Disneyland Takes a Hit : Dada’s ‘Dizz Knee Land,’ a Sardonic Takeoff on Park’s Ads, Gets Steady Airplay

After 37 years, Disneyland is no longer a mere artifact of culture but a part of the national subconscious. Joie Calio can attest to that.

Calio sings and plays bass in the Los Angeles rock trio dada, which plays tonight at the Coach House. He says the gist of the group’s hit song, “Dizz Knee Land,” came to him in a dream.

Calio, 28, says he has dreamed songs before, “but this was the only time I dragged my ass out of bed at 5 a.m. and grabbed my guitar. I wrote down an idea--I think it was, ‘I just stole your car, and now I’m going to Disneyland’--and I recorded the melody.”

Alternative and album-rock radio stations have been giving steady airplay to “Dizz Knee Land,” with its chiming, charging R.E.M.-meets-U2 guitar riff and its lyrics’ coupling of anguish with sour, dismissive wit.

The song takes off on Disneyland’s ad campaign, wherein a star athlete, having just won the Super Bowl or some such exploit, immediately proclaims, “I’m going to Disneyland!” Instead of leaving Disneyland to the usual assortment of clean-cut jock role models, dada’s song sardonically claims its neatly groomed turf for a collection of anonymous losers, reprobates, criminals, contrarians and ne’er-do-wells: “I just robbed a grocery store--I’m going to Dizz Knee Land/I just flipped off President George--I’m going to Dizz Knee Land.”

Disneyland had many years to seep into Calio’s subconscious before the hit tune presented itself in his dreams.

When he was a toddler, Calio said in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Chico, his family lived at Camp Pendleton, where his father was stationed. “The basic baby-sitting tool of my mom was Disneyland. I’ve seen the Super 8’s of me raising hell (there). I’ve got the movies and the pictures.” The most lingering impression, he said, was “that big mouse made out of carnations. I thought that was 10 acres when I was a kid.”

“Dizz Knee Land” was more immediately inspired, however, by the ad campaign that gave Calio his chorus refrain. “That commercial (‘I’m going to Disneyland!’) was still running during the Iraq war,” said Calio, who wrote the song around that time. “It showed how weird the information is that you receive in your day-to-day life.”

Calio said he hasn’t heard any feedback from the theme park. It wasn’t fear of being hit with a suit for trade-name infringement that led to the altered spelling of Disneyland. Instead, Calio said, the band had been fooling around with the spelling on a recording studio schedule board just to amuse itself, and decided to let the punning title stand.

In tone and style, “Dizz Knee Land” is actually somewhat uncharacteristic of dada’s debut album, “Puzzle.” The hit’s ironic, alienated tone is well attuned to currently fashionable alternative-rock attitude, and its guitar sound is based on familiar ‘80s-rock sources. But much of the rest of the album is steeped in lush romanticism and borrows freely from the pop past--including the decidedly Beatlesque vocal harmonies of Calio and guitarist Michael Gurley.

Overall, dada is more closely aligned with ‘60s-pop throwbacks such as Jellyfish and World Party than with the now-popular brigade of Seattle-style grunge-rock bands.

“Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,” a tall tale about young hopefuls who migrate to Los Angeles, attaches a Lou Reed-style half-spoken hipster’s narration to tremolo guitar licks that take a dip in Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Southern swamp.

In “Puzzle,” Calio starts the song with a furtive bass line that recalls the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.” By the song’s chorus, dada is copping chiming guitar chords from David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.” Gurley, who could be a guitar hero in the making, pays homage to Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits with terse, atmospheric playing on “Dorina,” then offers an adoration of Jimmy Page on the Zep-influenced “Mary Sunshine Rain.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” Calio said of dada’s willingness to let its influences show. “There’s a lot of Beatles, Stones, Doors, Beach Boys, Zeppelin. It’s for real, it’s in us, it’s in our blood. There are some modern bands that shun the Beatles and Stones, but we wanted to be totally ourselves, and (using those influences) is being totally ourselves.

Phil Leavitt, dada’s drummer, “tells people he missed the ‘70s because he spent the whole decade listening to the Beatles. But what’s also in our blood is what’s happening now. We relate to the Pixies, Soul Asylum, Sugar and Screaming Trees. Live, we tend to lean a lot toward those styles.”

Calio and Gurley first met while growing up in the Northern California towns of Saratoga and Los Gatos.

“We went to the same high school, although we didn’t play in a band together until we were about 18, and that was a short-lived, crummy band,” Calio said. Separately, they moved to Los Angeles in the mid-’80s to pursue musical careers. Gurley landed in Louis and Clark, with Louis Gutierrez, now guitarist of Mary’s Danish. When the band needed a bassist, Gurley asked Calio to “show up, bring some beers, and see if you like it.” Calio joined the band, which issued an EP on the Chameleon label.

When Louis and Clark broke up, Calio and Gurley stuck together as a duo.

“We noticed a pattern, where we were jumping from one band to another, and it didn’t have anything to do with making an original statement. So we honed our writing for about a year,” and began playing as an acoustic duo. They recruited Leavitt, formerly with the Los Angeles band Darius, in 1990. Calio said that Ken Scott, who produced three important early-’70s albums for David Bowie--”Hunky Dory,” “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust” and “Aladdin Sane”--took a liking to the band after seeing it live, and produced demo recordings that landed it a deal with I.R.S. Records. Scott also produced most of the songs on “Puzzle.”

In addition to dreaming up songs, dada has been finding inspiration in books and day-to-day life. Calio said that “Posters,” an account of a strange one-night stand, a la “Norwegian Wood,” was based on Gurley’s encounter with “a psycho Hollywood girl, a famous rock girl I can’t name. At least, she’s famous in Hollywood circles. Mike had a date with her, and it was kind of X-rated.”

“Dorina” and “Timothy,” two songs about wounded souls who escape into fantasy, were inspired by literary sources. “‘Dorina’ came out of a Charles Bukowski thing. We wanted to write a song about a barfly hallucination.” Calio said he based “Timothy” on a character from John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“We’re all big readers,” Calio said--which may come as a surprise to the Los Gatos high school authorities he says expelled him for turning up his guitar in the school cafeteria after he’d been told to turn it down. Calio said he eventually earned his diploma from an alternative high school where they didn’t mind so much if you played and sang. “I got my last 2.5 credits for singing a Pink Floyd song at my graduation. I think it was ‘Wish You Were Here.’ ”

If things continue to go dada’s way, Calio will have lots of opportunities to scribble “wish you were here” on postcards from far-flung places.

“We just want to keep touring,” he said. “We like playing in front of people. People have a lot of power when they get close to you. They can influence the course of the night just by getting close to the band and being excited.”

* dada and Lonesome Romeos play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Show time: 8 p.m. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 496-8930.