Playing With Hazardous Material : Leaving Trains’ Raucous Rockers Know From Experience How Dangerous Dissent Can Be

Speaking by phone the other day from his home in Pacific Palisades, “Falling James” Moreland, leader of the Leaving Trains, was calm, articulate, open, sincere and charming.

He didn’t sound like the sort of person anyone would want to scald with a pot of hot water, or bonk in the head with a hurled beer stein.

But listening to the Leaving Trains’ 1991 EP, “Loser Illusion Pt. 0,” and its upcoming album, “The Lump in My Forehead,” you can see how such responses, benighted as they are, might occur.

The Leaving Trains, who play Friday night at the Doll Hut in Anaheim, have been guided by a confrontational punk spirit since their beginning in 1980. Musically, the band--really Moreland and an ever-changing array of musical associates--has had a knack for rendering brutally effective, raucously careening Stooges-style garage rock, with occasional pit stops to take on blues, folk and even Gothic gloom-rock influences. Lyrically, the focus has frequently been on Moreland’s grappling with inner demons, expressed most often with symbols and oblique imagery.

But that changed early in 1991, when Moreland hooked up with his new band mate and writing partner, Chris (Whitey) Sims.

“He’s very caustic and insulting and macho,” Moreland said. “He really sets people off because he’s so insulting. Because of him chiding me and kicking me, I got to the point where I stopped writing about myself and my horrible love life, and we started writing about anything around us.”

“Anything,” so far, has included an obscene, existentialist tirade against God, a crude attack on Bob Hope that casts the comedian as a nemesis to civilization, a ballad about a psycho-killer having a bad day, a song claiming that every rocker who ever died young was the victim of an ongoing, organized conspiracy, and “Women Are Evil,” a song that, if taken at face value, suggests exactly what its title says.

If that’s not provocative enough, Moreland intends to use the band’s 1992 touring as a stump platform for a write-in presidential candidacy. His main plank is “to legalize pot and turn back the country to the Indians.”

In case all that doesn’t draw a reaction, the Leaving Trains’ wardrobe will. Moreland likes to perform in women’s clothing and makeup. Sims likes to perform wearing nothing at all.

“It’s not just provocation for its own sake,” Moreland said. “In a way, these are the personal politics, the personal battles, that we are trying to fight. These songs are real reflections of things that bug us. People who don’t fit what’s considered the norm are being imprisoned or subjected to extreme poverty and homelessness. It’s a dangerous time in society when entertainers have to step out in the forefront and be the people articulating dissent.”

Moreland says that he and Sims found out just how dangerous dissent could be when they started performing early last year at poetry readings. “Two different times there were fights. One of them was during the (Persian Gulf) War and I was doing an anti-war ramble. One guy in particular was very hostile, and he started punching me. He was going to pour a vat of hot water from a stove on me, but Chris punched him out. It made me realize that poetry is too dangerous, and punk rock is really much safer.”

Rock shows have their hazards, too. In Vancouver last year, Moreland said, somebody hurled a beer stein at the stage while the Leaving Trains were performing “Women Are Evil.” It missed Sims, who was singing, but it got a piece of drummer Lenny Montoya (the other Leaving Train is guitarist Aaron Donovan).

“I don’t want to be a martyr for people’s inability to take a joke,” Moreland said. “We don’t mean (“Women Are Evil”) to be taken literally, any more than Carroll O’Connor meant for people to believe that he was really like Archie Bunker. People assume that, because most rock songs are so stupid, it can’t be a fictional account. We wanted to write an answer song called “Women Are Equal,” but because of the Supreme Court’s stand on abortion, that isn’t true yet.”

Moreland says that his choice of stage wear also has given him a lesson in sexual politics. “I’m finding just how pervasive homophobia is. You get a lot of catcalls. There’s the assumption that I’m gay (Moreland says he isn’t), and I can’t say the number of times I get pinched walking through a club.”

Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls and David Bowie also have used cross-dressing as a ploy to create an image. Moreland says his motives are aesthetic and political, not commercial.

“I have too short an attention span to stare at people who are dressed unimaginatively. (Dressing in women’s clothes) kind of went back to my childhood. I was always attracted more to my sister’s clothes than to mine. I’ve done this off and on throughout the band’s career, but I finally got the nerve up” to perform in drag all the time. “I just want to dress better, and I feel attracted to softer things and more colors.”

“There (shouldn’t be) anything shocking about it,” he continued. “Neither (should) a guy taking off all his clothes. But this is all shocking to people still. In that case, I feel we’re doing missionary work, to bring the 20th Century to people. If you can handle the visual assault and the musical assault, you’re a Renaissance listener.”

But not all audiences and venues can handle it. It isn’t unusual for club owners to shut the band down before its show is finished, Moreland said.

“You find really conservative people in the strangest places, including punk-rock nightclubs. I can’t see us getting away with it forever, and I can’t see society being repressed forever. Something’s got to give, and I suspect that, society being what it is, it’s going to be us.”

Only a cult following has embraced the Leaving Trains to date, although the band has kept up a consistent flow of releases since 1984, including five albums and an EP for its current label, SST. Several SST alumni, including Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Firehose and the Meat Puppets, have made the jump to major labels. But Moreland, who says he got his “Falling James” nickname years ago when he tumbled unhurt down a staircase at a party given by Susannah Hoffs in her pre-Bangle days, says he’s happier having the freedom to be confrontational that an independent label affords.

“I’ve actually lost a lot more money than I’ve made,” in the band, said Moreland. “When I started out I had a full-time job and several thousand dollars in the bank. At this point in my life, I’m way in debt and I’m freaking out about it. But the band is doing better (in terms of record sales and concert fees). I could break even if we tour full time.”

Moreland thinks the current Leaving Trains lineup has prospects for a longer run than its predecessors. Over the years, he said, 40 different musicians have been in and out of the band. The main reason for players leaving is that “I’m difficult to get along with. Or else it’s economics. People don’t want to go on tour, or they don’t want to leave home. I prefer to look at it as a jazz type thing, where I’ve had the good fortune to play with a lot of interesting musicians who stayed as long as they wanted to.”

“The band always exists, as long as I’m breathing,” Moreland vowed (he has taken side jobs, though, including a stretch as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Pacific Palisades during 1990, when Leaving Trains was stuck on a siding).

Keeping the band going “is all that really makes sense to me. I guess it’s a combination of egotism, (fighting) boredom and wanting to meet people--and I love loud sounds.”

* The Leaving Trains, Delusions of Grandeur, Slandertones and Hundred Acre Wood play Friday at 8 p.m. at the Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. Admission: $6. Information: (714) 533-1286.

TRAMPS MOVING UP: Reflecting the strong grass-roots following it has been gathering over the past two years, the Cadillac Tramps will be the first local band to play a two-night stand at Bogart’s, with shows Friday and Saturday.

Tramps guitarist Brian Coakley said the band decided to play two nights instead of jacking up prices for a single show.

The band, which records for Orange-based Doctor Dream Records, is almost finished with work on its second album. The title will be “Hearse,” Coakley said. “It’s kind of a reflection of our last year. Everybody seemed to have it tough. We were on the road and doing a lot of hard work for very little compensation.”

‘OTHER PEOPLE’S’ RADIO: KSBR-FM, which follows a jazz format, is taking a new slant on Saturday nights with a funk and rap show called “Other People’s Music.” The program airs from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. The Saddleback College station is at 88.5 FM.