Xtra Large Is Trying On Substance and Style for Size

Xtra Large’s just-released debut album, “Now I Eat Them,” offers two pleasant surprises.

One is the music itself, in which the young Orange County band breaks through alternative/hard-rock conventions with a striking display of confidence, skill and imagination.

The other surprise is that Xtra Large’s two main songwriters and onstage agitators, singer Darren McNamee and guitarist Warren Fitzgerald, both have managed to stay in one piece long enough to make an album, period.

Since 1988, when they first teamed up in another local band, Gherkin Raucous, McNamee and Fitzgerald have put on bizarre, sometimes crude performances that were so heedless of physical risk even Lloyd’s of London might not insure them.

Two recent days in the performing life of Xtra Large show that the two haven’t mellowed much in their new band, which also includes bassist Bob Thomson, formerly of Big Drill Car, and Josh Freese, a 19-year-old drumming phenom who turned down a spot in the highly regarded punk-metal band, Suicidal Tendencies, to devote himself to Xtra Large.

During an afternoon gig at the Cal State Fullerton student pub two weeks ago, McNamee came under a barrage of table condiments and wound up being nearly blinded by cayenne pepper.

“People were picking up everything they could and throwing it on stage,” he explained later. “I had put about 15 stuffed animals down my pants, and I was throwing them during the whole show. That might have encouraged them.”

McNamee said he washed the sting out of his eyes and continued the performance: “I’m not going to use pain as an excuse not to finish a show.”

One night after having his eyes peppered, McNamee stood outside Club 5902 in Huntington Beach after another Xtra Large show, tallying the latest damage: a cut lip and assorted small abrasions on his fingers sustained when he started banging ashtrays against countertops during a table-climbing sortie into the audience.

It had been an eventful 40 minutes on stage. Fitzgerald had led the band in an amusing tap-dance display. McNamee had poured beer and water down his own shorts and flung some over onlookers’ heads. Not to be outdone in spreading fluid around, Fitzgerald had on a couple of occasions used the stage-front area as a spittoon.

McNamee capped the show by demanding that all the stage lights be turned off. When they weren’t, he climbed the lighting rig and tried to do the job himself. McNamee’s eventual dismount from an upside-down position sent him sprawling across the club’s floor. Not rattled, he scrambled on stage and finished the concert by bending over and mooning the audience at length.

Given the circus atmosphere of its shows, it really is a surprise that Xtra Large has emerged from the recording studio with a meaningful, stylistically ambitious and remarkably well-crafted album. After years of coming across as the class clowns and gross-out kings of the local rock scene, Fitzgerald, 24, and McNamee, 27, suddenly turn out to be thinking musicians who can offer substance as well as sensation.

In conversation, all four Xtra Large members are able to leave behind their performing dementia and present themselves as friendly, polite, reasonable and good-humored people--even as they talk about the fascination with madness and death that is at the core of their music, and the Hieronymous Bosch-like grotesqueness that creeps in at the fringes.

McNamee pondered whether Xtra Large’s stage antics undermine the meaning that comes across on record. “Does it take away from the music and make it comedy? Take the seriousness away? I don’t like to sacrifice the music. People want to hear a good set. But they also want to see something they can talk about.”

“Live (performance) and recording are completely different,” said Fitzgerald. “In the studio you get a chance to be introspective; you’re creating something that’s close to you. But all the finesse and subtleties get overshadowed by the energy of having a live audience. I hope when the album comes out, people will get to know the songs, so we can take them on more of a journey. I look at that as the next level. If (concert-goers) don’t know the music, you have just the immediate gratification and impact.”

On its album, Xtra Large draws upon Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, sources that such alternative-hard rock heroes as Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have already freely exploited. What makes “Now I Eat Them” different is the band’s ability to branch out in directions that other contemporary hard-rockers seldom tap. Many of the song arrangements are complex, recalling psychedelic Pink Floyd. “Perfect House,” a shimmering acoustic track with lush, floating harmonies, suggests certain delicate passages from Yes, circa “Close to the Edge” (although Yes never laced a song with so much bitter irony).

