The Great, and the Not-So-Great, Outdoors : O.C. pop music review: Eleven bands play the KROQ Weenie Roast & Sing-A-Long, and 5 are disappointing.

As we’ve learned from the Lollapalooza tours, marathon “alternative rock” concerts, whatever their carnival value, tend to be more miss than hit when it comes to the music.

A lot of today’s Angst -fueled, youth-oriented rockers simply can’t--or don’t know how to--thrive in daylight or in big venues.

That’s how it was Saturday at Irvine Meadows, where they staged the Pre-Palooza, otherwise known as KROQ’s First Annual Weenie Roast & Sing-A-Long.

First, let’s run the numbers. Eight hours, 11 acts, 0 delays. Of the 11, three were impressive (X, Terence Trent D’Arby, Bettie Serveert). Two were solid (Stone Temple Pilots, Rocket From the Crypt). One wasn’t bad (The The). Five, all power-poppers undermined by rotten sound as well as more intrinsic problems, were disappointing, though not truly awful (Dramarama, the Gin Blossoms, the Posies, the Lemonheads and Suede in descending order of appeal).

Let’s talk about the better stuff first.

* X, flexing its muscle as well as its pride of place as the original spearhead of West Coast alternative rock, hit the spot with a ferocious show-closing onslaught of straight punk. X’s pummeling, 53-minute set sounded much like 12 rounds with Smokin’ Joe Frazier must have felt. But as a result, the band, mounting a comeback with an aggressive new album, “Hey Zeus!” ignored the strong anthem-rock of its middle period that accounted for some of the best, most melodic songs of its career.

X, which began in 1977 (two years before KROQ) was the only leader on a bill of confirmed followers. Only X could lay claim to leadership, to a signature sound that has allowed it to be influential in its own right. At the heart of that sound is the harmony blend between Exene Cervenka and John Doe. Cervenka, moving like a Bohemian rag doll in black dress and candy-stripe stockings, and Doe, a Samurai bassist in a bandanna headband, sang more forcefully than ever--which is why it would have been nice to hear them essay a soaring anthem such as “Fourth of July,” “See How We Are” or “The New World.” However, we’ll settle for a howling “The Hungry Wolf” any time.

The two singers were so polite toward the audience that all the sheer niceness seemed a tad suspicious. They’ve evidently decided that, for a band trying to re-establish its career with a younger generation of fans, honey will draw more bees than customary punk vinegar. But the vinegar’s still in the playing.

* Terence Trent D’Arby asserted his immense, if not yet fully realized, talent. After a promising 1987 debut and a precipitous 1989 sophomore slump, D’Arby appears to have re-established himself as a pop force to be reckoned with.

Greeted tepidly, he earned the crowd’s attention and applause with kinetic dancing and a merger of tough rock and gritty soul, along with a touch of softer, Rod Stewart-like warmth. A poor sound mix couldn’t diminish the force of his band’s trenchant, bass-driven grooves.

* The Dutch band, Bettie Serveert, played an endearing, unaffected and affecting set of Velvet Underground-inspired garage-rock. That made it the class of the day’s large and rather disappointing power-pop contingent.

Unlike Dramarama, the Posies and the Gin Blossoms, three good and far more musically accomplished bands, Bettie Serveert had the courage to attempt ballads in daylight, and the good instincts to build interest-sustaining changes of tempo and dynamics into its songs.

Yes, the drummer is barely competent. But, what matters more, all the players showed spirit and intensity, and the band’s limited resources found a sharp focus in Carol van Dijk--a wistful singer who was direct, unpretentious and unschooled to the point of awkwardness. The result was complete believability for her steady-rocking tales of vulnerability (Bettie Serveert headlines at Bogart’s on Thursday).

* The Stone Temple Pilots, easily the favorite of a sell-out house of 15,000, proved that they are the Billy Joels of grunge--no insult (well, maybe just a little insult) intended. Like Joel, the Pilots (who enjoyed the day’s only perfect sound mix) distilled what’s most accessible in a very popular form and recycled it, making up for an utter absence of stylistic originality with skill, savvy and intense effort.

