Park Road, Capistrano Beach. Information: (714) 496-9033. Lost Souls is also scheduled to play at Bogart’s in Long Beach on July 8. Information: (213) 594-8975.