Toad Album Springs Back With ‘All I Want’ : The single is a lighter work than the controversial song ‘Hold Her Down.’

“Hold Her Down,” the thorniest song on the current album by Toad the Wet Sprocket, wasn’t a hit, but its angry depiction of a rape stirred up controversy when it was released as a single last year.

One of the album’s lighter tunes, “All I Want,” isn’t likely to raise similar passions, but it’s become a national pop hit and brought the album back to life.

All of which makes the band with the unlikely name from the unlikely home base of Santa Barbara one of the most unlikely success stories of the year. With the current single in the Top 20, the 13-month-old album, “Fear,” has moved into the Top 50.

“It is kind of strange,” says the band’s singer and main lyricist Glen Phillips. “A lot of it’s just due to radio. If ‘All I Want’ got played, the album sold. I don’t know exactly how it worked.”

Phillips and his bandmates--Dean Dinning, Randy Guss and Todd Nichols--do know that their third album was about to die shortly after its release more than a year ago. According to Phillips, Columbia Records decided to try two more singles before giving up. The first would be the potentially controversial “Hold Her Down,” whose lyrics were strong stuff even for its targeted alternative radio market.

Take her arms and hold her down ...

Until she stops kicking

Take her arms and hold her down ...

Until she stops moving

“There was a lot of debate about it in the band,” says Phillips, 21. “Whether it would be exploitative to have it as a single, whether it would be useful. More than anything I was scared of it not being understood.”

Sure enough, the record did generate objections from listeners at many stations.

Says Phillips, “It’s a weird song, because it’s visceral, and it was made to be angry about. So I think people heard it and then they got really pissed off, and rather than thinking, ‘Hmm, it’s a song about sexual assault, I should be pissed off about that,’ they would go, ‘Damn, I’m angry and they made me angry and this is a bad song for making me feel this way.’

“It’s hard to deal with an unpleasant subject in a pleasant way effectively. So I dealt with it pretty unpleasantly.”

But “Hold Her Down” also transformed Toad--whose earnest approach and accessible, folkish rock had attracted a small but avid following--into something of a rape-awareness spokesman. The band was the only all-male group invited to play at April’s massive abortion-rights rally in Washington.

“It’s strange that musicians suddenly become messengers of modern morality,” says Phillips. “It’s not a role I think we’re entirely comfortable with ‘cause we’ve always written on a much more personal level. You can be very politically correct and still not be able to express yourself well. I mean, I’m still working on trying to learn how to express myself well.”

Even if he’s reluctant, Phillips does accept rock performers’ growing involvement in social causes--Toad has carried Amnesty International’s message on two of its tours, and Friday it will join 10,000 Maniacs and T Bone Burnett in a Wiltern Theatre benefit for the Rock the Vote campaign.

“You figure you have people’s ears so you may as well try to do something constructive,” Phillips says. “At the same time there’s the problem of stepping over your bounds and getting into the area of self-importance and didacticism. . . . We’re just musicians, we don’t really have any insights. If people identify with the music, it’s because we’re probably attempting to work through the same things they’re trying to work through.”

Some might feel that the most surprising thing about Toad the Wet Sprocket’s success is that it’s managed it while saddled with that clumsy name, which was drawn from a Monty Python sketch.

“I mean, it’s a stupid name,” says Phillips. “But the Beatles was the worst pun ever. Blue Oyster Cult was a terrible name. I don’t think there are any good names. At least we might honestly have the worst name ever, which is pretty cool.”