Singer Weiland, who dyes his shorn hair a bright pink and hails from Huntington Beach, may not have quite the lung-power or dervish presence of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, but he is no slouch on either count.

Much of the time STP sounds like a melodically enriched Soundgarden, or an Alice in Chains without the numbness. It’s no wonder that the Pilots’ debut album, “Core,” has closed in on the Top 10.

Rookie uncertainty showed only between songs, when Weiland, trying to sound subversive, came off sounding merely cranky. He said something pointless about the drug LSD, and he groused that the audience was “all-white, good-lookin’ and (it) looks like you’ve got a lot of money.” That was probably a generally true statement, even in recessionary Orange County, and, judging from the uneasy silence that greeted it, Weiland’s pointless and gratuitous indictment succeeded in instilling a measure of the useless guilt he intended.

If Weiland is serious about wanting to play for a more diverse audience--and influencing his fans to take diversity seriously--we trust he’ll use some of his band’s profits to provide youth groups in ghettos, barrios and Indian reservations with tickets and transportation to all future Stone Temple Pilots concerts.

(By the way, good-looking and rich as they may have been, some in the crowd behaved like dolts, throwing stuff at the performers, and mindlessly hurling objects, including fruit and a half-filled water bottle, into the rows below them.)

* Rocket From the Crypt played an uneven but still memorable set. This hard-driving, workingman’s punk band from San Diego wielded two guitars and a bass as if they were sledgehammers, yet without the sense of monolithic dumbness that infects grunge.

These guys are more into the Beatles than Black Sabbath, although they’re too caught up in roughing it to pay unstinting tribute to such an elegant influence.

The slamming, countrified waltz, “Ditch Digger,” and “Hippy Dippy Do,” with its messed-up Beatles riffing, were among the day’s meatiest helpings of rock ‘n’ roll.

*

The current market cachet of rock that puts might before subtlety was evident not just in the crowd’s enthusiasm for Stone Temple Pilots, but in the extent to which most of the other acts on the bill, including D’Arby, X and almost all of the power-poppers, seemed intent on emphasizing clout over finesse.

For elegance, you had to turn to The The. This urbane, philosophically minded British band offered some power moves early in its second-billed set, but its best moments came with lighter, acoustic textures that emphasized melody.

“Slow Emotion Replay” and “Uncertain Smile” were highlights, the latter featuring expansive, jazz-tinged piano excursions by D.C. Collard that called to mind “Low Spark”-era Traffic.

Bandleader Matt Johnson was as bald and craggy as Captain Picard of the starship Enterprise, and nearly as low-keyed. He sang with the theatrical, chesty drone common among British rockers of limited vocal range.

The The made for a nice contrast on this bill (with harmonica used for color as well as the featured piano). But it hit a mid-set trough of subdued, same-sounding songs, and ultimately failed to make Johnson’s ideas vivid despite a well-constructed sound.

While KROQ deserves credit for making the trains run on time, most of the good audio engineers must have been left at the depot; only a handful of acts enjoyed anything approaching crisp sound. That resulted in a fairly miserable day for the electric guitar, which was much employed but seldom clearly heard.

Maybe this was some kind of karmic pay back for all those years when KROQ served a main course of indigestible techno-pop piffle, a style that, thankfully, was not represented on this bill.

*

John Easdale of Dramarama has had better days. Introduced as “the KROQ house band,” these longtime Southland favorites received an enthusiastic welcome and played a muscular, if horribly mixed, set.

But the image that will stick is of Easdale discovering a heretofore unknown hazard of tobacco. Intent on tossing individual smokes to the crowd as the band played its finale, “Last Cigarette,” Easdale forgot to look where he was going and took a frightening header off the stage. He quickly emerged, apparently not seriously hurt in the roughly six-foot fall, and waved to the crowd.

