POP MUSIC SPECIAL : Was (Not Was) Is? (Not Is?)

Don and David Was--the masterminds behind the avant-pop/funk group Was (Not Was)--were in the studio finishing up their production work on the new Bob Dylan album, “Under the Red Sky,” when an old friend of Dylan’s, poet Allen Ginsberg, dropped by. It made a strange meeting of the minds just a little bit stranger, but seemed somehow appropriate.

“We were gonna finish mixing the album with the convocation of Rabbi Ginsberg,” David Was remembers. “It was a great moment. It was like three generations of Jewish wiseguys in the room.”

A little too smart--or smart-alecky--for their own good, some would say of the Was brothers (who aren’t really related). On their own deliciously diabolical, soulful records--the most recent being “Are You Okay?”--Don and David have mixed black comedy with black music, intellectual Jewish Angst with visceral dance beats, the urban with the urbane.

Their refusal to “dumb it down” has cost them at times. Viewed as too schizophrenic, Was (Not Was) was unceremoniously dropped by its first two labels, Island and Geffen, after one record for each.

After signing with Chrysalis in 1988, the group surprised skeptics by producing two left-field Top 10 hits (“Walk the Dinosaur” and “Spy in the House of Love”) off its third album. Yet Was (Not Was) continues to confound pop stations, pundits and product managers alike. Now “Are You Okay?” is off to a slow start on the charts, despite reviews that have been much more than OK.

Don Was admits that by operating on so many different levels, between the inherent incongruities of youth-conscious rhythms and sophisticated themes, the band risks alienating all camps at once.

“If I try to take a step back and worry about it, I’ll think that, well, it’s got this dance texture on it so kids are gonna listen to it, but they’re gonna see that we’re talking about different, more grown-up stuff than Bobby Brown is, so in the end they’ll be put off,” he says.

“And then the worry is that adults will hear all this beat stuff and won’t be able to differentiate between us and ‘Yo! MTV Raps,’ and we’re gonna put off everybody .”

If the album ultimately does a belly-flop into the bargain bins occupied by some of its wiseguy predecessors, Don Was won’t have to worry about keeping up the house payments. He’s suddenly become a hot record producer.

He steered Bonnie Raitt--who was considered a has-been--back into artistic and commercial glory, producing her Grammy-winning “Nick of Time” album. The B-52’s exploded back into the Top 10 with his production of the single “Love Shack.”

Besides the Dylan co-production with partner David, Don Was also has recordings either in the stores or in the works with Paula Abdul, Elton John, Bob Seger, the Knack, Michael McDonald, Dion, Leonard Cohen, Ozzy Osbourne, Voice of the Beehive, David Crosby and Iggy Pop. (See adjoining story, Page 51.)

In other words, just about everyone in pop music but Bobby Brown, who might want to add his name to Was’ long waiting list now before it’s entirely too late.

David Was is really David Weiss--the blond, goateed lyricist of the duo, prone to quoting obscure philosophical and scientific texts and puns in nearly equal measure; former jazz critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and golf editor for City Sports, aspiring screenwriter, student of classical Greek, reed and keyboard player and crazed monologuist.

He’s the one who does the spoken-word raps like “Dad I’m in Jail,” “Earth to Doris” and the new single “I Feel Better Than James Brown,” usually in a sarcastic, tortured voice that sounds like a Beat Generation Bob Hope on acid.

Don Was is in fact Don Fagenson--the dark-haired, shades-wearing composer and bassist, the quietly confident studio whiz who reins in some of his partner’s outermost instincts with tight, sharp melodies, a student of every sort of pop craftsmanship.

These two have been collaborating ever since they met nearly three decades ago as junior high kids in Detroit, sharing a love while growing up of Dylan, the Mothers of Invention, John Coltrane and musical bourgeoisie-bashing in general.

Says David, “I’d like to think that it’s where Don and I meet . . . somewhere in the middle . . . that his more savvy instincts about what works meet my instincts of throwing in some element that shouldn’t be there, and that our happy medium is where his smarts and my idiocy create a spark.

“Although I’ve always held close my role as fly in the ointment, and realized that without Don being the ointment we’d have nothing to sell whatsoever, the fact is, if you unleash this guy, he is the ultimate pop ironist. He’ll join two styles together faster than Wolfgang Puck can put raw chicken on a pizza.”

So though David publicly accused Don recently of having production instincts that are “embarrassingly commercial,” he does approve of his partner’s utilitarian indulgence in passing fads--all the way down to the current album’s “new jack swing” rhythms, which are popularly associated with, yes, Bobby Brown.

“I borrow from a more highbrow culture T.S. Eliot’s quote about how it’s better to steal than to imitate,” David says, “which I think in part was meant to explain why he ripped off passages from Homer and put them into ‘The Wasteland.’ And in a way I believe that if someone has said something well, it doesn’t always pay to change it.

“And pop music being as disposable as it is, I believe you’re basically spitting in the wind of posterity and eternity anyway. You’ve got to hold yourself out to the moment. The moment is your mistress.

