Rocker Webb Wilder Takes a ‘Horror Hayride’ : Pop music: Instead of making a video, Wilder talked his record company into financing a 40-minute film, which includes some sequences based on songs from his latest album.

During a party at a Nashville mansion, a punk-attired guest infuriates the host, sleazy country star Carlsbad Devereaux, by disparaging Elvis Presley.

Stepping in to sort things out is stone-faced Webb Wilder, who calms down the combatants and then sets the record straight by singing a twangy paean to the King. “If you don’t think he’s No. 1, you’re full of No. 2,” goes the recurring refrain.

That’s a typically skewed scene from “Horror Hayride,” a 40-minute film centered on Wilder, the real-life rock singer whose third album, “Doo Dad,” was released recently by Zoo Records. Instead of making two standard videos, Wilder and his longtime collaborator R. S. Field talked Zoo into financing their fanciful creation, which includes some musical sequences based on songs from the album.

Recalled Wilder: “We said, ‘Look, all these music videos, many of them get overlooked and get lost in the shuffle. Why don’t you let us make a film? We’d love to do it and it’s part of the Webb Wilder thing.’ They did and that’s how ‘Horror Hayride’ got made.”

In a blow against the Southern stereotype, the Hattiesburg, Miss.-reared, Nashville-based Wilder is outpacing most of New York’s and L.A.’s media-smart rockers in the area of interdisciplinary image development.

“There’s millions of gigs and interviews and stuff in which I and everyone in our camp is developing this shtick,” Wilder, 37, said this week shortly after arriving in Los Angeles. He and his band will play the Sunset Beach Club in Orange on Saturday, the Belly Up in Solana Beach on Monday and the Roxy on Thursday.

“Hundreds of schemes for the Webb Wilder this or that TV show or movie were laid and yet never realized (until now).

“All this shtick is an outgrowth of stuff that’s in my personality. I’ve just tried to turn it into what I think the people of the loving public would be interested in knowing about.”

“Hayride,” directed by award-winning, Austin-based filmmaker Stephen Mims, is the long-delayed successor to 1981’s “Webb Wilder, Private Eye,” a 10-minute “hillbilly noir” film (about a flying saucer investigation) that has enjoyed a long life in the recesses of cable TV. Both works will be released soon in a home-video package.

Wilder’s rock might be rootsy--very much in the Nick Lowe/Dave Edmunds mold on “Doo Dad”--but his outlook is definitely hip.

“We were going for a sort of a Buster Keaton, ‘Shane,’ ‘Shindig!,’ Andy Griffith, Humphrey Bogart, ‘Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ cornucopia of hokum,” Wilder said of “Hayride,” which was written and produced by Mims and Field with uncredited input from Wilder.

In the film, he plays a musician enlisted to assist the governor of Tennessee’s daughter in the making of a driver’s education film. All sorts of mysterious complications and psychedelic interludes ensue, and Wilder deadpans through it all like Gary Busey portraying “Dragnet’s” Joe Friday.

“I think I get a little bit more animated with the rock ‘n’ roll on stage and in real life,” Wilder said. “In ‘Webb Wilder,’ Private Eye’ I am very dry, like Fess Parker on hoodoo zombie pills. And we tried to give a little more depth and breadth to the character in this film.

“Still, in the 10 years between films I had done a lot of extroverted things and developed a cynical, boastful, grandiloquent style that Steve Mims kind of played down. . . . But at the end of the day there have developed several wrinkles to the world of Wilder and it’s hard to get them all in any one thing.”

In the world of Wilder, Music City is known as NashVegas, and his brand of rock is called swampadelic. Throw in a paleocybernetic here and a cellulite phone there, and you’ve got a fertile field of free-form word play that reflects a literary underpinning for this rock ‘n’ cinema operation.

“I was an avid reader as a child and now am again,” said Wilder. “I really love language and the spoken word, and Bobby (Field) is really good with writing, and a lot of that stuff comes to bear that way.

“We’re kind of preservationists too. We like getting semi-archaic and regional idioms going, trying to elevate the human experience. That sounds pretty lofty, but it just seems like everything gets homogenized.”