POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Zigzagging With the Ziggens at Lake Forest Hot Rod Cafe

In the Ziggens, as in the Ramones, each band member adopts the band moniker as his own stage surname.

And with the Ziggens, as with the Ramones, the name is a perfect, silly fit. The Ramones, single-minded primitives that they are, could take “ram on” as a musical motto. The Ziggens, on the other hand, are always zigging, refusing to walk (let alone sing) a straight line.

The Orange County trio’s show Friday night at the Hot Rod Cafe was given largely to two fundamentally humorous styles--country twanging set to clop-along tempos, and surf-rock that dispensed with the titanic melodrama of a “Pipeline” but laid on “Wipeout” wackiness and a thick coating of garage-punk grease.

The Ziggens also showed a wistful (though still lyrically skewed) folkie sensibility on a couple of numbers, which made for quite a well-rounded 50 minutes. One of the few moments tinged with sincerity was a downcast solo number in which singer-guitarist Bert (Susanka) Ziggen mused, with tongue at least halfway in cheek, that “there’s some relief in agony.”

Of course, Susanka was performing this fervent-sounding number to buy time while Brad (Conyers) Ziggen reconstructed the drum kit he’d discombobulated by climbing all over it during the previous song, “All Dang Excited.” As if that wasn’t enough, Conyers proved that he was dang excited by pulling out a skateboard during the number and riding it across the Hot Rod’s dance floor while doing a handstand.

According to the song’s lyric, the source of all that excitement is a trip to the grocery store. The Ziggens’ world view doesn’t allow for sweeping statements (if you ignore one song that imagines a Second Coming in which all fashion-conscious people will be automatically excluded from redemption), so they obviously have to make the most of life’s little episodes.

Susanka, a self-effacing, nerdy type in thick-framed glasses, teamed with Conyers for sharp harmony singing and well-timed comic byplay. On the country-flavored tunes, they injected absurd asides much as Buck Owens and his Buckaroos used to lay on the corn pone.

While those two carried on, baby-faced bassist Jon (Poutney) Ziggen tended strictly to musical business. The Swamp Zombies have long catered to local club-goers looking for a mixture of humor, satire and solid, style-hopping musicianship. Now, as the name of their self-issued cassette has it, we can “Wake Up and Smell . . . the Ziggens,” whose appeal lies in their willingness not just to deliver a joke, but also to be its silly embodiment.

Openers Standard Fruit, though far more precise and restrained than the Ziggens, were quirky in their own way. Most of the local band’s set was given to sweetly melodic, moderately paced tunes steeped in melancholy.

In the wrong hands, that kind of stuff can turn into mawkish sentimentality or numbing moroseness. But Standard Fruit’s set had a wry undercurrent. While able to bring out the poignancy and tenderness in sad tunes about partings, misbegotten relationships and other post-adolescent hard knocks, singer Denys Gawronski had a comic aspect as well, with his burly physique and slightly loopy look.

Ironies abounded in the band’s Smiths-influenced songs, but they weren’t laid on with the broad campiness of a Morrissey. Standard Fruit also was able to shed irony in favor of open-hearted emotion or outright innocence: “Dinosaur,” for example, expressed adult frustrations but, a la Jonathan Richman, it also worked as a song for children.

Musically, Standard Fruit stayed with soft dynamics and slow-to-middling tempos. Catchiness and subtle shifts in intensity were the main bulwarks against sameness.

The band toughened up at the end, showing that it could rock hard, after all, in a driving finale. The song found rhythm guitarist and main songwriter Andrew Lowery yowling half-desperate, half-comical things about consorting with sheep as he capped an oddly affecting number about an artistic soul trying to fend off barbaric elements: “The Little League goons are out tonight/But we will win with our love of romance languages and our love of light”). As appealing as its bittersweet aspect is, it wouldn’t hurt for Standard Fruit to rock like that more often.

A nightcap set by the Edge took a sharp turn away from the quirky alternative-rock charm of the first two bands and offered less engaging mainstream rock maneuvers.

“We’re a little more pretentious than the Ziggens, so bear with us,” singer Jeff Wright good-naturedly confessed at the start.

As soon as Wright began singing, it was apparent that his model was Mr. Pretentiousness himself: His voice can be a near-ringer for Sting’s, down to a penchant for coloring in between verses with wordless “whoa-way-ohs.” Now, it takes talent to sing like Sting. But while the Edge needn’t start sending out an S.O.S. for vocal help, it ought to consider finding a more personal approach so it won’t have to send out an I.O.U.

The set was competently played, with a muscular rhythm section laying down danceable grooves beneath flashy but colorless noise-whanging from guitarist Andy Duncan (all of which conspired to drown out the lyrics). There was surface appeal in the band’s hooky, oft-repeated choruses, but not anything grabbing. These four lean, well-muscled beach-kid types showed an instinct for showmanship by tacking a long tribal-drumbeat sequence onto a speeded-up cover of the Beatles’ “Fixin’ a Hole.”

The prime evidence that the band needs to use its head more was a concluding cover of the Doors’ “Peace Frog.” The rendition was blithe, casual and breezy, straight out of good-time clubland. Considering the news lately, it was a particularly unconscious way to handle a song that prophesies bloody street rioting.

The Hot Rod Cafe is full of reminders of its past incarnation as part of the Hop oldies chain--one corner is given to photo shrines to Elvis and James Dean, and there’s even a picture of Annette Funicello amid a display of souvenir gold record replicas from the ‘50s and ‘60s. But the club is well-suited to its new policy of booking original rock and blues concerts on the weekends.

The sound system was fine, the lighting elaborate, and the sight lines to a triple-decker stage were unimpaired, even when dancers gathered on the large wooden floor in front of the bandstand. The Hot Rod is sizable enough not to seem cramped, yet intimate enough for everyone to feel close to the action.

Upcoming bookings include the Mike Reilly Band’s Southern-fried blues rock on Friday, The Immigrants (with ex-Gene Love Jezebel singer Michael Aston) on May 22, and local alternative rock bands Standing Hawthorne and Soul Scream on May 30.