O.C.’s Lixx Array: a Metal Band That Plays Nice

Minions of Satan and hockey-masked slashers,

Big-bosomed models and blood to the rafters,

X-warning stickers for cusswords that sting:

These are a metal dude’s favorite things.

Eyes out of sockets and skulls grinning hollow,

Ravaged, nuked landscapes saying “There’s no tomorrow,”

Hot babes in undies and broadswords that gleam:

More of a metal dude’s favorite things.

Yes, these are a few of the favorite things that make most heavy metal albums instantly recognizable--before you ever hear a note. Sometimes you can judge a book, or a band, by its cover.

The artwork on Lixx Array’s debut album, “Reality Playground,” reflects a heavy-metal band that likes to make nice.

The cover shows a little girl in a white bridesmaid’s outfit playing hopscotch. Inside the CD booklet, four tall, handsome fellows with soft looks and large, fluffy manes are surrounded by the following iconography: a Buck Rogers-style toy space gun, a Raggedy Ann doll, a toy racing car and a Pez dispenser.

The music itself dispenses with the anger of such hard rockers as Metallica and Nirvana and the raunch of a Van Halen or a Skid Row, aiming instead for a higher-minded romanticism. Sure, singer Rusty Dades can be heard giving a cheatin’-hearted girlfriend the kiss-off, but he manages to do it without using the F-word, the B-word, or threats of facial rearrangement. And when Lixx Array sings a song called “Bad Man,” the band members aren’t boasting about their own nasty dispositions, but issuing a sincere warning against the sort of rampaging sociopath other bands are apt to install on their album covers.

Nowadays, what’s hot and current in metal-alloyed rock is the snarling, grungy, doom-laden sound of such Seattle bands as Soundgarden, Nirvana and Alice in Chains, the glowering roar and speedy, Charge of the Heavy Brigade beats of Metallica, and the foul-mouthed, pugnacious stance of such charm-school graduates as Sebastian Bach and W. Axl Rose. Lixx Array sports a sound and look that harks back a few years, to the mid-to-late-’80s heyday of such pop-metal bands as Bon Jovi and Ratt. As for the now pervasive bad-dude attitude, Lixx Array’s eager, friendly foursome is willing to concede that it’s just not in them.

“Nasty boys--I don’t like it. I don’t like that image for rock ‘n’ roll,” Dades said. He joined his band mates recently for an interview at the group’s rehearsal studio--a carpeted, high-ceilinged cubicle in a Stanton warehouse, complete with such unusual amenities as telephone, bathroom and cola-stocked refrigerator.

Bands such as Skid Row “want bad press, because they know that, for their image, that’s going to help,” Dades continued. “We would never do that. We don’t cuss on stage and get vulgar. We try to stay classy. We’re not an angry band. We’re trying to do feel-good music.”

Guitarist Blake Hastings, the 29-year-old Anaheim native who founded Lixx Array three years ago, said: “There are definitely (hard-rock fans) that will not like us because of who we are, because we are positive.”

“We wouldn’t want them to like us anyway,” chimed in Dades, who will front the band tonight at the Marquee in Westminster. The 28-year-old singer moved to Southern California from Las Vegas several years ago to find a niche on the local hard-rock scene, and Lixx Array seduced him away from a rival band. Drummer Barry McGill, 28, followed a similar path from Kansas four years ago, while bassist Rob Swanson, 26, is another lifelong Orange County resident, having grown up in Mission Viejo.

One of the highest compliments a contemporary hard-rock fan can pay to a speed-metal or grunge-rock band is to climb on stage and dive off into a sea of bobbing heads and shoulders. A stage diver did his thing at a Lixx Array show a while back; the band would rather it never happened again.

“We want everybody in there rocking to the ultimate point, but I don’t think our audience is the kind that wants stage diving,” Dades said.

As the discussion of Lixx Array’s preferred fan reaction proceeded, Swanson began to grunt rhythmically--”huh-huh-hunhh!!!”--while flashing the ever-popular pinky-and-index finger devil salute that no Ozzy or Priest show is complete without.

Had Swanson suddenly turned into a black-arts wolf in this nice-guy fold? Nah. It was just for demonstration purposes: Don’t try this at home, or at a Lixx Array show.

