Will Their Debut Album Bear Fruit? : Band Members’ Hopes Are Modest; They Want Their Self-Produced Release to Establish Their Name

Standard Fruit probably has a better chance of being obliterated onstage by a meteorite than it does of attaining rock stardom any time in the near future.

That doesn’t mean the Orange County band’s modest, self-produced, ultra-low-budget debut album isn’t a delight. One of the year’s best local releases, it is rock music wrought by miniaturists who reject the grand gesture and the sonic blast in favor of intimate, bittersweet, richly melodic songs that charm and seduce instead of seeking to grab a listener by the throat.

No, the enticing pure-pop heard on “Standard Fruit” (*** 1/2 on a scale of ****, in which three stars denotes a solid recommendation) isn’t likely to set off a feeding frenzy among the big record companies, which hunger mainly for red meat from the large, hairy, loudly braying mastodons of grunge rock.

Standard Fruit’s five members see their first album as a calling-card to establish their name and give them a reason to tour the country (manager Sam Lanni has released the album on his own label, Ellis Island Records, and is booking a six-week fall tour). They figure it may take them another self-made album or two before record companies show interest.

While Standard Fruit contemplates progress by the inch, the band member who writes most of the songs has a chance to become a celebrity before the summer is out.

Andrew Lowery, Standard Fruit’s rhythm guitarist and main songwriter, is also a movie actor. In his first leading role, Lowery plays a love-struck zombie in “My Boyfriend’s Back,” a Touchstone Pictures release that opens Aug. 6.

Last year, Lowery launched his film career with supporting parts in “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and “School Ties.” The latter was a memorable turn as a high-spirited preppy at an upper-crust New England boarding school; especially striking was the classroom scene in which his character got reduced to emotional rubble by a vindictive French-language teacher.

Lowery recently finished filming a supporting role in “The Color of Night,” a Bruce Willis vehicle that won’t be released for several months. He was scheduled to fly to Toronto today to begin seven weeks of filming on “JFK: Reckless Youth,” an ABC television miniseries about John F. Kennedy’s early days. Lowery will play Kennedy’s friend, Lem Billings.

The call to start shooting came unexpectedly this week, so the other band members--singer Denys Gawronski, guitarist Clark Fisher, bassist Roger Smith and drummer Ernie Woody--will have to go on without Lowery when they play Friday night at Bogart’s in Long Beach.

“The bottom line is, in about 4 1/2 weeks, either Andrew is going to be a household word, or he’ll be a talented actor looking for another movie to be in,” said Bob Balaban, the veteran actor who directed “My Boyfriend’s Back.”

(The film is a romantic comedy in which Lowery expires from a gunshot wound moments after the unrequited love of his life, honoring his dying request, agrees to go to the high-school prom with him. Thus encouraged, he returns from the grave to keep the date.)

*

If Lowery’s film career is a matter of occasional inconvenience for Standard Fruit, it also is an excuse for humorous banter within the band.

A free-flowing but amiable exchange of insults was the rule as the band members gathered recently at what they’ve dubbed the Fruit Farm, a combination recording studio and living quarters in Anaheim occupied by Woody.

“I go away and it’s like a vacation to me,” Lowery said of his double life as actor and rocker. “I do (a film), then I can’t stand it anymore and I come back and do this.”

“And for us, it’s a vacation from Lowery,” added Gawronski.

“That’s right,” the impish-looking Lowery retorted. “And you can go back to your mediocre little lives.”

Smith got in the last word: “Tell us about it, zombie.”

Such exchanges apparently are standard procedure for Standard Fruit. During a show at Bogart’s last month, in which scores of friends, fans and family had turned out to celebrate the release of the band’s album, Lowery warmly thanked the audience, then had to reassure them that he meant it. “I know I’m usually a snide, sarcastic (expletive) but this is really from the bottom of my heart,” he said.

The volleying of insults is “pretty much how it goes,” when the band members get together, said Gawronski, who shares a house in Fullerton with Lowery. “We all get along well enough that we can do that without getting our feelings hurt.”

Actually, Gawronski, another professional actor, came in for more ribbing than Lowery during the interview.

In concert, the bulky singer has the bearing of a gentle panda until it’s time for his chest-baring freakout on the Led Zeppelin sendup Standard Fruit uses as a set-closing foil to its carefully etched, mid-tempo originals. Gawronski is also a member of the Serendipity Theater Company, a children’s ensemble in Los Angeles. He currently is appearing as a very large mouse.

On stage, Gawronski and Lowery typically rein in their actorly impulses. Loose but endearing when it emerged on the scene early in 1991, Standard Fruit has developed into a tight, craftsman-like band in which putting across the songs comes before flamboyant display.

“I used to be much more goofy than I am now. I’m much more relaxed, and I don’t feel the need to play the joker,” Gawronski said. “It’s much more my own personality up on stage than it was a year ago.”

“If you try to play the songs well and get them across, then everything follows,” Lowery added. “You don’t have to rely on gimmicks. If you try to make impressions, you kind of lose it.

