Judy, Judy, Judy : Band bemoans music scene in hometown, but stays around to headline weekend gig at Mayfair Theatre Saturday.

Ventura’s Pinching Judy doesn’t seem to have a single nice thing to say about the local music scene. They see it as somewhere between “phooey” and “let’s hang ourselves.”

The band, which includes Mario Falso on guitar, Jason Bays on bass, John Lombardo on vocals and guitar and Shawn Freeman on drums, describes their hometown with some candor on their bio as “a quaint little suburban nightmare located in the vast wasteland between L. A. and Santa Barbara.”

“The local scene is gone,” said Falso. “The Mudheads, the I-Rails, Durango 95 are all gone. There’s no one left but Ariel, Raging Arb & the Redheads and us. Before, we had Charlie’s, now we don’t. Now we have the Mayfair Theatre, the Bermuda Triangle, then every few months, the Ventura Theatre.”

As far as Falso is concerned, to find a reasonable facsimile of a music scene one would have to venture north to the Bay Area. Bays agrees.

“Ventura is a hard place to get a gig for the type of music we play,” Bays said. “Maybe we’re just a lousy band.”

Unlike Lion I’s or Raging Arb, Pinching Judy isn’t much of a dance band--in fact, the dancers stay away in droves.

“You can count the number of people who have danced at our gigs on the toes of one foot,” said Falso.

The band is well beyond hard and fast, making dancing a bit difficult. They will be on display Saturday night when they headline the Mayfair Theatre, formerly the Insomniac Coffeehouse.

But to say the band has no dancers is one thing, to say they have no fans is quite another. About two months ago, Pinching Judy--on the same bill with Port Hueneme thrashers Ill Repute--drew 740 people to the Mayfair Theatre.

Pinching Judy plays but a couple times a month, and is almost too busy practicing to play a live gig. They all have day jobs, but music is their life, clearly a quartet without cable television.

“We just concentrate on practicing,” said Falso. “We’re losers. We don’t have any friends.”

Bays, Lombardo and Falso have been playing together for nine years. Pinching Judy is just their latest adventure. Those three plus a drummer used to be in Something For Nothing. That band survived the local scene for many years and had a repertoire of more than 30 original songs.

About every six months, the same guys would become Night Diamond--a put-on speed metal group. Just fooling around, Night Diamond was better than most of those metal heads who are actually serious. Bays and Falso were also in Big Biscuit Express.

“Pinching Judy has been around for about a year now,” said Falso. “A lot of people think that the drummer is not a big part of the sound, but when we got Shawn, it really changed our sound. So we wrote all new songs and we weren’t the same band anymore. We’ve got around 30 Pinching Judy songs, and even a couple of Something For Nothing songs, which we usually don’t play, anyway.”

“We’re harder than Something For Nothing, but not thrash metal,” said Bays. “We just do whatever jumps into our heads, hard or soft.”

OK, so now what? Pinching Judy has got the stubborn part figured out, but how can you rock out in a town that doesn’t rock? Simple. Get someone else to pay for it.

“We want some small label to pay for us to tour,” said Lombardo. “We just have to use whatever connections we can. We’ve got a four-song demo tape, which we’ve sent to 25 different independent record companies. We just want to get our tape heard by as many people as possible.”