“We don’t want to see this stuff,” Swanson said. “We’re not a Halloween band. We’re just normal guys, playing rock ‘n’ roll.”

All of this normalcy won’t endear Lixx Array to those looking for music that’s raw and subversive. That includes some critics who have seen the band ply the hard rock clubs of Orange County and Hollywood.

“ ‘Cliche,’ is the biggest word they use,” said Hastings. The tall, lanky guitarist cites Eddie Van Halen as his key influence, but his eager, upbeat, incessantly friendly manner makes you wonder whether he’s also been copping licks from Dale Carnegie. “Critics will say, ‘They’re like Bon Jovi; they’re not breaking new ground.’ ”

“We get bagged for being ‘hair farmers,’ ” added McGill, in a tone more amused than complaining. (Hastings said that Lixx Array has toned down the poodle-cut hairdos lately and switched from Spandex stage uniforms to a more casual T-shirts and ripped-denim look.)

Dades recalled one review that picked up on the Lixx wholesomeness and tagged the band as “Pat Boone meets the Partridge Family.” But the same reviewer also gave the band high marks for its playing.

The music on “Reality Playground” does hold up well, combining clean, sharp instrumental work, catchy hooks, impressive harmonies, and a hefty, confidently rocking sound in support of Dades, whose voice has a high, frayed, throaty quality that resembles Sammy Hagar.

The band has already proven that it can appeal to a far-flung audience. In an unusual move, Lixx Array has concentrated on getting its self-financed recordings out to radio stations rather than following the standard procedure of first landing a record deal, then letting the record company promotional staff lean on radio programmers to play the band’s music.

Managers Jon Egger and Rob Jones said they decided to approach radio first because of Jones’ contacts with hard-rock radio stations, established during his years as a record company promotion man and a tour manager for bands including Poison and Warrant.

Jones started last year, trying to sell radio programmers on the idea of playing Lixx Array’s five-song demo tape. “I’m going up against (signed bands with) $100,000 promotional budgets, and all I have is a cassette,” Jones said. “But I figured, ‘Nothing to lose, throw it up the flagpole and see who salutes.’ ”

More than 50 stations played the tape, Jones said. Lixx Array followed it up recently with the album-length “Reality Playground” CD, which has been getting substantial airplay on stations in Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Arizona. The band, whose members all work full-time jobs, has made several weekend concert trips to Utah and Arizona to capitalize on the radio exposure.

In Salt Lake City, the band members even got the rock-star treatment--a record-store appearance in which fans lined up to shake their hands, buy their CDs and get their autographs.

“They think you’re rich, automatically,” McGill said. “You’ve got this big poster, so you’re larger than life. (Fans wonder), ‘Where’s the limo?’ But we had to bum rides to get there.”

Dades hopes there are limos and other rock-star amenities in Lixx Array’s future.

That dream may have to wait a while. Lixx Array’s managers concede that with punk-tinged metal and alternative hard rock a la Nirvana now all the rage, record companies probably won’t leap to sign a band playing the pop-metal style that dominated a few years ago.

(There’s actually a delicious irony in that development. Much of the commercial metal produced by Bon Jovi and its peers was slick, empty and formulaic, and it deserved to be supplanted by something more edgy and daring. Consequently, a band such as Lixx Array can now claim a certain underdog status that it never would have before).

“There hasn’t been a huge Bon Jovi-type band since 1986-88,” Jones said. “But it comes around in cycles, and we’re building an audience. . . . If we can’t do anything to make it come around, we’re sure going to be there when it does.”

Lixx Array’s members aren’t about to put some thrash in their tempos or grunge in their sound in hopes of hopping the new trend toward punk-influenced alternative metal.

“Absolutely not,” Swanson said. “We’re not going to jump on anybody’s bandwagon. We’re going to play the music that comes out of us.”

Chimed in McGill: “They say, ‘Always be yourself,’ and we do it.”

Lixx Array, Fire Monkeys, Gina Davidson and Dirty Dealin’ play tonight at 9 at the Marquee, 7000 Garden Grove Blvd., Westminster. $9. (714) 891-1181.