Pop Tempers Belew’s Taste for the Exotic

If any rock musician could pull a Dr. Doolittle and talk to the animals, it would probably be Adrian Belew.

Using guitar synthesizers and distortion effects, Belew has developed a strange sonic menagerie of bird calls, elephantine trumpeting, rhino grunts and rain forest chatter. Over the past 15 years, he hasn’t lacked for varied opportunities and settings in which to apply this exotic guitar language.

He has played on tour and in the studio with Frank Zappa, the Talking Heads and David Bowie. He has backed Laurie Anderson in her avant-garde explorations and played on Paul Simon’s ultra-popular “Graceland” album. He served a three-year hitch in King Crimson, joining Robert Fripp for exacting guitar interplay in an early-’80s partnership that may be renewed in the near future.

Over the years, Belew’s taste for the exotic has been tempered by a convinced Beatlemaniac’s love of pure pop. Speaking by phone recently from a Salt Lake City tour stop (he’ll arrive Thursday at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, where he’ll appear with the Bernie Larsen Band), Belew said his goal is to strike a balance in which his unusual herd of sounds can roam a range that will be recognizable and accessible to pop music fans.

“I wanted (his latest album, ‘Inner Revolution’) to be a song-oriented record, not as experimental in nature” as earlier efforts, he said. “I wanted a brand of pop music that starts with a good, solid song,” then adds twists.

“I don’t really have it in me to write straightforward, trendy pop songs,” Belew said. “I guess it would be easier for me to do outrageous avant-garde guitar records that only 20 people could understand. But it’s most interesting to combine the two.”

Belew’s interest in the animal kingdom hasn’t been confined to mimicry on the guitar. Over the course of six albums on his own, he has often written and sung about the glory of creatures and the environmental threats they face. (When Belew formed a band a few years ago with some pals from the Cincinnati rock scene where he started out, it’s hardly surprising that they called themselves the Bears.)

It took Belew a while to develop his critter fascination, even though he had opportunities from infancy.

“The first five years of my life I lived on a farm that my father ran,” he said. “I never considered (the farm animals) to be this point of interest. But as I grew up, I became fascinated with animals, especially the rhinos and whales and elephants that became a motif in my music. Now I’m studying birds.”

That’s evident from a track on “Inner Revolution” called “Birds,” which finds the singer waxing Beatle-esque while expressing the ultimate in ornithological admiration:

Dear God, I know someday I’m gonna die

And when I do, I hope you’ll give me one more try

Up there in the sky

With those birds.

Belew also has a newfound rage for dinosaurs that has him scouring bookshelves for the latest reptilian theories. He wishes he could have scored the film version of Stephen King’s dinosaur novel, “Jurassic Park,” because “I think I could do some interesting guitar versions of dinosaur sounds.”

Actually, drums was Belew’s first instrument. “At 16 I taught myself to play guitar--very incorrectly, I might add. I did it because I wanted to be a songwriter.” Early on, he became intrigued by the recording process, not merely enjoying what he heard but breaking it down and mentally dissecting it.

‘I don’t read or write music formally,” he said. “I taught myself by figuring out any records I really admired--everything from Andres Segovia to Chet Atkins to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. But with the Beatles in particular, I would figure out every part: the drums, the orchestrations, the horn parts and bass lines. They were truly my education, because I studied their music so thoroughly and (learned) how it was put together.”

Belew broke into the big time in 1977 after Frank Zappa saw him playing in a club in Nashville, where he had moved with a band called Sweetheart.

“It was a good cover band that had an interesting look--we all dressed in ‘40s-style clothing. My actual guitar style was only in its beginning stages. Frank told me his interest in me was that I could sing and play well” at the same time.

A few months after Zappa first heard Belew play, he called the guitarist to Los Angeles for a formal audition. Belew went on to tour with Zappa, who has been a mentor of fine guitarists, ranging from the late Lowell George to Steve Vai.

Five years later, Belew released his own first album, “The Lone Rhino.”