“And if that means hewing to a certain beat, a beat that happens to be on the radio all the time, I tell you the truth, I’m married to the greatest groove thief in the Western world.”

Was (Not Was)’s origins, in fact, were with Don’s excursions as an urban anthropologist into the dance clubs of Detroit, going out with a blaster tape recorder “to bag a couple of new grooves like some kind of disco Alan Lomax,” says David.

The rhythms he’d come back with were both fresh and floor-tested. Pop on a bass line, a paranoid lyric and a horn section using Middle Eastern modality--and perhaps, in those pre-sampling days, a tape of, say, Reagan’s State of the Union Address--and you had seminal Was (Not Was).

“In the beginning we were radical dance music-makers because we were stealing fresh stuff and putting our own icing on it--which I guess is the same crime you could accuse the Rolling Stones of, or Elvis. Maybe a little more perversely; I mean, we were turning rabbits into monsters.”

Was (Not Was) has employed such guest vocalists as Ozzy Osbourne, Mel Torme, Leonard Cohen and Frank Sinatra Jr. to sing those monstrous lyrics, but the main mouthpieces have always been Sir Harry Bowens (formerly of the O’Jays) and Sweet Pea Atkinson--genuine vintage Detroit R&B; singers giving voice to the sorts of sentiments you’re not likely to ever hear on black radio, or any kind of radio.

If the lyrics often have a certain irony to begin with, the honest intensity and purity with which they’re delivered by the two lead singers only heighten it.

“There are times I begin to write a song and know it’s so far-fetched that when it’s brought back down to Earth and delivered earnestly, that’s when it’ll acquire its charge,” David says.

“When I wrote ‘I Blew Up the United States,’ I knew you could let the bile drip and the spittle spew and just be another white punk screaming without a voice and sounding disturbing. But if you wrote a supple groove and put one of these soul men on it, it would sound like the perfect thing to do with a Sunday afternoon is go blow up the nation.”

Don is a major contributor to the irony as well, often applying the most cheerful melodies to the saddest lyrics. Even David was surprised when he turned in the words to “Maria Navarro”--based on a news story about an East L.A. woman murdered by her husband after failing to persuade a 911 operator to dispatch a patrol car--expecting a sorrowful ballad to come out of it.

Later he was startled to find that Don had applied a definitive hip-hop beat to it, and David felt that dancing to someone else’s tragedy might be out of even his off-center sphere of reference.

The sense of subversiveness inherent in sneaking honest political or complex emotional nuggets into a slick, frothy pop-soul song isn’t always intentional.

“It’s not so much like a deliberate Trojan horse thing,” Don claims. “I like to go to clubs, I like dance music. It’s just another part of our vocabulary. The band was always built on that.”

And some songs are just legitimately silly.

Says David, “With an hour’s worth of music on a CD, you can put a scalpel inside your head and come up with a cross-section of a day’s consciousness, like Joyce did in ‘Ulysses.’

“And part of you is just some heathen meat-eater concerned about your own survival, and another part of you is a fantasist, and another part of you is a bleeding-heart liberal responding to Maria Navarro, and another part of you is casting a jaundiced eye on modern romance. It’s all part of the makeup of a normal day.”

At least when that was the day that Was.

A normal day now is a day in which Don Was and David Was don’t see each other. Don’s production jobs are stacked up more than La Guardia in a blizzard, which gives David time to concentrate on the reason he first moved out to Los Angeles from Detroit: the film business.

He’s now developing a fact-based script for a major studio that he describes as “Ozzy Osbourne meets Francois Truffaut--a coming of age heavy-metal picture.” He will also act in and contribute music to a jazz-oriented movie that director Robert Altman will begin soon. (Both Wases appeared in “The Freshman,” backing up Bert Parks on a unique interpretation of Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.”)

And Chrysalis has given him the go-ahead to make a solo album that will presumably take off from some of Was (Not Was)’s odder moments and go even deeper into space. His ultimate aspiration, he says with tongue only partially in cheek, is to fill the gaping niche now available for an American Luis Bunuel.

“Don has found his bigger canvas, and in a way, the canvas he always wanted to be painting on--just being a record-maker,” David says. “It’s a bit of fairy tale, and a bit of very inspiring go-get-’em American spirit. He put a football under one arm and a machine-gun under the other and just ran for the goal posts.

“And I definitely need my own canvas too,” adds David, whose ultimate hope is to add a great American play to his resume. “Was (Not Was) is a great thing to have, but I can’t pretend it’s all I want to do. I think if you have any pretensions about being a writer--which in the end might be all I have--that writing pop songs is like driving bump-’em cars at the carnival, compared to going out on the Indianapolis raceway.

“Writing is a man’s work, no sexism intended. I think a boy can write a pop song. Not that men haven’t written great ones, but I can’t see myself doing this with a cane in one hand and bifocals in the other. I need to test my mettle a little more than that.”