THROWING MUSES aren’t BLOWING FUSES : A Band Known for Raw, Harrowing Musical Psychodramas Overcomes Personal, Professional Problems

If Kristin Hersh were an aspiring media star, the events of the past two years would give her an ample supply of tell-all fodder for the gossip mill. A new Cher- or Madonna-in-the-making could get a lot of mileage out of a tale such as Hersh’s--a story of hardship and loss, with just enough of an upbeat note at the end to make it suitable for mass retailing.

But Hersh is the main singer and songwriter with Throwing Muses, an adventurous, defiantly art-for-art’s-sake alternative rock band from Newport, R.I. Neither her music, nor her approach to publicly discussing her personal life, is calculated for mass retailing.

In a phone interview from a tour stop in Colorado, Hersh, 24, briefly sketched the outline of recent history--the band’s and her own.

Her troubles started in the summer of 1989 when she and Andrew Going, the father of her young son, broke up. An ensuing court battle over their boy, Dylan, ended in a joint custody agreement. Primary “possession” of the child, now nearly 5, was awarded to the father, partly because of the travel demands of Hersh’s career as a rock musician.

Then came a second court fight, this one an ongoing financial wrangle between Throwing Muses and its former manager. Hersh and her two longtime band mates, singer-guitarist Tanya Donelly and drummer David Narcizo, say that the business split with Ken Goes (who also manages the Pixies) came as an emotional shock and an economic blow.

The combination of Hersh’s personal troubles and the band’s business problems threatened to break up the critically acclaimed Muses. “There was so much going on at the time,” Hersh said. “It was probably the worst that ever happened to me. I didn’t remember why I was in the band.” Judging from the raw, harrowing psychodramas that have been a Throwing Muses staple ever since the band’s brilliant 1986 debut album, Hersh’s worst could have been rough indeed.

But Throwing Muses, whose members are old school friends, hung together and recorded a strong and--for these confirmed undergrounders--surprisingly accessible new album, “The Real Ramona.”

“The project itself took me out (of personal problems) in a good way,” Hersh said softly. “Hard work is good for it--hard work with meaning behind it.” Lately, her personal life also has taken a turn for the better: In December, she married Throwing Muses’ new co-manager, Billy O’Connell, and a baby is due in August. The visibly pregnant mom plans to tour until a month before the birth, then to take the infant on the road with her for another round of shows in September.

Of the troubles that arose during the past two years, Hersh said “I can’t let these things happen to me again,” the wan, tired tone in her voice perhaps reflecting the exigencies of being on the road while six months’ pregnant. “I’ve learned a lot in some hard ways. But I don’t feel they’ve brought me down. I feel I’m beyond them now.”

Donelly, also 24, figures that the old friendships within Throwing Muses helped keep the band together during a difficult year in which, she says, the group’s survival was a “daily” issue.

“Everyone in the band felt kind of raw,” she said in a separate phone interview. “You forget why you’re doing it. All you know is you’re so hurt all the time. (Breaking up) was talked about. It would’ve been a lot easier to bury this”--if not for the ties between band members. “Plus, we don’t know how to do anything else.”

Donelly and Hersh have been friends since they were 8 years old. They grew up in Newport, R.I., an oceanside showpiece for old Yankee money. The two future Muses were not heirs to any old money, though: Hersh’s father teaches philosophy at a small college, and Donelly’s dad is a plumber. At 14, Hersh and Donelly began writing songs together and started an all-girl band.

Narcizo, another schoolmate, was one of the nascent Muses’ biggest fans, then became their drummer. The three scrubbed-looking white teen-agers recruited Leslie Langston, a transplanted black Californian with dread-locked hair, to play bass (Langston left the group in 1989, and the Muses have replaced her with Fred Abong, another Newporter who had become a fan and friend of the band).

Throwing Muses got its first exposure on the independent British label, 4AD. A 1986 debut album, “Throwing Muses,” sent England’s rock press into a tizzy of superlatives, with Melody Maker pronouncing it “the finest debut album of the ‘80s and a very beautiful, contorted mystery.”

