BEYOND THE BUBBLE GUM : Kevin Thornton Insists That There’s More to Color Me Badd Than Meets the Ear

“Don’t color us black or white. Don’t color us R&B; or pop. Color us Badd.”

Literal translations aside (because if you have to ask, either you’re not hip enough or you’re one of those finicky grammar people), what singer Kevin Thornton was getting at is that his group, the multiracial, multiethnic Color Me Badd, knows only one shade these days: red hot.

Chatting over the phone from the Color Me Badd tour bus en route to a concert in Corpus Christi, Tex., Thornton maintained that the Oklahoma-based vocal quartet isn’t interested in the categorization, competition or controversy that sometimes goes with being pop stars.

Furthermore, he let it be known, labels such as “bubble gum” and “hunk hip-hop” that the media use to describe the group’s style don’t bother Thornton or fellow Baddmen Bryan Abrams, Mark Calderon and Sam Watters.

With a smash debut album (“C.M.B.”) that has yielded five hit singles and has sold 4 million copies worldwide so far--not to mention the coveted slot as the opening act on Paula Abdul’s current tour, which brings them to the Pacific Amphitheater Sunday--they can afford to be charitable.

So go ahead, call them a cappella Adonises. Just remember there are two Ds in Badd.

The marketing images that have cast the guys as modern-day Bobby Sherman/David Cassidys are “definitely part of our style,” Thornton allows. But, he added, “you know, we weren’t trying to appeal to any one type of market. We were just being ourselves.”

So when Thornton (astrological sign Gemini; hobbies: writing, sports and romance) tells you on the jacket to the “C.M.B.” CD that he wants “a girl that loves romance. Someone I can cherish, hold and who doesn’t mind taking walks with me on the beach, or even gazing into my eyes underneath a starlit night as I read her poetry and express what she means to me . . . “ or when Watters (a Leo who favors music, basketball, dancing and writing) writes “I love to give a girl roses, write her a poem, sing her a song or do whatever it takes to make her feel like a lady!,” you can be sure they mean it, Thornton says.

“All of the romance--the quotes and stuff (on the CD jacket)--are just a part of us.” But, he hastened to point out, there’s more to this group than meets the personal ads.

“Now we want to expand more. (The debut album) only gave you a part of Color Me Badd; now we want to not branch away from it, but to enhance it.”

So rather than disown the “hip-hop doo-wop” style that the group has claimed as its signature, Thornton said CMB will continue to embrace songs like “I Wanna Sex You Up,” “All 4 Love” and “I Adore Mi Amor” but will, the group hopes, add dimension and texture in its next album. Work on the follow-up is to begin when the tour with Abdul ends in November.

“We don’t want to stay constant; we want to grow,” Thornton said. “What you’ll find, hopefully, in the next album is a deeper look at Color Me Badd. We’re going to get more romantic, touch on a few political issues, perhaps. It won’t be so bubble gum.

“This particular album that we have now, we’re pleased with it, but with the success of ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ (which actually debuted on the soundtrack to the film “New Jack City”), it blew up like no one had expected. Therefore we had to play catch up with it. We had to release the song earlier than we had planned, as well as come out with an album. So it was kind of rushed. This album we’re going to take our time on.”

Hang on a minute. Political issues? Color Me Badd?

“Well, you know we’re not going to get over our heads in the political-type thing. ‘Cause we’re not trying to have that type of following or that type of message, like let’s say a Midnight Oil or something.

“But in being a positive voice, or being any kind of voice in the public’s eye, we want to have a positive message. And these types of things are going on in our society so . . . you know, nothing’s definite right now, but some of the ideas that we had planned on maybe touching on were the racial tension and stuff like that.

“And of course love will probably be one of the highest focuses of the next album. And that’s not necessarily talking about a love between a man and a woman, but overall love.”

Color Me Badd began life in the late ‘80s as a diversion for four Oklahoma teen-agers enamored of Levi’s 501 Blues commercials. Thornton, Watters, Abrams and Calderon, all students then at Northwest Classen High School, began imitating the doo-wop style they heard in those ads and, eventually, in older material by the Dells, Temptations, Four Tops and other groups.

“We liked the harmonies,” Thornton explained. “Because everyone was so into synthesizers at that time, we thought it might be cool if we used our voices as our instrument.”

They performed their act for a school talent show and “got overwhelmed” by the response. So they began seeking out more a cappella material in movie soundtracks, television, albums, “anywhere we could find it.”

