Soul Searching : Momma Stud Doesn’t Shy Away From Asking the Big Questions

More than 20 years ago, a Temptations song warned that events spinning out of control had turned the world into a ball of confusion.

Now comes Momma Stud to second that emotion.

The young Los Angeles band, which plays tonight at Bogart’s and Sept. 13 at the Coach House, recently released a debut album, “Cockadoodledo,” that applies the emphatic expressiveness of vintage soul to the modern conundrum of not knowing where the world is headed or how to make sense of it.

The result is an album that reaches no conclusions but makes an impressive show of being passionately mixed up.

“I think we’re just a very confused band,” Krandal Crews, Momma Stud’s lead guitarist and main songwriter, said Tuesday during an interview at the Beverly Hills office of Momma Stud’s label, Virgin Records. Crews, a tall, quiet-spoken man with the spiked beginnings of a full-blown Vernon Reid Gorgon hairdo, was trying to explain an album in which the word confusion turns up in each of the first three songs. And that’s just the start. Momma Stud spends the rest of the record asking, probing and praying for some fundamental understanding of the meaning of life, only to come up empty.

If Momma Stud can’t provide the answers, Crews figures there is an ample population out there that can identify with a band that’s thrashing about asking big, philosophic questions.

“We’re just trying to find people as confused as we are,” he said.

There was a hint of wry self-deprecation in Crews’ confession that this is “just a very confused band.” But as a group, the members of Momma Stud seem a serious bunch. Drummer Gabriel Rowland, with his tattoos and his mane of dark hair, is the only member whose instinct is to lead with a quip. Besides Crews, 25, and Rowland, 24, Momma Stud consists of bassist Jimmie Snider, 23, who co-founded the band with Crews in 1987, keyboards player Jason Yates, 21, and lead singer Ernest Carter, 22. With his background as a singer in his church’s choir, Carter has the preferred resume for a soul singer.

Momma Stud takes an expansive approach to soul. Songs such as “Stormy” and “Revised Edition” hew closely to the gritty Memphis-soul style of Otis Redding. Elsewhere, the band blends psychedelic guitars and keyboards into the mix, like Sly and the Family Stone. The concluding, acoustic ballad, “Yellow, Purple, Green (I Ain’t Got Nothing),” leans toward folk as well as soul influences in a way that recalls vintage Rod Stewart. There also are echoes of more recent performers who reach back for ‘60s soul and rock influences: Prince and Terence Trent D’Arby.

Band members say that they have been tagged as “retro” in some quarters for wearing ‘60s influences so openly. Carter shrugs off that criticism.

“Let people say what they want to say. We’ll do what we want to do. I pretty much laugh at it.”

To Snider, soul music by definition is something that can’t jibe with a calculatedly “retro” outlook.

“It’s listening with your heart rather than your head,” he said. “It comes from within. It’s not a learned thing. I couldn’t learn to play soul music. I’m playing what will feel right.”

“What (Momma Stud’s influences) were talking about happened 20 years ago,” Crews said. “That’s their book. We’re creating our own book now.”

One problem that all emerging bands with classic influences face today is that their new book is on the same shelf as lavishly packaged CD reissues of older, far more famous ones. Momma Stud is competing for the attention of fans who might want to replace their old soul LPs with new CDs. The same fans also might bust their album budgets on an expensive item such as the recently issued James Brown retrospective set or Rhino Records’ multiple-disc “Soul Hits of the ‘70s” series, leaving little disposable cash to risk on a newcomer.

It was Yates’ turn to shrug. If fans get the old stuff first, “they’ll buy ours next time.”

Momma Stud began when Crews and Snider outgrew the funk-punk music they were playing in their first band together, Bad Kitchen.

“Back then, (funk-punk) was all we could play,” Crews said. “I always listened to (soul), but I just couldn’t play what I liked. It was learning how to write and put the harmonies together” that eventually enabled him to take a more sophisticated soul approach.

Snider said the crowded punk-funk field, typified by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, also spurred the change.

“There were so many bands in Los Angeles out playing that same kind of music,” he said. “We said, ‘Why are we even bothering?’ ”

The bassist and guitarist split with their old band mates and advertised for a drummer, singer and keyboards player. They came up with a lineup that, with two blacks, two European-Americans and a Latino, comes close to reflecting Southern California’s full range of ethnic diversity. But that, say the members, was never the point.

“We went for personality rather than skin color,” Snider said. “We wanted a crazy drummer, and we got Gabby (Rowland),” the band’s Latino member.

The band took a friend’s suggestion that Momma Stud would be a better name than the one it initially had in mind, Momma Cadillac, then began its apprenticeship on the Los Angeles club scene.

Having abandoned funk merged with punk, Momma Stud also refused to incorporate the alloy of funk and metal that had become popular in the hands of bands like Living Colour and Fishbone (Crews said he went to high school with the two Fisher brothers who make up Fishbone’s rhythm section). Nor did Momma Stud have any interest in an ever-more-common influence: hip-hop.

“I don’t rap,” Carter said flatly.

Without metal or rap in the mix, the band managed to get signed by Virgin Records, which suggested Bernie Worrell as co-producer. Besides producing, the former Parliament-Funkadelic and Talking Heads member lends his keyboards touch to two tracks on the album, “Stormy” and “Tossin’ and Turnin.’ ”

Later this month, Momma Stud, joined by two female backup singers, will tour outside California for the first time, concentrating on cultivating college audiences. If the band has visions of music as a ticket to the good life, it probably won’t find it very soon. For now, it only has a ticket to board a cramped touring van.

Of course, the good life can arrive sooner if you’re willing to bend the usual definition. Snider already has. “The only good life is on stage, so yeah, (being in Momma Stud) is a ticket to the good life.”

Momma Stud and Family Affair play tonight at 9:30 at Bogart’s in the Marina Pacifica mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $8. Information: (213) 594-8975. Momma Stud, the Ziggins and Loveless play Sept. 13 at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $5. Information: (714) 496-8930.

BLUEGRASS BENEFIT: Orange County bluegrass, swing and Celtic bands will stage a benefit Saturday night for a San Francisco bluegrass musician who was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage while playing a concert in June at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments in Laguna Niguel.

Elizabeth Weil, bassist in the Good Old Persons, remains unable to speak and is paralyzed on the right side of her body, said Margie Mirken, the Shade Tree’s co-owner. She is 39 years old and has two children.

The Shade Tree and Orange County bluegrass fiddler Paul Shelasky are organizing the benefit, which takes place Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Anaheim Cultural Arts Center, 931 N. Harbor Blvd. Performing will be two Disneyland groups, Thunder Mountain Boys and Rhythm Brothers, Blackthorn, and the Shelasky-Wiedenkeller Band, plus guest artists. Tickets: $15. Information: (714) 364-5270.