Poi Dog Adds Bite to Its Bark : The Band Puts Muscle Into New EP, Dipping Into Rap and Hard Funk

While Poi Dog Pondering’s list of musical influences is as long and as varied as that of any American rock band, it would be safe to assume that Olivia Newton-John isn’t on it.

Even so, the new watchword around the eight-member band from Austin, Tex., seems to be Olivia’s old line: “Let’s get physical.”

Where Poi Dog’s first two albums were dominated by the lilt and shimmer of folk instruments and breezy, African rhythms, its new five-track EP release, “Jack Ass Ginger,” shows that the band can deliver a funky kick.

The title track is churning, tumultuous, flat-out funk; another song, “Take Care of Your Thing,” finds this erstwhile band of street-corner acoustic buskers intersecting with another pop form that began with informal curbside workouts: rap music.

Not to be pegged down, Poi Dog, which plays tonight at Bogart’s in Long Beach, has also included an easygoing reggae love song by Toots Hibbert and a campy Hawaiian Christmas song overlain with New Orleans parade-band tootling. But speaking over the phone Thursday from a tour stop at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, Poi Dog’s singer and main songwriter, Frank Orrall, said the band’s new approach definitely puts more emphasis on muscle.

“The main thing it comes down to is physicality,” said Orrall, a rapid, animated talker. “The band feels it is more into its sound now, which is a real electric sound. It’s physically engaging.”

Poi dog is a slang expression for mutt in Hawaii, where Orrall, now 31, and two other members--guitarist Ted Cho and conga player John Nelson--started out. Now, with its dip into rap and hard funk, Poi Dog Pondering has grown a few more spots on an already motley hide. Its past repertoire has touched on Hawaiian and African music, Celtic-accented folk, sweet fiddle music, and Jonathan Richman-style pop sung from a viewpoint of gentle wonderment. The band also came up with one convincing electric rocker, “Fruitless.” It has employed such atypical instruments as the fluegelhorn and tin whistle.

“There’s so many beautiful instruments to get sounds off of. We’ll build a song around one because it’s so inspiring,” Orrall said.

When Orrall (pronounced “oral”) and eight others first left Hawaii for the mainland in 1986, they probably didn’t think they would one day find inspiration in what is essentially music without instruments--a hip-hop disc jockey scratching out rhythms on a turntable.

Those days were given to a romantic, Woody Guthrie-influenced vision of a band that could travel the land, making a communal living by playing on sidewalks for passersby who would stop, listen and toss coin or note in the band’s guitar-case coffer.

“What we were after was really a road adventure,” Orrall said. “We slept outside half the time and on people’s floors the other half, and survived on what the guitar case had brought us. We lived totally communally. No one could have more money than another person. I had no idea what was going to happen next. You had to throw yourself into it with complete devotion.”

But not everyone finds a busker’s lifestyle worthy of devotion. The Poi Dog contingent dwindled, Orrall said, with Cho and Nelson dropping in and out of the band in its busker days. But Poi Dog did begin to establish some firmer connections as it drifted along. In Los Angeles, the band established contact with the small Texas Hotel label, which put out its first two EP releases. And in Austin, Orrall and his friends found a rich and relaxed music scene that beckoned after the band’s initial roving “adventure” had run its course. The Texas Hotel releases and touring with such alternative-rock favorites as Camper Van Beethoven, Throwing Muses, Robyn Hitchcock and They Might Be Giants led to the band’s current major-label deal with Columbia Records.

Poi Dog’s wandering, hand-to-mouth beginnings reflect what Orrall says is an openness to extemporizing and pursuing new directions on a whim.

“We’ve always believed in serendipity,” he said.

That’s how the rap element came into play. Orrall said he went to a dance at the University of Texas in Austin last year and found “this great hip-hop scene going on, everyone just fully physically involved, shaking, dancing.” That record spinner, Anton (D.J. Cassanova) Irons, wound up scratching rhythms on “Take Care of Your Thing” from the new EP, and on some tracks from a new full-length album, “Volo Volo,” that Poi Dog will release in February.

Orrall said that other new influences have led to changes in his approach as a lyricist.

On Poi Dog’s first two albums, “Poi Dog Pondering” (1989) and “Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea” (1990), the songs were like small homilies, warm, optimistic and direct. Orrall would extol the virtues of small pleasures like taking walks, or meditate on the importance of accepting death, without fear, as part of a larger cycle of life.

“I was really directing those songs at me. They came out of writing introspectively,” rather than trying to preach values, he said. “They’re put out there, and people can agree or not. Some people, I feel, have really mistaken the direction of the songs and slagged us off as too optimistic.”

Orrall said he feels his songs took “full cognizance of strife” but focused on “these perfect moments (that) are worth so much, I want to stay alive for them.”

The prevailing happy tone, he said, reflected the band’s West African and Jamaican influences.

“That (Third World) music is giving people strength under strife,” Orrall said. “There’s no time to wallow in melancholy like Bauhaus,” the gloomy British rock band. “Living in England might afford that luxury, but other cultures can’t.” In other words, where the everyday circumstances of life are palpably hard, people need to find in music a way to raise spirits.

“I want to articulate that better,” Orrall said. “I want people to understand me.”

Paradoxically, Orrall says, his new lyrical style can make it harder for him to understand himself. The song “Jack Ass Ginger” points toward a more free-form style in which the sound of words can take precedence over their sense. For example, Orrall said, the phrase “Jack Ass Ginger” is a place name, a spot in the Hawaiian rain forest where people take rides down a mudslide. It has nothing to do with the meaning of the song, which he says is a look at the double-edged, potentially dangerous nature of creativity, sparked mainly by “Vincent and Theo,” a film account of Vincent Van Gogh’s life.

Orrall said that listening to recently issued recordings of Jack Kerouac reading from his prose works was one factor in his changed writing style; hearing a live reading from James Joyce’s literary dreamscape, “Finnegans Wake,” was another. He also cites the rushing rhymes of Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” as an influence that taught him to pay closer attention to what he calls “the crisp click of consonants and the oblong bulge of vowels.” (Orrall really must be paying attention if such phrases are cropping up in his conversation.)

As a rule, a band like the new Poi Dog, with a toughened, electric, danceable sound, is in a better position to sell bundles of records than one playing predominantly acoustic music. But Orrall said the band’s changes aren’t based on commercial calculus.

“It’s not in the equation at all for us. We completely follow our whims. We were collecting a following as an acoustic band. I don’t know how (those) people are going to make the transition with us, but I’m not concerned. I’m just moving on, because other musics are exciting me.”

Poi Dog Pondering , Giant Sand and the Pagan Babies play tonight at 9:30 at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $12. Information: (310) 594-8975.