As legend (and the group’s own press material) has it, their impromptu practice sessions and concerts during school hours attracted enough attention to virtually stop student traffic in the hallways, prompting school officials to ban the quartet from singing between classes. Thornton will admit that like most legends, this one is more alluring than true.

“Well, we weren’t necessarily banned,” he said. “What happened was, oftentimes we would sing--sometimes we’d see a girl we liked or whatever and we would kind of sing a cappella to her, sometimes other people wanted us to sing to their girls, or we might just be practicing. Well, when these things happened, people would gather around and they’d kind of clog up the hallways. So the teachers or the principal would make us stop singing and make everybody go to class.

“Then sometimes we’d go into the men’s restroom and the girls would follow us in.”

Norman Mears, vocal music director at Northwest Classen for the past 12 years, remembers the boys (all four were in his advanced choir) and their spontaneous vocal outbursts.

“They would just start singing anywhere,” Mears recalled over the phone from Oklahoma, “passing in the hall or at lunch time.” But an administrative “ban” of their singing? Not that Mears can recall. “They were well-liked by the school,” he said emphatically.

The legend continues: Our heroes, determined to break into the big time, auditioned whenever and wherever they could for various musical acts (Huey Lewis, the O’Jays) passing through town. Eventually, with the help of Robert (Kool) Bell of Kool and the Gang, they moved to New York City, where they met their current managers, Myles Sanders and Adil Bayyan. A record contract with Giant followed in May of 1991.

The group’s sound has been categorized as black because of its street-style, hip-hop elements but only Thornton, a native of Texas who turned 23 on June 17, is black. Abrams, 22 and from Oklahoma, is part American Indian; 21-year-old Calderon, originally from Los Angeles, is Mexican-American, and Watters, also 21 and a native of Maryland, is Anglo-American.

Thornton said that though Color Me Badd didn’t come together until all four were in high school, he and Abrams had known each other since junior high and Watters and Calderon had met in the fourth grade.

The hip-hop, doo-wop and R&B; blend that the group showcases on its debut album is the result of collaborations with several producers and writers including Elliot (Dr. Freeze) Straite, Howie Tee and Nick Mundy.

“It kind of evolved,” Thornton said. “Of course, we first developed the doo-wop part, but we also wanted to advance. We liked to put on shows, so we were interested in having a hard-core street sound. We liked the styles that Dr. Freeze had come up with for other groups, the rap-type tracks, ‘cause you could really dance to them and do a lot of group performances with that, so we combined the doo-wop with the hip-hop.”

It’s no secret that some members of Color Me Badd were less than thrilled to have “I Wanna Sex You Up” as their opening salvo. In an interview with The Times in February, both Calderon and Abrams said they initially felt the song was something of an embarrassment. “Nobody was going to listen to this,” Abrams remembered thinking. “It wasn’t hip.”

But when asked last week if he or any group member ever thought “I Wanna Sex You Up” was not hip, Thornton replied:

“No, that’s not true.

“What happened was, we were concerned with how it was going to be accepted, because of the word ‘sex.’ If you look at George Michael’s ‘I Want Your Sex,’ it caused a lot of controversy. It did well, but it still caused a lot of controversy. Some radio stations wouldn’t play it, you know, and some record stores were saying they might not sell it. And we were wondering if (‘Sex You Up’) would cause enough controversy where people would reject us, which was a big concern, especially coming out of the box, our first single.

“However,” he continued, “we weren’t afraid to attack the issue. We had a lot of faith in God; we had a lot of faith in ourselves. And we’re realists, because we felt that any product that we put out would have an element of class in it. Because if you listen to the words in ‘I Wanna Sex You Up,’ you don’t hear ‘sex’ from lyric one to the very last lyric. You hear things like ‘I want you to be my wife.’

“It’s a romantic-type song, even though it’s about sex. Because we feel that anybody who has experienced sex, nine times out of 10, has enjoyed it. Therefore, it is something that doesn’t have to be raunchy.”

That might be why Thornton doesn’t balk much at being cast as a sex symbol, or at finding himself routinely mobbed by hordes of pre-pubescent girls.

“It’s great. A dream come true,” he said without hesitation. “We love attention.”

Not all kinds of attention, though.

Thornton said he hasn’t loved all the press and hype that the group has drawn. In particular, questions about Color Me Badd’s purported rivalry with a similarly styled, all-black a cappella group, Boyz II Men, can provoke an exasperated response.