While the album and a subsequent 1987 EP, “Chains Changed,” have not been released in the United States, they helped Throwing Muses win a U.S. deal with Sire/Warner Bros. records. The band’s American releases include a 1987 EP, “The Fat Skier,” and three albums, “House Tornado” (1988), “Hunkpapa” (1989) and this year’s “The Real Ramona.”

Early on, Throwing Muses was a jigsaw puzzle of a band that would throw enticing rock riffs and bits of catchy pop melody into a song’s frame, then distort the picture. Rhythms would circle obsessively, guitars and drums ticking together like time bombs. Suddenly, a song would turn a sharp corner with jagged beats and jarring time switches. Hersh and Donelly could sound like the demure sweethearts of some folk-pop coffeehouse one moment, then turn without warning into a couple of frightful, deranged crones ranting in the street.

With “Hunkpapa,” and even more so on “The Real Ramona,” the band moved toward song structures that are simpler, more direct. But the lyrical approach has not changed: Hersh’s songs, and Donelly’s less frequent contributions, engulf a listener in an often-troubled psyche, throwing a veil of symbols and enigmatic imagery over the events that might have spurred those inner emotions. Hersh deals in fragmentary word pictures that evoke feelings; narrative clues about the actual happenings involved are scant.

True confessions may be the currency of today’s truth-or-dare media stardom, but Hersh says she would rather keep hers out of circulation when it comes to writing songs, and that she avoids writing in a way that would draw attention to the events in her own life.

It’s possible to read some of the Muses’ recent tough sledding into “The Real Ramona.” A sad and lovely lullaby is titled “Dylan,” after Hersh’s son, but it is a piece without lyrics. There also is a deep dejection in songs such as “Graffiti,” which beats to a melancholy, gentle thrum reminiscent of Psychedelic Furs’ quieter hits.

“I tried to walk on this wall, it fell right under my feet,” Hersh sings in a plaintive, wearied voice. “Now I only lean, only lean on the wall.”

The album journeys to the edge of madness on “Hook in Her Head” and “Ellen West,” but it also admits, in “Golden Thing,” a sudden bolt of exuberance that arrives on a Bo Diddley beat. “Honeychain,” one of two Donelly songs on the album, oscillates between a pleasantly hazy vision of sweet commingling (“We’re all honey, drippin’ through the honey chain”) and scary images of someone locked in a catatonic trance.

“Two Step,” the slogging, elegiac march that ends the album, seems to be a summation, it sparse, inscrutable lyrics and graceful melody evoking sadnesses that cannot be transcended, only met with dogged dignity. A harmonically rearranged but otherwise straightforward version of “Amazing Grace,” that relic for all weary souls, turns up as a bonus track on the CD-single version of “Counting Backwards.”

Hersh draws a sharp distinction between songs that are personal and the confessional or autobiographical songwriting she wants to avoid.

“The songs deal with personal politics that are very intimate,” she said. “But they seem to be more far-reaching than my life. I don’t think anyone should care what happens to me. That’s insignificant. If I get stuck on my life and my days and my thoughts, I couldn’t expect anyone to care. Hopefully, I’m editing out the psychodrivel that’s my own.”

What’s left, Hersh said, should speak more universally. “It’s the difference between telling a dream to someone and fascinating them, and telling them a dream and boring them to tears.”

In fact, Hersh said, she tries to write songs that, like dreams, arrive unbidden. It’s an idealistic approach that scorns the idea of starting with an intended topic and trying by craft and calculation to raise a song around it.

Instead, she counts on inspiration. Hersh says the basic body of a song comes to her all at once, words and chords together--whatever the muses throw her way. She speaks of her songs in somewhat mystical, abstract terms, as things that come from somewhere beyond her, and that don’t really belong to her.

Most veteran songwriters reach a point where craft has to take over from inspiration, because one can’t always count on inspiration to call. Hersh says her own muse has been persistent, but not necessarily kind.

“So far, (inspiration) has come too much. It’s turned into a pain in the ass, how often it does come. It was kind of violent. I couldn’t tell if it was trying to mess with my life.”

Much of the time, Hersh explained, her creative drive has threatened to overwhelm her personal life, driving her to all-night sessions with her guitar. “I was definitely obsessed with songs, because they seemed so huge and I seemed to get smaller in relation to them. I just wasn’t there a lot of the time. The songs were there instead. I thought maybe in order to tell the truth, you have to give up your life.”