“When we first played,” Lowery said, “we’d throw things at the audience, and dress (Gawronski) up as a Christmas tree. It started getting us (regarded) as a joke band. We started making better songs, and (we didn’t) have to do that.”

*

Standard Fruit’s album showcases a band with an uncommon gift for melody.

Like the best pop, “Abilene” and “Brand New Baby Waltz” begin with an engaging hook, then build upon it with fresh melodic ideas, each one appearing as a delightful surprise as the song unfolds.

Well-honed song craft, neglected by too many bands that seem to think you need just one catchy hook (if that) to carry a track, is alive throughout “Standard Fruit.”

The lyrics, mostly by Lowery, but with contributions from Fisher and Smith, are mainly character sketches, alternately humorous and poignant.

In the sadly gorgeous “Abilene” (which will be used in the soundtrack to “My Boyfriend’s Back”), a young woman stagnates and decays in a small town she can’t escape. The next song, “Bird,” surges with the enthusiasm and anticipation of a young couple leaving their old home behind, with high hopes for the future.

The love songs have an appealing hangdog humor to them. The edgiest rocker, “Little League,” was inspired by a run-in Lowery had three years ago with some thuggish characters while he was riding his bike in Placentia, the town where he grew up.

“I got chased down by these jocko guys who tried to run me over while their girlfriends followed in another car, watching,” he recalled. “It was about five minutes of pure hell” that ended with Lowery taking a punch in the head.

Without referring to any of the specifics of the incident it grew out of, the song asserts, with a mixture of pride and tongue-in-cheek humor, that good taste and intelligence will triumph over brutishness.

The Little League goons are out tonight,

And we will beat them with our love of romance language,

And our love of light.

In the rock world, the musical equivalent of those Little League goons is the blatant force and distortion of grunge rock. Does Standard Fruit have a chance with a refined approach in which melody, sense and clarity come first?

“We are the alternative to the ‘alternative,’ ” said Smith, who, at 25, is the band’s youngest member (Fisher and Woody are 27, Lowery and Gawronski both 29). “All we can do is what we like, and this is what we like.”

Band members cite the likes of R.E.M., the Smiths, Camper van Beethoven, Miracle Legion, and the Trash Can Sinatras as rockers they enjoy.

Lowery sees no need to add extra brawn to the music, a formula that has resulted in huge hits for such bands as Pearl Jam and Nirvana, in which good pop instincts combine with grunge-rock distortion and density.

“If you play fast, it sounds noisy, it gets garbly,” he said. “We’ve learned how to play songs that are maybe not fast, but they build in intensity so you get the impression it’s rockin.’ We’re more interested in melodies, things that are hummable.”

Standard Fruit’s roots go back to the theater program at Fullerton College, where Lowery, Gawronski and Fisher all were enrolled in the late-’80s.

Gawronski went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at UCLA; Lowery got an agent and started landing television roles after earning an associate’s degree at Fullerton. Fisher is now a sound and lighting technician at Founders Hall, a small theater within the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

*

A mutual friend brought Lowery and Smith together, and they started a band called Laughing Boy five or six years ago. They eventually recruited Fisher, then Gawronski, and launched Standard Fruit in 1990.

Woody became a fan of the band, then joined it in 1991, after the original drummer, Jerry Renek, left to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Should Lowery’s zombie film become a hit and establish him as a star (an outcome he considers unlikely), Standard Fruit will have a chance to raise its profile immediately.

But Lowery and manager Lanni are leery of tying the band’s identity too closely to his film career. The last thing they want is a perception that Standard Fruit is merely the hobby of some Hollywood dilettante looking for a hip way to fill his spare time.

“I don’t want to get the stigma that the band is going somewhere because he’s in movies,” said Lanni, a fixture on the Orange County alternative-rock scene since his mid-’80s days as a partner in Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach.

“That’s the worst thing that could happen. The band has to look honest about their music, which they are,” Lanni said. “I want to make sure that image stays. Him being in the movie business will help get them publicity, but I still want to keep the image of honest guys playing music.”

“I always liked music better,” Lowery said. “I make money at acting.” Having released its album a few weeks ago, Standard Fruit can point to tangible evidence that it was a serious, creatively accomplished band before the public had ever seen Lowery in a starring role.

Not that Lowery expects, or even wants, to become famous playing an amorous dead person.

“If this movie made me a star, I’d be in big trouble,” he said, noting that it could typecast him in pictures geared, like “My Boyfriend’s Back,” for teen-age, date-night audiences.

“Most actors I like are not big stars,” Lowery said. “They’re just actors and they go and do it. I’d rather just be perceived as good.

“I have a healthy fear of fame,” he added. “With the band, it’s five people, and you could all shoulder it if (fame) was to happen.”

* Standard Fruit plays Friday at 9:30 p.m., opening for Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and Girl Trouble, at Bogart’s, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. (310) 594-8975.