Timbuk3 Goes Back to the ‘Future’ : Pat and Barbara K MacDonald Return With More Wry Musings on the American Mood

“The McLaughlin Group” is a televised set-to in which liberal and conservative pundits scream at each other like kids playing sandlot baseball without an ump, each side claiming special insight and foresight concerning the sociopolitical Zeitgeist .

For rock music fans seeking lively opinion about the spirit of our times, it might make more sense to tune in the MacDonald Group, better known as Timbuk3. Over the course of Timbuk3’s four albums, Pat and Barbara K MacDonald have established a pretty good track record of capturing the unfolding mood of the country with musical commentaries from a leftish perspective. They’re back in the Southland for shows tonight at Bogart’s in Long Beach and Friday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

Timbuk3’s 1986 debut album, “Greetings From Timbuk3,” featured “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades,” a satiric comment on Reaganism in full bloom. The song poked fun at a smug college kid crowing over the prospect of living off the fat of the arms buildup with a job designing nukes at $50,000 a year to start. The fact that some listeners heard only the bubbling enthusiasm on the surface, and not the mockery underlying it, may have had something to do with the song hitting the Top 20.

By 1989, the bills were coming due for a decade’s orth of massive military spending and profligate banking and real estate practices. Timbuk3 responded on its “Edge of Allegiance” album with such songs as “Grand Old Party,” a wry look at the mess left when the big bash of flush times winds down, and “Dirty Dirty Rice” and “B-Side of Life,” characterizations of have-nots learning to make do with less.

The band’s new album, “Big Shot in the Dark,” sounds what could be an evolving theme for the ‘90s: the search for the sturdy values needed to cope under darkening social and economic clouds.

Speaking over the phone recently from his home in Austin, Tex., main songwriter Pat MacDonald said that when he started writing the album last year, the first two songs he came up with seemed to offer directly opposite advice on how to deal with social decay.

“Dis---land (Was Made For You & Me)” suggested turning one’s back on all woe and finding a secure spot in some escapist, self-indulgent Magic Kingdom.

Let the wayward children play, let the wicked have their way

Let the chips fall where they may. I’m going to Disneyland.

The contrasting song was “Sunshine,” in which MacDonald vowed to remain aware of the horrific side of life, yet without being defeated, depressed and obsessed by it.

“They’re both perfectly natural” ways of reacting to uncertain times, said MacDonald, who speaks slowly with frequent pauses to consider how best to put what he has to say. “I think most of the time I fall somewhere in between,” wanting to escape completely and wanting to confront social ills.

“ ‘Sunshine’ is more progressive,” MacDonald continued. “It’s acknowledging that dark side while somehow trying to break through it. America buries its head in the sand and refuses to look at the basic dark truths that have governed our lives. I’m trying to know what’s going on and get to the bottom of things that are important, but a person can get dragged down. The search for truth can be like a pair of lead overshoes. I had to say that to myself at a certain point--that I was being dragged down by certain things, and I needed to get a life.”

MacDonald said he did that by spending more time at home last year in Austin, where he and his multi-instrumentalist wife, Barbara, live with their 8-year-old son, Devin (MacDonald said his aunt lives with them and cares for the boy when Timbuk3 is touring).

“I hadn’t been appreciating our home. I hadn’t taken advantage of the fact we had a home and it was a nice place to hang out,” MacDonald said. “I took writing (the album) as an opportunity to be home for a while. That was the most laid-back time of my life, and that ended up coming out in the songs in different ways.”

The result is an interplay between occasional dark musings about values collapsing and things falling apart (“God Made An Angel”), and the more hopeful outlook of a song such as “Two Medicines,” which prescribes a healthy venting of emotions--”laughter and tears”--as a way to keep one’s sanity.

In the title song of “Big Shot in the Dark,” MacDonald, who is 39, expresses an embattled idealism, addressing someone who has sold out higher aspirations for financial security.

You used to believe in the power of music,

And all that revolutionary stuff,

Back when money was the root of all evil.

Now you just can’t seem to get enough.

You had it right the first time.