“I had accidentally discovered that (beast-like) guitar sound and it coincided with my writing the song ‘The Lone Rhino,’ ” Belew said. “That became the strongest theme for the album. The fascination with rhinos has never ceased. It’s a fascinating creature of power and sedateness, of beauty and ugliness.”

It’s interesting that Belew would focus on a creature of contradiction: He seems to be one himself, and not only in terms of his musical duality between experimentalism and pop traditionalism. (Besides the Beatles, Belew obviously has a sweet spot for Roy Orbison, having covered the Traveling Wilburys’ “Not Alone Anymore” on his own 1990 album, “Young Lions.” Asked whether he’s interested in more outside work as a sideman, he said not really, but added with a chuckle that “I’m waiting for the Traveling Wilburys to call.”)

There also is a clear conflict between the touring life Belew has led and the pleasures of the hearth he often has celebrated in his songs. Scattered through Belew’s repertoire are expressions of joy in being a homebody in Middle America, far from the exotic jungles he sometimes conjures on guitar.

Belew has sung delightedly about lazing around his lakeside Wisconsin home, about whiling away a summer’s day picnicking and shooting hoops with the neighbors, about roasting contentedly on the beach (in a song called “Coconuts” that would be an ideal tune for Ringo Starr) and about feeling homesick and cut-off while on the road.

In the latest installment in this series, “I’d Rather Be Right Here,” Belew admits to a fear of flying and declares, “I’d rather be at home in my bed.” And yet, he has toured every year for the past 13 years, including a nine-month trek in 1990 as bandleader for the “Sound + Vision” tour in which David Bowie bade farewell to his old songs and vowed never to play them again.

In one more example of duality that is obvious on his new album, the specialist in animal sounds has turned into a chronicler of the vicissitudes of the human heart. Half of “Inner Revolution” is given to a sequence of songs that looks at relationships from just about every angle: from lustful attraction to spiritual romance, from wrenching divorce and lonely blues to the recovery of love’s spark.

They represent Belew’s most intimate and autobiographical songwriting--something he says he set out to do by design.

“On ‘Inner Revolution,’ I was trying to become more direct and personal. It’s John Lennon’s approach of saying things in simple, direct terms. There are no metaphors on that record. In the past I’ve hidden a lot” of the personal element by deflecting experiences into symbols and metaphors, he said.

“I was in a pretty awful relationship, but I don’t like to reveal those things and burden other people with my personal problems. That may be why I dealt in metaphors--write about animals and cars, everything but my relationship.”

The love songs on the new album are “all true, and in a sense they are autobiographical statements. I got divorced and fell in love again. In the last couple of years I’ve had some good changes--falling in love the major one. If I look chronologically at the way those songs were written, it would have begun with the ending of a bad relationship, followed by loneliness and beginning a new relationship.

“Most of the songs have to do with the optimism of a new love. I wanted to keep my marriage together because we had children. I eventually decided that wasn’t the way to do it, that you have to be happy as a person” to do what’s best for one’s children. “Now I have a relationship I think is beautiful. Maybe I’ll have a few more albums of love songs.”

Although he remains the proverbial cult act, Belew professes to be happy with his career to date. Only one song, “Oh Daddy” from his 1989 album “Mr. Music Head,” enjoyed much notice from radio and MTV. Ironically, it’s a wry number in which Belew, joined by his daughter Audie, wondered: “Oh daddy, when you gonna write that big hit?”

He typically plays nearly all the instruments on his records, although lately he has added keyboards to the guitar and drums he learned in his teens (though he makes no great claims to piano expertise).

“The next thing I’ll try to do is tackle some reed instruments,” Belew said. “My goal is to become a complete recording artist who has taken an interest in every aspect. That’s what I’d like to do before I turn into a grouchy old man.”

* Adrian Belew and the Bernie Larsen Band play at 9:15 p.m. Thursday at the Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave., Solana Beach. Call 481-9022.