Local Music Makes Unusual but Quality Gift

If you’re still scurrying around with your holiday gift-giving list, one or more of these recent-vintage, home-grown products of Orange County might help you cross off a name or two. The ratings system for these stocking stuffers ranges from * (a cleaner lump of coal) to **** (keep it for yourself). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** The Hollytones “Gridlock Christmas” Eaglestone Music It takes real musical talent to spoof real musical talent. The Hollytones--a trio of veteran Orange County musicians, plus a large guest cast--pull it off on this charming, well-wrought and impressively varied collection. The album’s 14 original Christmas songs work on two levels. There’s pop parody as the Hollytones send up or pay homage to a wide array of styles: Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, vaudevillian crooning and Merle Haggard-style working-man’s honky-tonk blues, Beach Boys lofty harmonizing, psychedelic rock and even New Age music. And there are playful, occasionally pointed observations in Yule-related lyrics and skits that range from the gently barbed to the sweetly sentimental.

The Hollytones are Brian Curtin, who plays rock oldies in the Greg Topper Band, and Floyd Elliot and John Wheeler, two members of the on-again, off-again Gyromatics. They’re at their best--and most wicked--on “Christmas Is Coming Twice This Year,” a portrait of kids playing off the guilt of divorced parents to extort ever-greater offerings of Christmas loot. It’s the one track that will make some people cringe a bit, as effective satire should, and it works primarily because of zestful performances from Christina Daly and Drew Harrah as the song’s knee-high Machiavellians.

“Strange Season” neatly ties together a lyrical conceit and a musical style: bedazzled by Christmas lighting displays, the song’s protagonist assumes he must be having a hallucinogenic experience and breaks into a parody of ‘60s mystical psychedelia.

Randy Newman needn’t look over his shoulder, though: Most of the Hollytones’ lyrics are one-dimensional jokes that, while clever enough to provoke a laugh, need the added punch of good musical parody to make the ideas work. “Christmas in California” recycles cliches about the anomalies and comical excesses of celebrating a winter wonderland holiday under the warm California sun. But by attaching familiar observations to a spot-on Ray Charles/Bobby Bland soul-blues tribute, the Hollytones’ music continues to engage long after you’ve gotten the joke.

“Do the Snowman” is a neat little dance-craze spoof that sends up the Merseybeat sound, complete with chirpy Liverpudlian accents. “Merry Christmas Sandi,” one of two Beach Boys tributes on the album, is a poignant tale of bittersweet teen-romance that Brian Wilson would surely endorse.

As holiday novelties go, “Gridlock Christmas” is far classier than “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and its ilk. It’s well-performed, carefully produced and tasteful (PG-ish overall, with occasional themes of seasonal stress and paranoia, and, in “Mistletoe,” a mildly racy portrait of a would-be office-party Lothario who gets his comeuppance). Perhaps best of all, odds are that nobody on your list already has it.

(Available at Tower Records, Moby Disc and Compact Discs Unlimited).

Hollytones, PO Box 10421, Costa Mesa, Calif., 92627. *** Robert Lucas “Built For Comfort” Audioquest

Success seldom comes in an avalanche for musicians who play traditional blues. But in his own specialized field, Robert Lucas is a snowball slowly gathering momentum.

His 1990 debut album, the self-produced cassette release “Across the River,” introduced Lucas’ powerful vocal style, which pays a respectful nod to tradition while remaining indelibly his own. Two subsequent albums for Audioquest confirmed him as a tremendous harmonica player, a pretty fair guitarist and a well-schooled student of acoustic- and electric-blues styles.

On his fourth album in three years, the mostly acoustic “Built for Comfort,” Lucas comes up with his best songwriting yet, and his slide-guitar style has improved from respectable to impressive. Factor in that big, rusty voice, which steams and gurgles like the radiator in a battered old Cadillac, and a harmonica style as strong and capricious as a gusting wind, and you’ve got a prospect ripe for attention from the blues big leagues.