The question of whether to hold on to ‘60s-style ideals, or dive into ‘80s-style deals, has cropped up for Timbuk3. MacDonald said the band has had numerous requests to allow “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” to be used in advertising jingles. They have always refused, he said, on the grounds that “advertising cheapens the music.”

“Just recently we had to turn something (like that) down, and we could have used the money,” MacDonald acknowledged, adding that an ad agency once offered him a job (which he politely refused) because it admired Timbuk3’s lyrics.

“It’s like when I was younger, playing in bands. We could have made a lot of money playing Top 40 hits. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to work on the original stuff, and stand or fall on the strength of the material we wrote.”

The rewards behind that curtain of artistic integrity are uncertain.

MacDonald figures that Timbuk3 is a hard band to place in a marketing pigeonhole, given its use of technology to generate a spacious, atmospheric sound, and its simultaneous application of rootsy acoustic elements like a fiddle, a bluesy harmonica and, on the new album, steel drums.

“We’re too techno for a rootsy audience, and too rootsy for a techno-dance crowd,” he said. “Eventually, if we were to stop and play the same kind of music for a while and keep doing one thing, we would find ourselves with a safe mass acceptance. That’s not what I aspire to. I want to play stuff that is challenging to us. We’re not the most avant-garde or progressive band in the world by any means, or the most retro. We’re kind of a strange hybrid, and I’m happy about that.”

Early on, the MacDonalds got attention for what was often taken as a gimmick: their use of a beat box as a “backing band” on stage while they performed as a duo. In 1989, after “Edge of Allegiance” came out, they abandoned the prerecorded rhythms and set out on a tour as an unaided duo, with Barbara providing hand percussion or thumping a beat with a kick drum. But when they arrived at Bogart’s on that tour, they got a better idea when an old friend, Wally Ingram, sat in on drums. Originally from Wisconsin, the MacDonalds had played with Ingram in a band there before heading off on their own to Austin. Ingram subsequently had moved to Southern California and joined a reggae band called Brave New World. He played the rest of the 1989 tour with Timbuk3 and remained in the band. With the addition of bassist/steel drum player Courtney Audain, Timbuk3 is now a more or less conventional, fully equipped rock band.

While it comments on economic trends and, on its latest album, lays out a set of values for pressing times, Timbuk3 doesn’t perceive itself as an agent of social change.

“It’s not like we’re doing it for some ulterior motive, to save the world,” MacDonald said. “That’s what I don’t like about (pop songs in) commercials. It’s music used for an ulterior motive. We don’t play music to change people’s minds, or even to make them think. The point is, we think. We’re thinking people, and everything we are comes out in the music. Hopefully, that enriches it for people who are hearing it.”

* Timbuk3 and Trip Shakespeare play tonight at 9:30 at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $13.50. Information: (310) 594-8975. Timbuk3, Trip the Spring and Big Bang play Friday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $13.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.

NOISE FOR TOYS, VIII: ‘Tis the season for annual holiday benefits on the local rock scene.

The granddaddy of them is Noise for Toys, which will stage its eighth annual benefit show Dec. 21 at the Doll Hut in Anaheim.

This year, the Adolescents--the lineup of Rikk and Frank Agnew, Steve Soto and Sandy Hanson that recorded the fine “Balboa Fun Zone” album in 1988--will stage one of their periodic reunions to headline the show. Also appearing are the Decadent Debutantes, Large Hardware, I Own the Sky, Nevada Time, Three Ring Binder and Corruption.

The show starts at 6 p.m.; the Adolescents play at 8:30. Admission: $10. Proceeds will go to buy toys for the Orangewood Children’s Home for abused children. Information: (714) 533-1286.

S.O.S. II: Moving into its second season is the Benefit for the Homeless, an alternative-rock mini-festival that will collect canned food and raise money for the Costa Mesa anti-poverty agency, S.O.S. (Share Our Selves). The show takes place Friday at 6:15 p.m. at the Costa Mesa Community Center, 1845 Park Ave. The Dickies headline a bill that also features the Mummies (from San Francisco), the Muffs (including former members of the Pandoras), the Mono Men (from Bellingham, Wa.) and locals Olivelawn and Black Creep. Admission is $10, plus a donation of three cans of food. For additional information, call (714) 650-1141.