“It is a media creation,” Thornton said of the supposed rivalry, “and it really sucks. I’ve been quoted as saying there’s no competition between us. I’m not naive . . . I know that there is because we’re two different groups striving for the same goal, and that’s to be a success in the same industry.

“But when I say there’s no competition, what I mean is that Color Me Badd and Boyz II Men are very good friends. We have a high level of respect for one another. I just didn’t want it to get to the point where the media caused us to be in the public’s eye like a Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas issue or the Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J issue, where they hyped it up so much that the public thinks we don’t like each other or any time we see each other it’s got to be a sing-off or a competition. It’s not.”

Thornton acknowledges that--given the similarities in the two groups’ styles, their almost concurrent arrival on the charts and a perhaps ill-advised penchant for showing up on the same awards shows--a certain amount of comparison was inevitable.

“Yeah, the comparison is cool, and I think that people should have their own opinions,” he said. “However, I don’t think it should be on the media to try to press that issue of who’s better.

“The Grammys, our particular section, was meant to show each group’s a cappella talents. But the next day in the newspapers and on radio it was ‘Color Me Badd versus Boyz II Men: who do you think’s better? Call in.’ That kind of crap.”

Another thing Thornton doesn’t like is the pressure some would put on the group to preach to its captive audience of impressionable teens or to get behind specific (politically correct, it goes without saying) causes. Though the four are supportive of such issues as AIDS awareness and stopping street violence, it is not on their agenda, Thornton said, to educate the masses.

“We’re not going off trying to preach to anybody or raise anybody’s kids or anything like that. We’re just trying to be the best role models that we can be. We feel that if we can live together--we come from different places of the world, different parts of the country--then why can’t everyone else? We’re no better than anyone else.”

He added that the ethnic and racial mix of the group has never been a problem “because we didn’t look at it. We’re just friends. (Our skin color) is not important and shouldn’t be important.

“Bigotry and all of that racial ignorance is not inherited, it’s taught. Because you can look at kids and they don’t care what color you are, they just want to have fun. But once you start separating people and being ignorant to each other’s cultures, that’s when you have the problem.”

The depth of Color Me Badd’s ability to “all get along,” in the language of Rodney King, extends to collaborative effort in the songwriting department. The members share credit for six of the debut album’s 10 songs and, according to Thornton, plan to share even more of the writing for the follow-up release.

Four-way input may sound a bit unwieldy to anyone familiar with the songwriting process, but Thornton said it has never been a problem, largely because the quartet’s members agree that each should have a voice.

The writing process “goes one of two ways,” Thornton explained. “Someone might come up with a melody or something, then (he’ll) present it to someone else in the group and before it’s over, everyone has put input into it. Or, we might get an instrumental track from a producer and we’ll all build on it.”

Group members also are in agreement on the issue of lip-syncing. Which is to say they won’t do it, most of the time, but they don’t condemn performers who do.

“Well, we don’t judge anyone but ourselves,” Thornton said.

“I can’t say we never use (lip-syncing) because certain TV shows that you’re on--regardless of how people say ‘we despise this’--they still make you do it, because they don’t have the right sound equipment or whatever.” But on tour, what you hear will be what you’re getting from Color Me Badd, Thornton assured.

Indeed, the show is so real, and physically grueling, he said, that a traveling infirmary might have to be added soon to handle injuries incurred in performance. First, headliner Abdul had “some sort of muscle spasms” Thornton said, so one tour date was canceled. “Another time I injured my back. I got over that. And now I’ve banged up my knee doing some splits.”

Still, he’s not about to complain. “I love performing more than anything,” he said. “We just have a lot of fun and work as hard as we can. We try to make each show as though it’s our last. Because each crowd is different, so we try to give them our all.”

None of which surprises choir director Mears, who recalls that back in high school the boys’ dedication to singing found them dabbling in all kinds of music, from ‘50s material to operatic arias. And even then, he said, their star quality was apparent.

“It was evident that they could do well,” he said. “Their stage presence was quite good.” Yet it’s probably safe to say he never imagined that one day, an entire nation of adolescents might tune in to watch the group do a guest shot on “Beverly Hills 90210,” as happened recently.

“I just had no idea,” Mears said, “that they would be this successful.”

Who: Color Me Badd.

When: Sunday, June 28, at 7:30 p.m., opening for Paula Abdul.

Where: The Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (I-405) Freeway to Fairview Road exit, go south.

Wherewithal: $22 to $31.50.

Where to call: (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).