The seven original songs on “Built for Comfort” find Lucas using handed-down styles to tell his own stories. In the album’s main story line, Lucas sorts through the pain of a romantic rejection, borrowing material from Robert Johnson and Elmore James to carry his theme.

He starts with a measure of ironic bravado, on “Ringing That Lonesome Bell” but winds up in abject sorrow with a closing solo rendition of Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen.” On “Sleeping by Myself,” Lucas mocks his own sorrows with a comically honking harmonica accompaniment.

But the intimate, highly melodic falsetto of the next song, “I Miss You Baby,” lets you know that his suffering is no joke. “Come On in My Kitchen” arrives not merely as a rehashed famous oldie, but as a thematically apt coda for the album--a final, futile call for a lost lover’s return. While he voices the well-known refrain--”you better come in my kitchen, because it’s going to be raining outdoors”--Lucas’ slide bar emits descending, water-streak shivers that indicate the rain is falling not outdoors, but in his grieving soul.

Lucas’ songs of romantic woe are sandwiched around a mid-album digression into topical songwriting. On the bouncing “Blues Man From L.A.,” complete with tuba work by Bonnie Raitt’s old sidekick, Freebo, Lucas stakes a claim to blues authenticity and proves himself by showing his ability to cast an observant, ironic eye on street-level surroundings:

Drunks laughing at the junkies

Rockheads laughing at the whores

Homeless psychos screaming at the sky

Tellin’ God they can’t take no more. With “Change Change,” Lucas uses one of the most deeply rooted styles available, country blues, to express modern feelings of anomie and stressed-out overload. “My Home Is a Burnin’ ” gives a trenchant, darkly surging account of the L.A. riot and its still-combustible aftermath:

My home it is a burnin’

My town it is ablaze

And this anger’s not like smoke

It’s not gonna up and blow away. In one of the album’s characteristically spare band arrangements, ex-James Harman Band drummer Stephen Hodges keeps up a steady, ominous tap-tap-tapping on a drum rim, so that the song itself seems to sit atop a ticking time bomb, just like the city it envisions.

When a musician puts so much raw ability to such good use, there’s only one thing to say: He’s ready.

(Robert Lucas plays acoustic shows Tuesday at the Heritage Brewing Co. in Dana Point and Dec. 26 at Diedrich’s in Tustin. He also plays at the Heritage on Dec. 31 with his electric band, Luke and the Locomotives).

Audioquest, PO Box 3060, San Clemente, Calif., 92647.

** 1/2 The Offspring “Ignition” Epitaph

You needn’t run a blood test to ascertain the parentage of these Offspring. With guitars buzzing in furious but harmonized riffs, chorus vocals mounting anthem-like behind lead singer Bryan Holland, and lyrics about tough sledding through the post-teen-age wasteland, there are distinct echoes of an important Orange County punk-rock forebear, the Adolescents. (Like the Offspring’s 1990 debut album, this one is produced by Thom Wilson, who worked on early-’80s recordings by the Ads and T.S.O.L.).

Holland’s throaty, full-bodied singing has real character that gives the Offspring’s best songs more dimension than typical snarling-punker fare. With a consistently hard-revving instrumental attack behind him, the Offspring have no trouble reaching ignition on their best songs. Most of the highlights come in the first half of the 12-track disc. After that, with melodic punch seemingly spent, sameness sets in and the Offspring begins to lose its special edge. The result, in songs such as “Burn it Up,” “L.A.P.D.” and “Nothing From Something,” is standard-issue fast, Angst -filled punk rock.