Especially significant are a couple of direct and deliberate cops from the Who. No band was better at reconciling irresistible pop melody with brutal, hard-rock thrust than those classic English rockers. The current hard-rock generation has sadly neglected the Who’s legacy.

“I love the Who. They were massive, but they don’t seem to get the credit today that I think they deserve,” Fitzgerald said. Following the Who’s lead, Xtra Large is starting to develop themes and characters for a projected rock opera.

“I like Simon & Garfunkel and I like Helmet,” Fitzgerald said, citing extremes of ‘60s harmony and ‘90s noise-mongering that influenced the new album. “Everyone’s musical taste in this band is so broad. We tried to use our imagination and create an atmosphere, a journey through the light and dark, the heavy and the softer stuff, and make it a challenge for people to listen to. There’s a lot of things to absorb.”

Given the album’s sonic complexity, ambitious arrangements, and crisp sound, one would assume that a seasoned record producer had piloted Xtra Large through its maiden recording journey. In fact, production credit goes to Fitzgerald, with help from the rest of the band.

After Xtra Large signed with Giant Records last spring, Thomson said, there was “heavy hinting” that the label wanted the band to enlist an outside producer to complete an album that was already almost finished.

“We held our ground,” Fitzgerald said. “We decided, ‘We’ve got a vibe here, let’s not mess it up.’ The whole thing with the record industry is that they want a safe bet with (whatever producer) had the last hit. But there’s a beauty to being self-contained. I have a real fear of producers. In my limited experience, they’ve always been dictators or they’re not interested in what the musicians think.”

Fitzgerald said he had been practicing for nearly a decade so that he could do his thinking for himself in the studio. “Ever since I was 15, I spent every opportunity I could in the studio. I was always fascinated with the technical process. I spent most of the past two years in the studio, developing those skills.”

Fitzgerald has been establishing performing credentials on the Orange County rock scene since his late teens. While playing with the funk-punk band, Doggy Style, the Huntington Beach resident came to the attention of Jon St. James, the La Habra-based record producer and manager who made a name during the mid- and late-’80s crafting dance-pop hits for Stacey Q and Bardeux. St. James recruited Fitzgerald into Metal MC, a rap-and-rock band that proved short-lived, but kept in touch with the guitarist as a talent he hoped to help develop.

In 1988, Fitzgerald and McNamee, a former UC Irvine biology student who had grown up in Newport Beach, teamed up in Gherkin Raucous, which quickly became one of the most popular draws on the local alternative-rock scene. While several major labels took a look at Gherkin, none made an offer, and in mid-1990 the band broke up.

By then, Josh Freese, another young musician bird-dogged by St. James, had entered Fitzgerald’s orbit. Freese, whose tall, skinny frame belies his ability to attack a drum kit with unusual force and dexterity, had joined Stacey Q’s band at 15. That led to a nearly year-long touring gig with Michael Damian, the soap opera star turned pop singer.

“When I got back, I was so tired of cheesy pop music, I wanted to do something else,” Freese said. “I was talking to Jon St. James, and Jon said, ‘There’s only one musician I know who’s more obnoxious than you.’ He introduced me to Warren, and the two of us hit it off.”

Freese and Fitzgerald began playing together part time as sidemen in the Vandals, the venerable local satiric punk band. Freese also got involved in other projects, including a stint with Dweezil Zappa’s band, recording sessions with Tender Fury, School of Fish and Suicidal Tendencies, and live shows with the Suicidal Tendencies offshoot group, Infectious Grooves. Fitzgerald also was busy on other musical fronts.

Early in 1991, Fitzgerald, McNamee and Dan Wallis, another former Gherkin Raucous member, went to England to hang out and record with Rat Scabies of the Damned. They had befriended Scabies, one of the original British punk rockers, when he spent time in Orange County the previous summer. The London sojourn was three months of wintry hell for the lifelong Southern Californians, spent in flats without heat or hot showers. And the partnership with Scabies didn’t pan out as hoped.

“It was humbling. No one knew who we were, we didn’t have any friends,” McNamee recalled. “The TV and the food are horrible, and that’s my whole life. The only thing to look forward to was that we’d rehearse a couple times a day.”

