MUSIC : THE DICKIES : Bubble-Gum Punks : ‘It’s weird going from a band to an influence.’ The band isn’t fabulously wealthy yet, so they do have some unfinished business.

Fashion-conscious dorks used to wear them around their necks. EarlA. punk rockers used to slam their brains out to their music. We are referring to dickeys and The Dickies, respectively.

The musical Dickies went the way of the sartorial dickeys, but, like every band that ever played or sang a note, have returned. Plus, they’re nearly as funny as those things around your neck. And they rock hard, in a bubble-gum thrash sort of way. Any band that covers the theme from “Banana Splits” can’t be all bad.

That cloud of dust visible in the distance may not be a horde of tourists coming to steal your parking spot, but perhaps a posse consisting of the Moody Blues, Barry McGuire, Simon & Garfunkel, Black Sabbath, the Cowsills and Gene Pitney hellbent to beat up the Dickies for messing up their songs.

Other twisted Dickies favorites include “(I’m Stuck in a Pagoda) With Tricia Toyota,” “You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)” and “I’m a Chollo.”

Most of their songs are only memories since there haven’t been any new Dickies’ tunes in years, partly due to the fact that a couple of their former record companies (PVC and Enigma) have gone the way of all things.

The Dickies themselves have only played a few gigs in L. A. and the Bay Area recently and, before that, nothing.

Hailed as the Next Big Thing in the late ‘70s, the band instead became the next Whatever Happened to Those Guys? Now the cartoonish, Jellyfish-like band wants to come back. Fear came back, the Clash did not; several others won’t go away.

Singer tricky Dickie No. 1, Leonard Phillips, discussed from his North Hollywood home the life and loves of the funny punk band.

All right, who’s in the band these days?

Well, we have John (Mr. Perfect) Melvoin on drums, Stan Lee on guitar, Enoch Hain on guitar and Charlie Alexander on bass--whom we chose because he looks like Jeffrey Hunter--and me, Leonard Phillips.

Is your Stan Lee the editor of Marvel Comics?

Stan Lee would like to be the editor of Marvel Comics, but he’s not. We’re all real men from the tips of our parasols to the tops of our high-heeled pumps.

The band has been missing for awhile; has this entailed the dreaded day job?

Yes, there was a scary day gig about a year ago. It was phone sales, a typical musician job, right? I was sitting right next to someone wearing mascara and a Mohawk selling Disney books. There were the ugliest, most twisted people, but since it was for Disney, you had to wear slacks and a tie.

So what have the Dickies been up to besides selling Disney books?

It’s a long and ugly story. We went through the Aerosmith cycle of riches to ruin. One of our original members, Chuck Wagon, committed suicide. It was a meteoric rise to fame, then comes the excesses of women, devil worship and solo projects that went into the dumper. So, next, I guess, we’ll conquer the world. Basically, we haven’t done anything for the last five to seven years. Our last album for A & M, “Second Coming,” wasn’t promoted at all. Then about five years ago, I got a song in the movie “Killer Klowns.” The movie didn’t do anything, but it paid decent royalties. You can make money off cable. Now, we’re shopping for a deal; we’re waiting for Geffen.

Everybody’s waiting for Geffen, yet there may be room for the Dickies since, in the last few years, wild punk rock music has became alternative, then darlings of college radio, then mainstream, sort of like Social Distortion, whose music hasn’t really changed, merely the number of records they sell.

Sometimes the perceptions seem to change rather than the band itself.

So where did all the punks go?

They’ve all grown dreadlocks now and are buying Nirvana records. We still have a lot of hard-core fans plus a lot of teeny boppers, too. All these garage bands come up to me and tell me the Dickies were the first band they were ever into. It’s weird going from a band to an influence.

What’s the worst thing about being a Dickie?

The worst thing is probably knowing there are a few, poor, unenlightened countries who haven’t experienced the awesome power of the Dickies. Also knowing that I’m approaching rock ‘n’ roll middle age like those rock ‘n’ roll survivors like Keith Richards and Neil Young who have polyurethane teeth, can’t talk, but still rock--but they have 30 trillion dollars. I haven’t become fabulously wealthy yet, so we do have some unfinished business.

How would you describe Dickies’ music?

In the old days, we were called “easy listening punk” or “MOR punk,” but lately “bubble-gum punk” makes sense. I can see why people would say that. We were calling ourselves a punk band 15 years ago when no one else wanted to. A lot of rockers get homophobic about the term punk now.

How did the band fall into doing all those funny cover songs?

None of us considered ourselves songwriters in the beginning, and the Dickies were sort of a corporate entity like the Monkees. We were a prefab, no budget punk band, kings of the quickly dissolving glitter heap. In 1976, punk was the next Big Thing, and it was cool for the few musicians trying to break out of Hollywood who secretly wanted to be punk rockers and have short hair. We had a lot of outside writers, and I think early Dickies stuff was really great. When you’re playing a great song, it doesn’t matter who wrote it. All of our good songs are by somebody else. Like “Nights in White Satin,” we took something peaceful and made an obvious joke out of it.

Anyway, tell me about a strange Dickies’ gig.

Well, they’re all pretty strange. Once we opened for the Alarm in about 1983 in a library right next to Niagara Falls; it was their first tour. At that time, there was this college radio herd mentality, and about 500 of the 700 people there didn’t know the Alarm, except that being there was the hip, college radio thing to do. We opened. We’ve been in situations where we’ve died or where we’ve won, but if you’re in a support situation, you’re not letting down your own fans because you can always blame the headliner’s fans. If you can hear crickets between songs, it’s demoralizing, but we were awesome. We could do no wrong, but the audience didn’t like it. They couldn’t convince themselves that we were bitchen, which we were. They were more like an oil painting than an audience.

So what’s next?

We’ll be having a record coming out soon. We’re just holding out, waiting for the best deal to come along. I’m working on a punk rock opera and some new songs like “I’m Stuck in a Condo With Marlon Brando.” Then we want to go to Japan.

* WHERE AND WHEN

The Dickies, Youth Brigade at the Anaconda Theater, 935 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, Saturday night, 8 o’clock, $12.50, 685-3112.