Dramarama’s Easdale Pulls His Music Off the Self : Now that the songwriter has become a father, his lyrics are less personal and have begun to confront the world around him.

When John Easdale turned up for an interview last week, the singer-songwriter of the rock band Dramarama was fresh from his debut as an educational resource.

Easdale seated himself at a table at Mazzotti’s, an unpretentious Huntington Beach eatery with a rock ‘n’ roll accent to its sparse decor, including posters of heavy-metal bands and a weather-beaten bass fiddle signed by the Stray Cats. The singer, who lives in La Habra, reported that his previous stop had been an English classroom at Anaheim High School.

“Apparently some of the kids have been bringing in my stuff to teach to the class” in a unit on poetry, Easdale said. Their teacher had tracked him down and invited him to talk to the students about his songwriting.

“I was flattered to be asked,” said Easdale, a tall man with an athletic build whose face bears a passing resemblance to one of rock’s most self-consciously poetic types, Jim Morrison. Easdale’s billowy white shirt and beaded necklaces wouldn’t have looked incongruous on the Lizard King, either. But Dramarama’s singer is open and affable, with no hint of self-mythologizing rock-star Angst or mystery in his bearing. Easdale said his question-and-answer session with the poetry class had gone well, although he confessed lightly to being “totally unprepared.”

“They were real interested in how I do it,” Easdale said. “But they must have a misconception of our success. (They wanted to know,) ‘Could you retire right now if you wanted to?’ Yeah, right.”

In fact, Dramarama is still climbing the pop ladder, having made modest commercial progress with “Vinyl,” a 1991 album that built on the base the band had established with “Stuck in Wonderamaland.” That 1989 release gave Dramarama its first national exposure after several years as a Southern California cult favorite. The band made a big local splash in 1986 when it opened a show for the Psychedelic Furs at Irvine Meadows; on Saturday, Dramarama returns to the amphitheater, opening for the Cult.

It’s fitting that Easdale should now be branching out into such a forum as a classroom to talk about his music. With “Vinyl,” his lyrics have begun to confront the world around him, breaking out of the cocoon of personal desperation and frustration where most of the action on previous Dramarama records took place.

“It’s still (about) confusion, but it deals with less self-contained things,” Easdale said. “I think a lot of the stuff on this record is like that because of my newfound parenthood. Becoming a father has taken me beyond a totally selfish mode. I was so self-involved all my life, and what I was writing was all very personal.”

Easdale, 30, wrote most of the songs for “Stuck in Wonderamaland” as a panicked daddy-to-be. Now, he speaks as a more settled house-husband who spends much of his time minding 3-year-old Melody and 1-year-old Heather while his wife, Kelly, manages a flower shop in her hometown of Whittier.

“When I found out I was going to be a dad, at first I almost had a nervous breakdown,” Easdale said. “I was very irresponsible. I could barely take care of myself. It was that (lifestyle of) rock ‘n’ roll stupidity. But after getting over the initial fear, I found I was pretty competent. Outside of the weeks I’m on the road, the other 40 weeks of the year I’m here 24 hours a day. I’m glad I can be a constant figure in their lives, instead of this guy who goes to work all day and comes home for two hours before they go to bed, and he’s constantly grumpy from working too hard.”

“Haven’t Got a Clue,” which made it onto MTV and gained airplay on some major radio stations across the country, reflects Easdale’s movement from confusion over his personal life to confusion about the big world outside. The song’s verses are crammed with oblique, scattershot images that evoke the nonstop surge of incomprehensibility we’re faced with in an age of information overload. Then Easdale breaks into a soaring chorus with the key line, “I swear I’ll do anything for you.”

It’s sure to ring a bell with Dramarama fans, because virtually the same thought is at the heart of “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You),” the 1986 song that became a hit on KROQ and led to Dramarama’s relocation to Los Angeles from its members’ hometown of Wayne, N.J. In addition to Easdale, the band includes guitarists Pete Wood and Mr. E, bassist Chris Carter, and new drummer Clem Burke, the original Blondie member who also hails from New Jersey. Though not an official member of the band, sideman Tom Mullaney, another old New Jersey buddy, rounds out the stage lineup, contributing keyboards, acoustic guitar and backing vocals.

