Joes Keep Her Company : Singer Douglass, Shy About Solos, Finds Harmony in Numbers

One likes to suppose that the foundation of harmony singing is joy--the warm mutuality of two voices sharing a song, a feeling, an experience.

But for the Orange County band, Too Many Joes, harmony is also based in terror.

It’s not that the band’s sound is scary. Far from it. The twining of two female voices on the band’s new debut CD, “Charm,” is as pretty as you could wish in a wistful, gently melancholy way, as the voices glide atop a glistening, precisely crafted instrumental bed.

Fear enters the picture when Andrena Douglass, who started Too Many Joes three years ago, contemplates the idea of singing without another voice to keep her company.

“I almost started crying the first time I sang in front of anyone,” Douglass, 27, said during an interview before a Too Many Joes concert in Fullerton last weekend (the band will play again tonight at Bogart’s). That was in a college voice class at Cal State Fresno. “I was so scared in front of the class. I’d start shaking so hard. I was scared to sing by myself. I felt much more comfortable singing with someone else.”

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Shy about soloing, Douglass landed in a college band, Walkabout, that featured another woman singing harmony. When that band fell apart upon graduation, journalism major Douglass moved to Orange County to work for Doctor Dream Records and set about forming a new band. She began with a name, Too Many Joes, and a concept: Don’t get stuck with too few singers.

Douglass, who goes by the nickname Dina, says she had a hard time at first finding musicians who wanted to be in a female-led band with such influences as Throwing Muses and the Sugarcubes. Eventually, though, guitarist Nick Benich answered her musician-wanted ad. They recruited Barry Stevenson, a bassist who had played in a series of bands on the same local alternative rock circuit as Benich.

Both were agreeable to the name Too Many Joes, which Douglass had first hit upon several years before, when she was in junior college. “A friend and I had about 15 friends named Joe, and we were having a hard time keeping them straight,” Douglass said, enthusiastically recounting a tale she probably has been called on to tell too many times. “He finally said, ‘Too many Joes,’ and it struck me as a good, catchy name for a band. Nobody in Fresno liked it, but luckily down here they liked it.”

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Finding and keeping a harmony singer to fit Douglass’s tandem-vocal concept proved more difficult than convincing the other players to accept her pet band name.

The first singer “had some really bad problems and she disappeared,” Douglass said. “She was so perky and happy, we went into shock for a month when she left. We couldn’t believe it.”

“We thought she was an angel, and she turned out to be Satan,” summed up Stevenson. The band wrote a song about the experience, the bassist said, “but we stopped playing it because it brought back bad memories.”

Too Many Joes’ next harmony singer, Kristi Lewis, was reliable, but not available over the long term. “She just wanted to do her own thing (musically), but she hung out so long that we got lazy and didn’t look for anybody else,” Douglass recalled.

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When Lewis left in 1990, Kristine Kunego, a theater student at Golden West College, came to the band’s attention. Kunego, who had been a high school cheerleader growing up in Rochester, N.Y., came to California with acting in mind. She was a rock ‘n’ roll novice whose experience consisted of one rehearsal with the local gloom-rock band, Black Daphne. It was an eventful practice, though: Before it was over, the band had broken up. Douglass had heard about her from one of the Black Daphne members and invited her to audition.

“Dina gave me a tape, and I said, ‘This is the band I want to be in.’ ” Kunego joined in January, 1991, along with drummer Brad Wilson, a friend of Stevenson’s. At 22, she is a rock-generation younger than her band mates, who are in their mid- to late 20s. There also is something of a contrast in tastes between Kunego and the others. They’re all confirmed alternative rockers, while she has a penchant for dance-pop acts such as Prince, New Edition and Sheila E.

“I don’t know any of the music they talk about,” Kunego said. “I missed punk. I was too little.”

Said Douglass: “Her record collection shocks me constantly.”

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The voices are a fit, though. The band hopes that “Charm,” which was released on Piece of Mind Records, a tiny, Santa Monica-based label, will serve as a calling card to larger labels that might be interested in the band’s harmony blend.

Douglass, the main songwriter, has a penchant for spinning pretty, melodic patterns around sobering tales about drowned fishermen, abused children and a battered spouse.

Some are drawn from life, while others exercise her fondness for fiction (Douglass says she has written five chapters of a “terrible pulp novel that I’ll never finish”).

“Say Something,” in which she imagines herself confronting a wife-beater, stems from “watching a friend in a real dysfunctional situation, where heroin was involved too. It’s a nightmare, the kind of thing that (you think) only happens on TV.”

“My Father,” a song that isn’t on the CD, is not about Douglass’ home life, but a friend’s experience of childhood incest. “I sing it in first person, so people come up to me and say, ‘Are you OK? Do you need to talk?’ ”

‘Jonathan,” yet another song about family violence, “was just made up. I’d read somewhere that Neil Diamond, who I really hate, had scored ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’ ” Douglass decided that she liked the name Jonathan and would build a song around it. “One of Our Boys,” an anti-war song about a soldier’s death, took root because “I wanted to put the word December into a song. One word will trigger a whole story.”

Patience is one word that Too Many Joes seems to understand. The band recently signed a contract with a music publisher and got itself a lawyer--two steps calculated to help it move toward a record deal with a bigger label.

“For me it’s like, ‘Whoa, slow down,’ because I’ve never been in a band before,” Kunego said. “We’ve got time.”

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“We’re really happy about the way things are going,” Douglass added. “We just got the first money we’ve gotten in our lives” as an advance from the publisher. “Everybody’s buying new equipment. It’s not that much, but it’s nice that someone gives you some money.”

The band members realize that, with their controlled sound, they’re not going to get much notice from scouts looking for the next Nirvana. But, with a style that often draws comparisons to 10,000 Maniacs (a successful band that nobody in Too Many Joes professes to like very much), they could find their niche.

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Douglass has no desire to trade delicate harmonies for the now-fashionable howling of such noisy alternative bands as L7. “Girls that scream that way, they lose their range,” she said. And if Too Many Joes made a sudden conversion to noise-rock, “People would start laughing. We’ve played what we’ve played for almost three years.”

Guitarist Benich, who enjoys the carefully textured ensemble instrumental sound of Too Many Joes, isn’t about to start tossing off screaming feedback leads. “The bottom line is, I’m having fun playing what I’m playing, and I’m not sacrificing my style to change with the current musical trend.”

Too Many Joes, Eli Riddle, the Ziggens and Small Tribe play tonight at 9 at Bogart’s in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $6. Information: (310) 594-8975.