On “Dirty Magic,” the album’s standout cut, the Offspring slow the pace as Holland kicks in balefully with a half-wounded, half-disgusted emotional tone that recalls Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. It’s a song about an obsessive, unhealthy love-hate romance. On “Session,” a good, loosely played yowl-along stomper, the obsession is purely sexual. Not being the sort of band that can indulge in animal pleasures without a good deal of worry and reflection, the Offspring wonder whether those lustful but loveless “sessions” are what they really want. On “Get It Right,” the Offspring invoke the original mixed-up kid, Holden Caulfield, as they confess their own youthful alienation and confusion: “Still can’t get it right . . . I swear I never will.”

The world doesn’t need any more self-righteous rock bands, and these songs of self-doubt buy the Offspring room to harp on perceived wrongs without coming off as callow cranks. “Take It Like a Man” expresses a typical theme of suburban punk rock, lashing out at the devil’s bargain that affluence presents: Conform, and you’ll be comfortable and secure. “We Are One” is a Jeremiad against arrogance that might apply to superpower brinkmanship or ecological neglect:

We are one, we are free

We are headed for obscurity

We are one, we are weak

We are gonna make ourselves extinct.” Even here, the sarcasm is tempered by anguish.

It would be good if the Offspring could temper its anxious, critical stance with a few glimmers of humor. With or without that, it needs to develop the creative reach and stamina to deliver a full album’s worth of melodically appealing songs--the extra dimension that separates a consistently listenable musician such as Bob Mould from a one-note anger merchant such as Henry Rollins. This band can do better than the usual hard-and-fast cliches.

(The Offspring play Jan. 2 at the Ice House in Fullerton).

Epitaph, 6201 Sunset Blvd., Suite 111, Hollywood, Calif., 90028.

** 1/2 The Clints “Mysterious Clints Tour” Shattered

The real mystery here is why Shattered, a fledgling label, took half the tracks from the Clints’ 1989 debut album, “No Place Like Home,” and jumbled them in with seven new cuts. Why not give us a real Clints double feature by reissuing “No Place” (which isn’t available on CD) in its entirety, along with the new stuff? Since this CD clocks in at just 38 minutes, it isn’t as if there wasn’t room.

The mysteriously omitted songs (all written and sung by Mark Ambuter, who left the Clints after “No Place Like Home” to form a new band, Jack and Marilyn) would not have intruded upon some grand scheme of stylistic continuity.

The Clints--three guys who’d like you to believe that they all have been named Clint from birth--are an enjoyably offhanded mishmash of a band. They ride hither and yon (no longer, one hopes, in the silly matching Western hats they used to wear on stage) through left-of-center, college-rock terrain that encompasses Clash-like punk, charging psychedelic rock and creaky acoustic sing-alongs that sound like the Grateful Dead gathered around a campfire. None too fussy in their bash-it-out delivery, the Clints make up in tunefulness what they lack in polish.

The new songs are all at least passable, with “Lindquist” and “Swayback Girls” standing out. Somehow, on this ill-packaged collection, it’s not surprising that those are the only new songs whose lyrics didn’t get printed in the CD booklet. Instead, the Clints allow room for inane drawings and an absurd, tongue-in-cheek tale about the band’s alleged tour exploits. The Clints ought to drop all the goofy trappings and just shaddup and play.

Sorry to get sidetracked--but that’s all the Clints accomplish with their corny extracurriculars. Keep them focused on music, and they can churn out good work such as “Lindquist,” a passionate, hard-revving song that seems to be about an abused or abandoned kid’s attempt to reconcile himself with his past (that lyric sheet would have come in handy).

“Swayback Girls” affects a nice merger of “Workingman’s Dead” with Neil Young & Crazy Horse at their most countrified and relaxed--think of “Barstool Blues” from the “Zuma” album. The song is raggedly glorious until its final moment, when somebody undermines the concluding Young-inspired guitar valediction with some ill-advised synthesizer sweetening.

All of this makes the Clints perhaps the most exasperating alternative-rock band in Orange County, but one too good to remain Unforgiven.

(The Clints play Saturday at the Fullerton Hofbrau).

Shattered Records, 646 S. Detroit Ave., Los Angeles, Calif., 90036.