On “Anything, Anything,” the phrase “I’ll give you anything” was the addled cry of a character walking a plank into relationship turmoil as he proposed marriage to a woman he hardly knew but was desperate to have. Easdale says he wrote the song as a post-mortem on his first marriage, a very brief and “very dysfunctional” union in which “she was 18 and I was 21, and I was working in a record store making minimum wage.” On “Haven’t Got a Clue,” the phrase “I’ll give anything” comes off less as a desperate plea than as a firm, if embattled pledge from the singer to the woman, family, or art form that can help him rise above the turmoil he sees in the world around him.

A more obvious reflection of Easdale’s outward gazing is “What Are We Gonna Do?” a song in which he reflects on Earth Day and the need for urgent action on behalf of the environment.

The song’s lyrics specifically state Easdale’s discomfort with topical songwriting: “I’m not a protest singer, I can’t write a song to send a message / But it seemed to me as if this message needed to be sent.”

Easdale said he came up with the song’s Beatlesque music--Dramarama doesn’t shy from echoing ‘60s influences--while strumming a lullaby for his older daughter. The lyrics came after the band played at an Earth Day rally in San Francisco in 1990, the 20th anniversary of the initial Earth Day.

“It took people 20 years to realize that some of the things they proposed in the ‘60s were actually worthwhile,” Easdale said. But instead of writing a hopeful anthem, he used the song to express his feelings of disillusionment with the true level of environmental commitment he saw at the concert. “When the half-million people left the rally, they left all their trash.”

Dramarama recorded “Vinyl” minus its original drummer, Jesse, who quit the band to travel in India, and amid a wholesale restructuring of its label, Chameleon Records, which wound up dropping or losing every other act on its roster. “Vinyl” was the first release by the reconstituted label, a former independent that is now partly owned by the major label, Elektra.

“I guess we were the only thing they liked on the roster. It was very flattering,” Easdale said. Dramarama’s album, which came out last fall, was the first release for the revamped Chameleon, and Easdale says “there were growing pains” involved in the label’s promotional efforts.

“I thought (the album) might have done better under different circumstances, but that’s like crying over spilled milk,” Easdale said. “I think it’s a really good record, but we all know that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a big hit. I was satisfied with what we had accomplished. We’ve gotten on radio stations we’ve never been on before, we were on the David Letterman show and the Dennis Miller show. Naturally it has increased our profile. We’re getting on with things. I’ve already started writing and doing demos” for another record. “I don’t want to sit around too long.”

* The Cult and Dramarama play Saturday at 8 p.m. at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive. $24.25 and $21.75. (714) 855-6111.

TROUT FISHING: The Walter Trout Band will be racing to put the final touches on its next album, “Transition,” before heading to Europe next week for a two-month, 58-show tour that will include large-venue appearances on bills with such acts as Bryan Adams, Van Morrison and the Jeff Healey Band.

Unfortunately, the excellent Huntington Beach blues-rock outfit still hasn’t secured a record deal in the United States. Although the album, Trout’s fourth, is the first he has recorded in this country (he has been working at Front Page Recorders in Costa Mesa), it will be released by a Dutch label, Provogue.

Trout said that “No More Fish Jokes,” a live album consisting of material culled from his two previous studio releases, “Life in the Jungle” and “Prisoner of a Dream,” has just been released on a Danish label. For “Transition,” Trout has recorded 11 new songs of his own, rather than balancing originals with blues and folk classics as he has on previous releases.

The producer is Kevin Beamish, who previously has worked with Jefferson Starship, R.E.O. Speedwagon and MSG.

Trout and his two longtime band mates, organist Danny Abrams and bassist Jim Trapp, have a new drummer, Bernie Pershey, who previously backed Edgar Winter and Dwight Twilley. They’ll play tonight through Sunday at Perq’s, 117 Main St., Huntington Beach.