Joyride Focuses on Forks in the Road : Alternative music: O.C. group’s debut album carries universal theme: the necessity of making hard choices in life.

About two years ago, Greg Antista had a choice: He could accept a scholarship to law school, or he could join a fledgling, unknown local rock band named Joyride that had no immediate prospects.

Antista turned down the University of San Francisco law school in favor of the band. Now Joyride is about to emerge with its first album, “Johnny Bravo,” and making choices is the album’s dominant theme.

In several key songs, Antista and Joyride’s other singer-songwriter, Steve Soto, talk about the trade-offs between security and risk, comfort and integrity, that go into some of our crucial choices.

“It upset the whole family that I turned (law school) down,” said Antista, as he, Soto and Joyride’s other members, lead guitarist Mike McKnight and drummer Sandy Hanson, sat for an interview recently in the chilly, dilapidated rehearsal room the band rents in a complex of warehouses and industrial buildings.

Joyride had just formed when Antista, then a recent Cal State Fullerton graduate, was accepted to law school and had a choice to make.

“He said to the rest of us, ‘As long as you tell me that your heart is in this (band), and you’re really going to do it, then I’m in it too,’ ” recalled Soto.

“This is just a really solid band,” Antista said. He decided that being in a solid, if obscure, band was better than being in a secure profession that filled him with doubts. Antista said he had gotten to know some lawyers while helping run a campus program that gave Cal State students access to legal advice.

“They all seemed so unhappy. One day a lawyer came in and said, ‘Being a lawyer is like being a garbage man. People come in, dump (excrement) on your desk and expect you to clean it up.’ The more lawyers I was involved in meeting, (the more I found) they just weren’t a higher class of person. I realized they’re not a class of people with higher goals. Musicians are supposed to be people with higher aspirations, and you find that more in musicians than in lawyers. I meet musicians I can respect more often than lawyers I can respect,” Antista said.

Joyride isn’t a rambunctious bunch of personalities, but the four members are ready with a quip when the opening arises. Soto, who was part of the original wave of Orange County punk rockers (he was a founding member of both Agent Orange and the Adolescents), has been around rock ‘n’ roll long enough to know that lawyers play a dominant role in the business end of it. He joked that Antista’s low rating of the profession could leave the band without access to a barrister: “There go our chances of getting an entertainment lawyer, shot to hell.”

“I was just over to see my family last weekend, and they said, ‘So what’s up with law school?’ ” Antista added. “They still expect this to end and me to go off to law school sooner or later. But if I do anything else, I think I’d go into teaching--or open a disco.”

Said Soto: “A lot of people have gotten miserable by trying to make their parents happy” with their career choices. “Mine have been pretty accepting, but my mom wishes I had something to fall back on,” he said.

Questions of integrity, of being true to one’s deepest feelings rather than to one’s best financial interests, run through the album, starting with its title.

“Johnny Bravo,” Soto explained, was an episode of the ‘70s sitcom “The Brady Bunch.” In it, Greg Brady, the oldest Brady sibling, is tempted by, then rejects, an offer to leave the family clan’s singing troupe and appear on his own, under the stage name Johnny Bravo.

At one point, Soto said, Brady dons a Johnny Bravo stage outfit and is told, “ ‘You’re not you anymore. You’re the new Johnny Bravo.’ It meant selling out. But he had morals, and he wasn’t going to sell out.”

The album traces similar ethical dilemmas. “24 Hours,” Antista said, was inspired by having to choose suddenly between law school and Joyride--except that in the song, he alters the situation, making it about a woman on her wedding eve, trying to decide whether to marry for security when she feels no love.

On the next song, “The Only Thing I Wanted Was You,” Soto analyzes a marriage that has lost its compass as husband and wife get caught up in the drive for affluence. In the process, they lose their inner connection. Later, on “The One That Got Away,” Soto declares independence from parental and social expectations that dictate climbing a conventional career ladder:

I’ll bet you had it all planned out before my birthday breath,

From Little League to college,

Corporate wife, to shuffleboard, to death.

