POP MUSIC REVIEW : Downbeat With Thelonious Monster

The sign outside may have said Bogart’s, but from the tenor of Thelonious Monster’s concert, you would have thought that band leader Bob Forrest and the group were spending their Saturday night in Heartbreak Hotel or on Desolation Row.

Thelonious’ current album is called “Beautiful Mess,” but this show was far more messy than beautiful. Forrest being Forrest, however, the 70-minute set was never less than interesting, and to the credit of his Monster mates--guitarists Dix Denney and Chris Handsome, drummer Pete Weiss, and bassist Don Burnet, a show that seemed in imminent danger of turning into a train wreck never quite skipped the tracks. In fact, the band’s gritty performance offered rock far more satisfying than most slicker stuff that goes off like clockwork.

Thelonious faced problems both internal (Forrest informed the packed house that he and lead guitarist Denney “got in a scuffle” before the show) and aural (band members had a hard time hearing themselves clearly on stage, prompting Denney at one point to send a roll of duct tape whizzing past the sound man’s ear). But the band kept its cohesiveness, and the sound in the house itself actually was decent, at least near the board run by that tape-ducking sound man.

Forrest cut a somewhat wobbly, uncertain figure, cradling a Budweiser bottle and a pack of Marlboros so snugly in each hand that you would have thought that they were two ends of a security blanket. With his stringy, wizened, cracking voice registering more weariness than usual, he sang of emotional exhaustion, defeat and loss, anger and damnation.

He left out the tempered, hard-won sense of affirmation that occasionally brightens Thelonious’ repertoire. The 14-song set didn’t include such songs of hope and fellowship as “Hang Tough,” “Lena Horne Still Sings Stormy Weather” or the new “Vegas Weekend.”

Which isn’t to say it was a show without humor--albeit humor as a defense mechanism. Casting himself as an underachieving rock underdog (which he pretty much has been throughout Thelonious’ four-album career), Forrest tossed out many a barb about Lollapalooza-anointed rockers who once were no less ragged than he, but now are rich.

“Sammy Hagar Weekend,” Forrest’s teen memoir of a day spent getting blasted at an Anaheim Stadium rock show, was recast as “Perry Farrell Weekend”--the idea being that the “earth dog” music that served the dumb-rock needs of kids in the ‘70s, when Forrest attended Marina High School in Huntington Beach, now has its corporate equivalent in the big-stage Lollapalooza “alternative” extravaganzas that Farrell organizes.

While his old running mates in the Red Hot Chili Peppers have found rock’s penthouse, Forrest holds forth as if from a crumbling curbstone. Offering a handy marketing tag for Thelonious Monster’s brand of music, he announced “this new form of rock . . . we created this thing for losers like ourselves, called ‘Slacker Rock.’ It’s for people who went to college and didn’t get a job and live at their parents’ house and borrow money from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and stuff.”

Singing “Radio Radio,” Elvis Costello’s rant against the tendency of the airwaves to spew dross, Forrest couldn’t muster any rage, singing instead in softer tones that signaled powerlessness and resignation. In the show’s most poignant moment, he howled and moaned and hacked his way through “Mellow My Mind,” culled from Neil Young’s harrowing “Tonight’s the Night” album. The original version found Young blearily trying to find some comfort amid the classic album’s pervasive darkness and pain. Forrest sang “Mellow My Mind” in a wrecked voice that squeaked and cracked, yet seemed brave in its refusal to succumb to the embarrassment of its own limitations. The performance called to mind one of Tom Waits’ heartbroken Skid Row confessions.

Having failed to mellow his mind, Forrest took the band down a stormy path on which rumbling, rough-hewn playing formed a backdrop for a mounting display of mental agitation, culminating with Forrest cursing Jesus over and over during a raucous version of the Blind Lemon Jefferson blues classic, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.”

There was far more pain than mockery in Forrest’s rant, which ended with his admonishing the audience to heed a substitute Golden Rule that might make life more tolerable in his presumably Godless world: “Try treating (other people) like you treat your dog.”

