INFECTIOUS GROOVES : Post-Suicidal Funksters

Before N.W.A., before Slayer, before anybody, there was Venice-based hard-rock band Suicidal Tendencies, which for a long time was at least as famous for being effectively shut out of L.A. bookings as for anything that the band might have done. And now there’s Infectious Grooves, a sort of funky raucous hard-rock band--it has been compared to a punk-rock JB’s--which revolves around a couple of Suicidal members as well as the guitarist from Excel and Dean Pleasants, who used to back up Jody Watley, plus Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins (recently replaced by Josh Freez), and which does for danceable groove music approximately what Suicidal did for the sensitive singer-songwriter ballad: rips out its guts and makes it rock real hard.

“Right when I joined Suicidal,” says Infectious Grooves bassist and principal songwriter Robert Trujillo, slouching back in a folding chair in the recording studio where Suicidal is finishing up its fourth major-label album, “the rest of the band wanted to hear the songs I had done before. I came from an R&B; background, and I didn’t want them to hear the tape. I mean, it wasn’t Suicidal. But (Suicidal frontman Mike Muir) liked it, and as soon as we got home, he and I started putting stuff together and experimenting with ideas. I think that was the birth of Infectious.”

“What he was doing was cool,” says Muir, bouncing in his seat. “When you start off with an electric guitar, there’s only a few things you can do; when you start off with a bass, you can take it a lot of ways, different styles and stuff, so it’s not so defined. I said, why don’t we go back and work around some of the bass stuff, rather than working around the guitar like in Suicidal, and put different elements to it and stuff, and he said OK.”

It worked pretty well--especially live, though the debut album, “The Plague That Makes Your Booty Move,” is selling about as well as a Suicidal record so far. And perhaps because of its more accessible style of music, Infectious has been able to get the airplay and play the mainstream venues that have usually been denied to Suicidal: Both new-pop station KROQ and hard-rock station KNAC have been playing the heck out of the Infectious debut; Infectious headlines the Universal Amphitheatre on Saturday. The band also toured with Ozzy Osbourne last fall.

“I was trippin’ one night,” says Trujillo, “thinking, ‘Wow . . . we’re playing freakin’ James Brown riffs to a freakin’ Sabbath crowd.’ ”

Infectious is definitely not just a side project.

“I think when a lot of people from different bands get together,” Muir says, “it’s usually kind of an ego record. We want to showcase ability, but in the sense where the head keeps rockin’ and the toes keep tappin’ rather than doing something in 4/29 time with the harmonic 17th and a double twist and the 4-point-26 difficulty on the hydroplane scale. We wanted to do something that you could enjoy whatever your musical preference. If you like heavier stuff, you feel the power of it, and if you like danceable stuff, you can dance to that too.

“And with the musicianship, especially Robert’s, I think people are realizing we do Suicidal because we believe in it, and not because it’s the only thing we can play.”