And if I wandered, you would set me straight and send me on my way.

What a price for me to have to pay. In “Asking for More,” Antista finds the door to success closed to his generation, then decides it was never worth entering in the first place. It’s a fine number, full of roiling, bitter, conflicted feelings as he tries to purge himself of the careerist drive that is instilled in most of us from early childhood:

Indecision is not a crime,

But here we are, all doin’ time.

Told to keep in step, walk the line,

Smilin’ faces that never shine.

And if you never liked your choices, come on now and join the club.

Tax collector, disease detector, guy who glues on road reflectors.

Who could ask for more? “When you’re growing up, people lead you to believe that (career) opportunities would make you happy, but it was obvious to me that it wouldn’t make me happy,” Antista said. “I know people I went to school with who went on to be professionals, and now they have a big sense of ‘Is that all there is?’ I graduated from college and started driving a truck, and I was having a better time than they were. The downside of it is that I have absolutely no idea what I’ll be doing in 10 years. But I kind of like that. It is a drag to think I might be living in a gutter in 10 years. But it makes things interesting not to have any foundation.”

Given their druthers, the members of Joyride will be making a living playing music in 10 years. (Right now, they get by with an assortment of blue-collar and office day jobs, except for McKnight, who, having lost his job, describes himself as “basically a statistic now.”) The band isn’t after the big score, Soto said, just a steady presence on the alternative-music scene. “I’d like to be able to continually put out records and tour,” he said.

Joyride’s story goes back to the beginnings of alternative rock in Orange County. Soto, now 28, was in his mid-teens when he helped start Agent Orange (a band he soon split from) and then the Adolescents, two of the most important bands of the local punk boom. Soto played bass and got some songwriting credits on the Adolescents’ landmark 1981 debut album. He came into his own artistically in 1988 when a reformed version of the Adolescents put out another excellent album, “Balboa Fun Zone.” The album didn’t sell, but it established Soto as a forceful singer and an involving, straightforwardly emotional songwriter.

When “Fun Zone” flopped, the Adolescents--never the most stable combination of personalities to begin with--crumbled. Soto and Ads drummer Sandy Hanson, 32, hooked up with Antista, 27, and McKnight, 30, who had been playing together in the Midnight Specials. Soto and Antista were old buddies from Troy High School in Fullerton, where Soto had taught Antista to play bass. In the early ‘80s they also had played together in a “goof-around band” called Teenage Love, whose hallmark was setting dirty lyrics to the melodies of pop hits.

“Johnny Bravo,” recorded on a paltry $1,500 budget, was finished a year ago. It was originally intended to be released on Vox Vinyl, a custom label belonging to a former Adolescents manager. But the better-established Doctor Dream label subsequently obtained a license to release the album. While waiting for its label situation to be resolved, Joyride stayed busy writing more material and working its way up through the local club scene. “It took us all last year, but now we’re getting all the shows we really want,” Antista said.

The presence of two songwriters in the band makes for an abundance of songs--and for healthy competition, Soto said: “If Greg comes in with a song, it gets me pumped up to write too. So far it hasn’t been a problem.”

On stage, Joyride is basic and direct. Soto and Antista stand at their microphones and sing without any showman-like displays. For visual excitement, fans at concerts can look to McKnight, who obliges with occasional Pete Townshend-style leaps and windmill-motion swipes at his guitar strings.

Soto said the album’s leadoff track, “Take a Chance,” is intended as Joyride’s statement of purpose. The lyrics promise honest substance, with “no smoke to hide behind, no mask to hide my face.” In turn, it asks for a fair hearing.

“It’s time to go back to the basics,” said Antista. “Good lyrics, good melody. The rest has already been done.”

“That song is saying that we’re doing it, we’re here,” Soto said. “We’re not kids, we’re not putting on a big show or anything. These are the songs, and if you like it, it’s cool.”

* Joyride, Silvertrain and What’s Shakin’ play Saturday at 10 p.m. at the Fullerton Hofbrau, 323 N. State College Blvd. Admission: $3. Information: (714) 870-7400.