MUSIC / RIDE : Rock It Fuel : The British guitar quartet draws inspiration from the ‘60s. A big sound and vague lyrics bring them up to date.

You see, they were right: Rock is a four-letter word. Here’s another one: Ride.

This band is like a slow-motion car wreck with a beat. Ride careens relentlessly across your brain, laying rubber in all four gears until smoke pours out of your ears and you can barely stutter “m-m-m-more.” But, kids, don’t play this at home real loud. Your parents will cut you out of the will, ridden off.

“Funny is money, but art is smart,” said John Belushi who wasn’t. Ride is an art rock guitar quartet from Oxford, England. The band members met in art school and started performing around town. Sometimes when bands start playing live, people who are not relatives and friends show up, sometimes even important people.

“We were very removed from any musical scenes, weren’t part of any movements,” said bass player Steve Queralt in a recent phone interview from Cincinnati. “We played our first show in front of some drunk art-school students and got a pretty good reception. From there, we got to headline bigger and bigger shows in Oxford, and then the next step was to play a show in London, when Warner Brothers heard about us. When someone important hears about you, everyone hears about you.”

Hey, it worked. Ride is headlining its own tour from sea to smoking sea, with Slowdrive opening. Ride’s most recent album is the appropriately monikered “Going Blank Again.” The one before was “Nowhere.” The EP in between was “Kaleidoscope.” Are we establishing a pattern here?

“So far so good for this tour,” said Queralt. “So far, it’s been very well attended. It’s better than our last tour when we opened for Lush. The audiences are a lot smaller here, but everyone jumps around and tries to get on the stage. It’s great not having to get up in the morning, but touring starts feeling like a job after about four months.”

Yeah, real tough job, right? How many people wouldn’t trade places with one of these New Riders of the Purple Haze? Working an hour or so a day beats the hell out of, well, working.

“Describe our music? That’s your job,” said Queralt, helping the economy by creating more work. “I think most writers rarely understand what we’re really doing. As I understand it, even if we make a bad album, there will still be some who say it’s great. So, it’s pretty hard to describe what you do. Pop music, I guess. And we named ourselves Ride because we couldn’t think of anything else good. It sounds all right and it’s a word that doesn’t mean anything.”

Back when rock was young there wasn’t much doubt about what a song was about. When Dion sang “. . . It’s Mo on my left-a and Mary on my right-a, and Janie is the girl that I’ll be with tonight-a,” nobody needed a degree in philosophy to catch the drift.

But when Ride sings, “One hundred years from now/See the chrome, can’t hear it move/I’ll meet you on the way down/Wrapped around somebody’s hand,” it makes it hard to know what to do. Their bio observes the obvious when it tells us that the lyrics are deliberately vague. And if nothing was vague, we wouldn’t need PBS and foreign films.

“No, the lyrics aren’t as vague as they used to be,” said Queralt. “We’ve got a lyric sheet this time. Our songs are more oriented toward songs, before it was just the guitar effects. We’ve changed a great deal from our last album, I think. A lot of bands are doing the same thing, like Lush and the Pale Saints and that whole kind of guitar thing. So for us, it really wasn’t that difficult to leave it all behind. The ‘60s were a big inspiration to us--we listened to the Beatles and the Stones a lot--but we get inspiration everywhere. It would be good if people concentrated more on the arty side.”

Art, in the case of Ride, is so loud you may not be able to hear it.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Ride at The Anaconda Theatre, 635 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista. Tuesday, 8 p.m., $16. For more information, call 685-3112