One Hit Wonder Tries for Longevity : The Four Musicians Are Ready to Step Forward After Local Careers in Supporting Roles

If confidence is half the battle, Dan Root appeared to be on the verge of surrender last month as he stood in the hallway at Bogart’s, moments before going on stage with the new local band One Hit Wonder.

“I can’t sing,” Root announced, in a tone of voice that suggested he wasn’t referring to a momentary disability, but to an immutable fact of life.

During the bracing, 40-minute show that followed, however, Root did sing, on key and with unself-conscious urgency, as he shared lead vocals and blended in ragged-but-right harmony with One Hit Wonder’s other singer-guitarist, Robbie Allen. With bassist Randy Bradbury and drummer Chris Webb providing a solid anchor, One Hit Wonder was able to rev through hard charging, punk-influenced rockers or slow the pace for love songs and narrative ballads steeped in Allen’s country and folk influences. Notwithstanding Root’s momentary, off-stage expression of doubt, the set suggested that the four musicians who make up One Hit Wonder are ready to step forward after local careers as players in supporting roles.

Root, Allen, Bradbury and Webb all served hitches in Tender Fury, where they backed bandleader Jack Grisham, one of the most colorful performers on the local rock scene. Allen and Root also played behind Keith Morris, the former Circle Jerks singer, in his band, Bug Lamp. Allen has had some previous experience in the spotlight, sharing vocals with D.D. Wood a few years ago in the country-flavored band Gypsy Trash. But One Hit Wonder is the first serious showcase for his and Root’s ability as singers and songwriters.

“I’m not a good singer,” Root said as he, Allen, and Bradbury sat over beers recently in a Seal Beach bar. “Robbie’s a more confident singer, and he helps me. If I get to a tough part and Robbie’s vocals come in, it gives me confidence.”

Root, a capable riff-slinger who shows a bit of braggadocio when the subject swings to guitar playing, realizes that in rock you don’t need a golden throat to get by.

“There are people like Paul Westerberg and Bob Dylan, people who aren’t the greatest singers, but have something to say and just do it. We may be lacking that (flamboyant) front man standing there, but we make up for it with twice as much music.”

Allen’s long, craggy, weathered face befits his singing style, which brims with drawled, gravelly, boozy emotion. Root is tall and slender like his counterpart, but has soft brown eyes and a more youthful appearance (if Allen looks as if he’s put on a lot of mileage for a man in his late 20s, it may be because he has: For the past six years he’s made his living as a roadie for the much-traveled Red Hot Chili Peppers).

At this point in its brief and sporadic history, One Hit Wonder sits on a low rung of the local scene, playing opening slots in clubs for better-established bands (including a show at Bogart’s tonight headlined by Xtra Large). How far One Hit Wonder can advance, its two front men agree, depends on how ready alternative rock fans are for a band that cherishes the well-wrought song rather than relying, as many bands in the grunge age do, on an engulfing raw sound or sensational stage antics.

“It’s image first, or else people want something to get them moving, that has a good groove,” Root said, laying out what he sees as the prevailing requirements for initial success.

“The first thing we said was, ‘We’re going to have the songs come first.’ If it means we start off slower, that’s OK. We’re not going to just come up with a groove and not have the melodies. You hear a band like that live, and everybody will be into it. Then you hear the album, and it’s garbage.”

“I want to make music that people want to listen to at home. To do that, we need a record deal,” Allen added. “In order for the band to work, there has to be an album, as opposed to this huge street thing of ‘These guys just rock.’ (One Hit Wonder) is beautiful music and good songs, and if people can’t get it, (expletive) ‘em.”

Root made a striking impression on Allen the first time they met, when both were attending (studying might be too strong a word, given their accounts of shirking schoolwork and majoring in guitar before dropping out short of graduation) at Huntington Beach High School.

“I would sit out on the lawn, a typical hippie, sitting there and playing my guitar,” Allen recalled. “Dan Root walked up in red, polyester plastic pants. He said, ‘Can I check out your ax?’ He hit a chord and said, ‘Cool ax, dude,’ and walked away.”

The two didn’t hook up musically until several years later, when they both wound up in Cathedral of Tears, a Gothic-rock band led by Grisham. That evolved into the harder-edged Tender Fury, which featured Allen on bass and Root on guitar.

Both have their share of tales to tell about the mercurial Grisham. Allen once landed in the hospital after Grisham flung a large speaker at him during an argument and it him in the back, leading to Allen’s forced exit from the band. Allen later patched things up with the apologetic singer, and even returned to play in a later version of Tender Fury that also included Bradbury and Webb.

