Sending a Personal Message : Rock music: Next album of O.C. band Standing Hawthorn will focus less on political issues and more on individual ones.

It’s obvious that Standing Hawthorn takes its rock ‘n’ roll seriously.

The young South County band’s 1991 debut album didn’t lack for weighty themes: declarations of religious faith, visions of highly spiritual romance, apocalyptic broadsides against bloodthirsty tyrants and environmental despoilers, plus a nicely wrought satire on mealy, ego-stroking politicians who would be better off in group therapy than in public office.

But Standing Hawthorn has a capricious streak, too. It called that meaning-fraught album “Oh My Mother of Loachk,” which means God-knows-what, and decorated the CD cover with photos of two shocked-looking old-timers covering their ears.

The title was a nonsense phrase concocted by a friend of the band, singer Paul Schulte explained during a recent interview in the back yard of a Mission Viejo house shared by Standing Hawthorn’s two managers (the managers and all four band members are graduates of Mission Viejo High School).

“It means, like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Schulte translated. “We have all these crazy friends.”

“The old guys on the cover were supposed to be listening to our music and going, ‘Oh my God,’ ” chimed in Chris Judd Karn, Standing Hawthorn’s guitarist.

Standing Hawthorn got its name pretty much the same way it got its album title. When “Loachk” was about to come out in early ‘91, the band discovered it would have to ditch the name it had been using, the Slugs, because a Chicago punk band already had a legal claim on it. Enter another buddy, who suggested to Schulte that the band adopt as its new name “Standing Hampton,” a British expression with phallic connotations that Sammy Hagar once used as an album title. Schulte got the phrase garbled when he reported the suggestion to his band mates, and it came out Standing Hawthorn.

While the band didn’t mind adapting a sexual double-entendre just for the fun of it, Schulte said it has since tried to find more serious implications in its name. Since a hawthorn is both a large, thorny shrub and almost the right spelling of a famous 19th-Century American author’s last name, the band moniker, Schulte suggested, means that “we’re standing up for nature and poetry.” Also, he noted, “some philosopher said that maybe (Jesus’) crown of thorns had been made out of a hawthorn tree.”

By necessity, rather than by whim, Standing Hawthorn (which headlines Saturday at the Hot Rod Cafe) had to take a somewhat casual approach to recording its debut album. With funding tight, the band--Schulte, Karn, drummer Douglas Stoner Peterson and bassist Brent Loomis--wound up cutting tracks and overdubs in warehouses, garages, basements and bedrooms rather than in a proper recording studio.

If you listen closely, Karn said, you can hear the Karn family dog barking at the end of one of those bedroom guitar overdubs. And during one of the warehouse sessions, the band was in the flight path of the El Toro air base, so it had to keep pausing to let the aircraft go by.

The results were good, though. “Loachk” was consistently tuneful and varied, drawing on such primary influences as the Smiths, R.E.M. and U2 while showcasing Karn’s estimable guitar work. Besides its serious-themed songs, it contained lighter tunes such as the funky “Helluvalady,” about a steamy sexual attraction, and “Candy Lane,” which Schulte, the band’s lyricist, said was inspired by some experimentation years ago with hallucinogenic mushrooms.

“One thing we’re not is a drug band. We’re about as straight as you can get,” said Schulte, who along with Karn could be an updated model of the clean-cut, early Beach Boys visualization of how a Southern California rocker ought to look. (Drummer Peterson lends the band a taste of the currently fashionable punker look, with beard, close-cropped hair with beads strung along the crown of his head, and a right biceps encircled with a bracelet of tattoos.)

“None of us do drugs,” Schulte added. “Candy Lane,” he said, “was just reminiscing about high-school days. We were experimenting (on the ‘Loachk’ album) with so many styles, and I was thinking along the lines of ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s . . .,’ the whole psychedelic thing.”

Looking back, Karn and Schulte agree, the experimentation made the album too scattered stylistically to interest any record company. But in making it, they said, Standing Hawthorn was able to sort through possibilities and get a better handle on what the group’s own, distinctive sound might be.

The band has written about half the material for a new album and is scheduled to begin recording early in July. This time, Standing Hawthorn, whose members are 22 or 23 years old, will work in a proper studio at a more leisurely pace, having saved or hit up investors for a recording and manufacturing budget of $20,000--an extremely healthy sum for a self-produced album.

“It’s going to be very different from the first one,” Schulte said. “It’s going to have direction, and the craftsmanship will be as good as we can get. A little more technical, a little more complicated, but we’re not going to sacrifice the feeling.”

The new batch of songs will focus less on politics, the singer said. “They don’t take as much of a stand. They hit a lot closer to home. They’re personal issues. Our album is going to be based on some theme of honesty. That just keeps coming into my mind.”

Sounds like pretty ambitious stuff from a singer who, as co-founder Karn tells it, was originally drafted into the band because “he’s good-looking and we knew he’d get chicks” coming to its shows.

The Slugs were launched in 1987, when Karn, Loomis, and original drummer Kevin Cascell played at a high-school talent show. Quickly realizing that a three-man, all-instrumental group would have its limitations on the teen-party circuit, the Slugs brought in Schulte, who had never sung outside of a shower stall. Besides his looks, Karn said, the fact that he was a big R.E.M. fan also recommended him.

In those days, Karn said, Mission Viejo was wide-open territory for a young alternative-rock band. With few others in the area playing their style, the Slugs quickly gathered a following. For the past few years, the band has been a solid draw in South County, able to attract audiences of a few hundred fans to such venues as the Coach House, the Heritage Brewing Co. and the Hot Rod Cafe. It also has made forays into Los Angeles, hiring buses to bring along some of the hometown following.

“I think we’ve paid our dues,” Karn said. “We’ve played pizza bars and sushi bars,” not to mention many a collegiate party. “Years of fraternity parties finally paid off” last year as the band’s student contacts led to a series of college bookings in Colorado and Arizona, Karn said.

Along the way there have been frustrations. Said Karn: “We tried real hard getting (record companies) interested in us” before deciding to go ahead and release “Loachk” on the band’s own label, Green Records. “I don’t know if it’s the recession, or they hate our music. But we’re not ones to wait. I think we’ll go ahead and release another” if the record companies balk again.

But getting signed to a label deal is the band’s main aim now: “I want to be able to make a living. I want to be able to eat macaroni and cheese and pay my rent,” said Karn, who joked about being the only “sheltered one” in Standing Hawthorn still jobless and living at home. Peterson and Loomis work in construction, and Schulte is a valet at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point. Karn hasn’t exactly been goofing off, though: he is about to get his bachelor’s degree in music from UC Irvine, where he majored in classical guitar. (Loomis is graduating from UCLA, where he majored in sociology).

On “Loachk,” Karn wove some deft solos in a variety of styles. But he sees Standing Hawthorn as more than a vehicle for guitar flash and foresees little extended soloing on its second album.

“I don’t think I’m that great of a solo player. Also, it’s kind of childish: ‘Watch my fingers fly.’ When my guitar does come out, it’s going to be interesting and subtle. I’m really into creating a full, thick sound and keeping it interesting.”

If things come out right, Karn said, the comparisons to U2, R.E.M. and the Smiths will fade away when the next album appears.

“We want people to go, ‘What kind of music is that?’ (and realize) it’s Hawthorn music.”

Standing Hawthorn and Soul Scream play Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Hot Rod Cafe, 23822 Mercury Road, Lake Forest. $5. (714) 770-1226.

* LARGE DEAL

Xtra Large will release an album. F19