Toward the end of the set, Forrest stepped away from the band and sang “Ain’t Never Been Nuthin’ for Me in This World,” a song from “Beautiful Mess” in which he both laments and accepts his terminal alienation: “Ain’t never been nothin’ for me, and there never will be--but that’s all right.”

As he sang, he came close to wedging his head between a ceiling beam and the edge of a suspended public address speaker, as if he was fitting himself for a noose. But with the rest of Thelonious Monster revving hard with a funk-flavored thrust, Forrest, alone as he seemed at that moment, kept stomping his feet to the beat, anchored by music to the disappointing yet perhaps livable earth.

In contrast to Thelonious Monster’s night of off-kilter wallowing, the Darling Buds played a sharp, glitch-free, note-perfect set of catchy, appealing songs. But not one of them cut below the surface to summon the conviction, feeling, risk and spontaneity that permeated Thelonious Monster’s set.

That’s not to say the superficial pleasures of the Buds’ 45-minute set should be dismissed. Singer Andrea Lewis’ airy voice was tempered by just enough sturdy ballast to let it hold up amid the now gently thrumming, now densely textured double-guitar attack mounted by Harley Farr and Matt Gray. But Lewis’ songs about the upsets, obsessions and idealism of post-adolescent romance seemed studied and detached rather than fully involved, as if she either hasn’t experienced all that she sang about, or was unable to find the vocal and lyrical means to render her experiences vivid.

“If I had a reason, I’d kill for love,” she sang during “Long Day in the Universe,” but her entire performance was too temperate to make one believe the claim was anything but hypothetical, or that she would ever really go to such extremes.

While the Darling Buds’ current album is called “Erotica,” just like Madonna’s, Lewis’ act, which involved occasional bouncing, shimmying and shaking of long blond hair, was more like a wholesomely aerobic cheerleader routine than Madonna-style stage eroticism.

In fact, there was virtually no connection, erotic or otherwise, between Lewis and her proficient band mates. Farr did try. The tall guitarist, who founded the band with Lewis in 1986, leaned his head toward the singer’s shoulder during “Gently Fall,” as if seeking support. Well he might, because in the lyric Lewis offers a troubled friend or lover comfort and a shoulder to cry on. But she gave Farr the cold shoulder, absently staring straight ahead and shaking a tambourine as if his gesture toward closeness meant nothing.

The Darling Buds’ influences have changed from Blondie-meets-the-Go-Gos garage-pop, as heard in 1988 on the band’s debut album “Pop Said . . .” to melodic noise-pop a la the Jesus and Mary Chain and Ride on “Crawdaddy” (1990) and “Erotica.” Fans who would rather dip their ears in chiffon than toxic sludge might prefer Lewis’ female version of the journey through post-adolescent sex and love to the snarling impact and banshee screams of Hole, Babes in Toyland and L7.

But even better bets are Juliana Hatfield and the Breeders, who offer both pop appeal and a sense of personal revelation--the one quality missing from the Darling Buds’ accomplished, alluring, but ultimately superficial set.

(The Darling Buds play tonight at the Roxy, 9009 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. (310) 276-2222).

Naked Soul, from Costa Mesa, opened with its usual unassuming but sonically hefty style of power-trio rock.

The strangled emotion in singer-guitarist Mike Conley’s raspy cries inevitably recalls former Replacements’ front man Paul Westerberg. Naked Soul struck a good balance of melody and clout, but among its originals, only “Lonely Me, Lonely You,” the video-featured track from the band’s debut EP “Seed” really sticks in the mind.

Naked Soul will need to generate a more consistent flow of enticing material to compete with such leading tough-but-melodic alternative-rock trios as Sugar and the Lemonheads. The half-hour set included some well-chosen, avoiding-the-obvious covers--the Who’s “So Sad About Us,” the Rolling Stones’ “Connection” and a Robyn Hitchcock song, “Tell Me About Your Drugs.” The latter two allowed Naked Soul to vent some ire, in contrast to the plaintive tone that marks most of the band’s own material.