“We learned a lot playing with Jack,” Root said. “He’s a great showman and the most fun person I’ve ever played with.”

In Tender Fury, and later in Bug Lamp, the songs Allen and Root wrote would be vetoed or tinkered with by the respective band leaders. In One Hit Wonder, they finally have control of their own material. When the band started last spring, Allen and Root both had a backlog of songs to contribute. Bradbury also has written music for the band.

A five-song demo One Hit Wonder recorded about a month after it formed is full of keepers.

“Where’s the World?,” written by Root and sung mainly by Allen, is a hard-driving protest against environmental degradation. It carries a sense of immediacy, anguish and personal loss that most rockers only muster for songs about their own romantic troubles.

On the quieter side, Allen’s “Three Days,” an account of missing his girlfriend while traveling with the Chili Peppers, is a winsomely folksy, harmony-based tune that sounds as if it could be a lost track from “Preflyte,” the charming, offhanded Byrds album that compiled that historic band’s earliest demo recordings.

Allen shows a promising knack for embellishing personal material with flights of imagination on the striking “El Capitan,” an elegiac ballad in the mold of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Allen said his father, an anthropologist, has requested that after he dies his ashes be taken to his native New Mexico and scattered from atop a mesa called El Capitan. As the song unfolds, we find that the dutiful son carrying out that wish isn’t a rocker who grew up in Seal Beach, but a character drawn from Old West lore. In a concise but complex and resonant narrative, Allen turns the protagonist into a killer on the run--a remorseful killer who grieves over having broken the moral code handed down by his father. Having failed in that crucial obligation, all that’s left for him, in this poignant story, is to carry out his father’s funerary wish. The chorus ends with a vision of the dead father’s spirit flying on the wind, set free from the earthly troubles that the singer can’t escape.

“It’s a heavy song,” Allen said. “The outlaw part of it (stems from) a feeling you get on the road. You start to feel like you’re different, that you can do things you normally can’t get away with.” Pressed for details on life as a Chili Peppers roadie, Allen demurred: “You don’t want to hear about it.”

Allen started working for the Red Hot Chili Peppers six years ago as their on-tour T-shirt salesman. At the time, the band was a struggling cult act. Now, thanks to the success of the album “Blood Sex Sugar Majik,” the Chili Peppers are arena headliners and Allen, now the band’s guitar technician, says his job is “just a cakewalk” that earns him $1,000 a week for keeping the guitars in tune and lending a hand with on-stage backing vocals. “I’ve been around the world three times--Australia, Japan and Europe about eight times. For people to pay you to do that is great, and the party is always where you’re at. I’ve been spoiled.”

However, Allen’s opportunity to see the world for fun and profit has been a detriment in launching One Hit Wonder. Since the band formed, he has been away most of the time with the Chili Peppers, including their headlining engagement on the Lollapalooza ’92 tour.

“I understand it, and I don’t hate him for it, but I don’t appreciate it,” Root said of Allen’s prolonged absences. “We’ve got to get this band going. We’ve been together seven months and rehearsed just three months, and that’s bad.”

“It’s so hard to pass up. The money was just too good,” Allen said. “I know it hurt everything else, but when I got back (from touring), I had the financial security to work on (One Hit Wonder).” Allen is scheduled to go off again in a few days for a two-week touring jaunt to Brazil with the Chili Peppers. But after that, he said, the band will be off for about a year, leaving him free to concentrate on One Hit Wonder.

Allen used some of his bankroll from the Chili Peppers job to pay for the band’s demo recording, and his connections helped One Hit Wonder win a performing slot on the Lollapalooza’s second stage on the closing day of the tour in September at Irvine Meadows. The rest of One Hit Wonder makes its living in less glamorous circumstances--Root delivering imported beer to Indian restaurants, Bradbury fixing home appliances and Webb laying tile.

“We don’t want to be delivering beer; we don’t want to be repairing stoves, and we don’t want to be hefting guitars for the Chili Peppers,” Allen said. “I realize with this band, it’s not going to be” the royal road he’s become accustomed to lately in his job as a well-paid roadie. “It’ll be six stinky guys in a van, driving around America. I don’t mind that.”

Xtra Large, One Hit Wonder and Dirt Clod play tonight at 9:30 at Bogart’s, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. $10. (310) 594-8975.