Out of those rehearsals came some new songs, and, says Fitzgerald, a new focus on what they wanted to do next. After returning to Orange County, he and McNamee began a recording project that would turn into Xtra Large. They kept the cream of Gherkin Raucous’s repertoire, added a few of their London compositions, and also began writing new material with Freese and Thomson, who, as a member of Big Drill Car, had come up on the same club circuit as Gherkin Raucous. St. James stepped in as manager, helped the band finance a self-produced video for the song “Hooker,” and ultimately helped Xtra Large land a major-label deal with Giant Records.

Fitzgerald says the new band, while “a stronger, more solidified” unit than the failed Gherkin Raucous, hasn’t taken a drastically different tack. But Xtra Large did benefit from better timing: big labels that weren’t sure they could sell alternative rock a few years ago are busy these days scrounging for the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam.

Fans who come upon Xtra Large via its album will probably form a far different impression than Orange County club-goers who know the band for its wild stage antics. They’ll hear a cycle of songs, most of them with oblique lyrics, depicting characters who face entrapping fears, encroaching madness and sudden emotional blows. The album’s epic finale, “Lovely Host,” is an account of the AIDS epidemic, told from a hungry virus’s point of view. Songs such as “Up” and “Mountain Climbing” offer more hopeful visions grounded in what McNamee calls “cynical optimism.”

“It’s saying the world is a horrible place most of the time, but if you can look through it, you can get past it,” Fitzgerald said.

The album’s success could be riding on how well MTV and radio stations respond to the album’s intense, catchy leadoff cut, “Hooker,” an old Gherkin Raucous composition that McNamee says got its title because when he first heard the music, it reminded him of John Lee Hooker. But there’s more to it than that: McNamee said the song’s lyric, about how people react to having their world suddenly rearranged, rose from a shock he had in 1987 when he learned that his then-girlfriend was surreptitiously moonlighting as a prostitute.

The lyric doesn’t actually recount that story but more broadly suggests how harsh experience can twist and change us. McNamee sings the chorus with a sinister edge: “I used to love children, now I beat them / I used to love animals, now I eat them.”

As madness-obsessed as Xtra Large’s music tends to be, Fitzgerald’s sidelight as a painter takes the bizarre and the horrific to extremes far beyond anything heard on the album.

Fitzgerald says he took up painting about two years ago and already has sold some pieces in which gore, mutilation and sexual degradation are leading motifs. When Fitzgerald had a showing of his art at a Los Angeles gallery, the invitation cards reproduced one of his paintings--a bloody vision of bestiality that he says was the least severe image in the show.

“The majority you wouldn’t want to hang in your house, at least not if you were thinking of having the family over,” he admitted.

Painting horrors, like singing about fear and mental illness, is “just therapy,” said Fitzgerald, who adds that his grandfather’s history of schizophrenia has something to do with his fascination with insanity.

“Instead of getting a gun and killing people at McDonald’s, if you can express yourself (artistically) in some way, maybe you can live a normal life,” he said. “All these politically correct people try to deny the horrors of the world. If you can face up to them and embrace them and even laugh at them, nothing’s going to rock your boat.”

Thomson, who also paints, describes Fitzgerald’s pictorial style as “punk-rock pornography,” and, like McNamee, gives it his endorsement.

“Everyone in this band tends to like things that are so disgusting and offensive and foul (that) it makes us laugh,” said the bassist. “How far can you take it? The bigger the bum-out, the better.”

One track on Xtra Large’s album, “Hold Me (Down),” is dedicated to Chris Burden, the UC Irvine-trained performance artist who has gone so far as to have himself shot in the arm in the name of art.

“If someone’s going to go that far with his art, it’s sincere. It’s not a weak attempt,” said an admiring McNamee. “We like to joke around, but we’re serious about it. I’m willing to die for it.”

McNamee sounds sincere as he says it. He adds that he already has a vision of the perfect exit taking shape in his mind--not exactly a suicide, but some maneuver so extreme that a fatal mishap would result. “I’d like to do it at a huge concert, and really bum everybody out.”

* Xtra Large, Vitamin L and Two Face play Friday at 9:30 p.m. at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. $10. (310) 594-8975.