Hersh said this compulsion became a “a sickness: It didn’t matter how many songs I wrote, I felt crazy because of it. It was like living in two different worlds at once.”

That “sickness,” she said, has healed “only in the past year or so. I had to have enough self-respect, and (the help of) Billy, actually, to learn that anyone’s life is as important as those symbols and stories that aren’t actually happening in the (physical) world.”

Throwing Muses has coexisted uneasily with music’s business world, where it is more important to be a medium for cash flow than a medium for the muse.

For the “Hunkpapa” album, Hersh said, she set out to write a song that might land the Muses a hit.

“I started thinking, ‘If I give Warner Bros. something they want, they’ll be able to sell everything else, and I’ll be able to do my job”’--namely, serving the muse rather than the marketplace. Hersh said she wrote with bigger sales in mind “in the way that you want your children to do very well and be big successes.

“Now I think I’ll love my kids whether they have good jobs or not. (Pushing for commercial success) can be frustrating to the point of altering the (creative) process that you work so hard to learn. Even if we sold a million albums, it’s not worth it. That isn’t more important than doing something I can respect us for.”

The result of Hersh’s effort to generate a hit was “Dizzy,” a catchy, fetchingly optimistic song about a young American Indian woman who follows her romantic impulses and leaves her ancestral home, vowing at the same time to hold onto old traditions. It’s one of the few Muses songs with a traceable story line and, Hersh said, one of the few she has deliberately crafted rather than waiting for inspiration. Her verdict: “I hate that song. We got tired of it fast.”

Touring as an opening act for R.E.M. and New Order after the release of “Hunkpapa” didn’t help Throwing Muses’ sales performance substantially. But drummer Narcizo said he is encouraged by the prospects of “The Real Ramona.”

The first single, “Counting Backwards,” was not the most obvious single from the album, Narcizo noted, but it was still “the biggest radio single we’ve ever had,” rising to No. 11 on the Billboard alternative and college radio chart.

He said the band held Donelly’s poppy, Phil Spector-ish “Not Too Soon” in reserve, feeling that “Counting Backwards,” a typically oblique Hersh composition, was more representative of the album as a whole.

“To have that kind of success with something that we all knew wasn’t the radio song, we’re all happy about that,” Narcizo said. The plan, he continued, calls for the promotional push to focus next on the more easily salable “Not Too Soon.” The band senses that the push it needs will be there, even though Throwing Muses is not an easy act to sell.

“Unless they’re lying, apparently (the record company’s promotional staff) really likes us now more than ever,” Narcizo said. “There are a lot of people we’ve been able to see working really hard for the band and putting a big effort in. I think our relationship with them is probably the best it’s ever been.”

For Donelly, the problems Throwing Muses went through over the past two years introduced a lingering sense of uncertainty about the band’s future. “It doesn’t feel fragile, but there is always that (uncertainty), because we had the taste of turmoil.” Donelly’s own plans call for relocating to London after the Muses’ current tour, and starting work on a second album by the Breeders, an all-female band that also includes Kim Deal of the Pixies.

“I would be restless if I didn’t have another outlet,” she said, adding that Hersh’s role as the Muses’ dominant singer and songwriter hasn’t been a source of contention.

“The songs on (“The Real Ramona”) are the perfect songs to have on this record, and that’s more important than who gets what,” Donelly said. “In the past, I definitely have not been as prolific as she. She’ll bring in 17 songs, and I’ll bring in 4.” On the Breeders’ debut album, “Pod,” Donelly was even more in the background than she is with Throwing Muses. But she said the plan calls for her to switch roles with Deal and to assume the spotlight on the second album.

Hersh said that an uncertain future is nothing new for Throwing Muses: “It’s always been unsettled. We’ve always made the choice to continue every time. I think we’ll know when we’re done.”

Who: Throwing Muses.

When: Sunday, May 26 at 8 p.m.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. The band also plays Saturday, at Bogart’s, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach, with Too Many Joes.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Center.

Wherewithal: $16.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.