Maybe the gods of performance were warning him that he should find a more imaginative approach to stage craft than the studied, literal-minded smoking rituals he invariably enacts during “Last Cigarette” (kneeling as if in prayer during a new song called “Prayer” gets him no more points for imagination, but at least it’s safer).

The lyrics to “Prayer” and several other songs from Dramarama’s new album, “Hi-Fi-Sci-Fi,” suggest that there are much worse addictions than tobacco (the album is in part an account of stepping back from a precipice of extremist behavior). Unfortunately, few of those lyrics were discernible.

Although Dramarama’s urgency and knack for the melodic hook remained to give the set some basic merit, drummer Clem Burke’s brutally over-miked bashing intruded on Easdale’s singing and gobbled up the efforts of two guitarists and a piano player. It was sort of like Pac-Man, only with musical instruments.

The day’s other major accident involved the seat of Terence Trent D’Arby’s fancy, skin-hugging, black velvet pants. They split at the seam during the first of the many marvelous dance displays that spiced his set.

D’Arby already resembles Prince in his confidence with rock, soul and psychedelic pop, and in his ability as a frenzied hoofer. The yellow shirttails and black underwear he was wearing saved him from further mimicking Prince in the matter of on-stage tush-baring.

D’Arby generated the heat, and some of the gritty vocal mannerisms, of a Tina Turner in his cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” There’s plenty of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke in there, too, making him a legitimate heir in the line of great soul singers.

“She Kissed Me,” from the typically pretentious but nevertheless tasty new album, “Symphony or Damn,” showed D’Arby’s touch with raw, straight-ahead rock. He established that he can do rock and funk well; the waltz-time “I Still Love You” offered a tender, country-folk-pop amalgam that recalled the “Mandolin Wind” side of Rod Stewart.

More simple, from-the-heart stuff like that, and fewer sex-god affectations (yes, the dancing included multiple crotch-grabs) would become D’Arby. The man’s talent is unquestionable. His challenge is finding the right presentation, the right personal voice, the something that will allow his music to take on meaning beyond the sum of its considerable parts.

As for the rest:

* The Posies’ Beatles-inspired harmonies were luscious; their application of heavy-handed distortion-guitar was, if not quite inept, at least not apt.

Members of this pogo-hopping Seattle band recently took part in a reunion of the legendary ‘70s band Big Star. If they could make guitars sing the way Big Star alumnus Alex Chilton does, they’d be on to something. The Posies have enough pop savvy to write listenable songs (their best, “Dream All Day,” sounded suspiciously like “California Dreamin’ ”).

But little of it sticks. Partners Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow added some lively, if catty, commentary to the party by mocking the Stone Temple Pilots for mimicking Seattle grunge bands.

* The Gin Blossoms, from Tempe, Ariz., have a gem of a singer in Robin Wilson--his voice naturally plaintive but firm and sturdy. Wilson sounded best when supported by Byrds-like harmonies, which didn’t happen enough.

And the lead guitar, or what could be heard of it, was all generic, imitation Neil Young stuff, a style that is not only way overdone, but overdone better elsewhere.

* The Lemonheads, well-received by the crowd, undermined good, varied pop material with a washed-out performance.

“I feel reserved for some reason. Imagine feeling reserved with all these people around,” admitted singer Evan Dando. Is it worth pointing out that, with tickets going for more than $25, some attempt at self-motivation on the performer’s part would seem to be in order?

* If you liked David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, you’ll probably yawn when you see Suede, the young British band fronted by Ziggy II, uh, Brett Anderson. Similar stagy vocal style, similar serpentine, seemingly spineless physique, similar exploration of ambisexual ambiguities, similar garagy backup. Except that Bowie had the spark of newness and the daring of probing little-charted territory, and this guy doesn’t. That said, Bowie probably wouldn’t have minded writing the catchy “Metal Mickey,” either then or now.

The “Weenie Roast” was a benefit, with proceeds going to the environmental group Heal the Bay. There was no announcement of the amount raised.