Missiles of October Aims for the Top : The Band of Boomers Looks to Make an Impact Outside of Laguna Beach

You’d expect a band called the Missiles of October to be made up of politicized young punkers or grunge rockers playing songs attuned to the name’s explosive historical connotations.

Instead, the band from Laguna Beach is made up of four literally grizzled veterans of the Orange County club scene. They’re all in their 40s, old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, those scary days during October, 1962, when a nuclear shootout between the Americans and the Soviets seemed imminent.

But the Missiles’ themes aren’t political, and the band’s sound isn’t measured in megatonnage. Instead, it mainly deploys moderately amplified acoustic guitars in an extremely well-wrought merger of folk, rock, blues and soul that ranges between Bob Dylan and Van Morrison as key influences and comes out sounding something like John Hiatt.

That’s not to say musical explosions don’t go off when the Missiles play. During the past two years, the band has built an avid following at its home base, the cozy Marine Room Tavern, where it plays every Thursday night and Sunday afternoon.

“It’s craziness,” says Kelly Boyd, the Marine Room’s owner. “By the time they get to the last set, the people are on their feet, and there usually are 30 people in the street, leaning in and listening to them” through the packed club’s doorway.

“A lot of people who just happened to be walking by on a Sunday afternoon heard them, came in, and saw a set or two, and I’m seeing them return,” Boyd said. “What started as a local following has turned into a lot of people from out of town coming in to see them from as far away as San Diego and L.A.”

That’s quite an accomplishment for a band that is geared for listening rather than dancing. The Missiles play a mixture of originals by the band’s singer and founder, Poul Finn Pedersen, and covers drawn from an impeccable array of influences, including Dylan, Morrison and Hiatt, as well as Richard Thompson and John Prine.

Pedersen is a singer of abundant range and soulful conviction, and a couple of his originals, “Look at Daddy Run” and “Back to the Basics,” are melodically irresistible, emotionally trenchant songs that sound like potential hits. (So does “Bad Seeds,” a never-recorded composition by San Diego songwriter Jack Tempchin, an old associate of Pedersen and the other Missiles who is best known for penning the Eagles standards “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Already Gone.” Tempchin, coincidentally, plays the Marine Room every Tuesday.)

Bob Hawkins’ nimble, resourceful guitar work and sweet harmony singing are up to the standard of the session pros of Nashville, Tenn. Drummer Frank Cotinola and bassist Jimmy Perez add to the harmonies and provide the requisite rootsy groove.

In Cotinola’s case, that’s a surprising achievement given that he usually leaves his drum kit at home and uses his fingers to tap out rhythms on the pads of a percussion synthesizer, a method he says helps prevent the drum sounds from drowning out the acoustic guitars in small-club surroundings.

While some Missiles fans are so enthusiastic that they are working to help get the band the recognition they believe it deserves (Related story, F2),the four Missiles have been around long enough to see such hopes and opportunities rise, then vanish.

By and large, Pedersen, Hawkins, Cotinola and Perez have spent most of the past two decades slugging it out in the bars of Orange County. They have made a living playing music, but at the cost of being able to focus on writing original songs and getting them heard in the wider world.

Pedersen, at 40 the youngest member, started the Missiles of October in a conscious attempt to break with his past in R & B dance bands and put creativity and personal expression first.

Last week, the four band members were gathered at a Newport Beach recording studio for do-it-yourself sessions aimed a producing tapes they can sell on a trip to England next month that will mark the band’s first appearances outside Southern California.

During a break, Cotinola reflected on the gig-to-gig, grind-a-living existence of the working club musician.

“The difference now is we’ve got a goal,” the muscular, bushy-haired drummer said.

“To make this band successful. To take it to the next level,” the lanky, easygoing Hawkins added, picking up the thought in a conversational parallel to the Missiles’ tight musical interaction.

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Most of the Missiles can trace their histories back to the Orange County music scene of the early 1970s.

Pedersen had grown up in Washington, D.C., and Austin, Tex., the son of a career Marine officer. He served a hitch in the Marines himself as a Vietnam-era draftee, although he didn’t see duty in Vietnam.

“I’ve been doing this since I was 10 years old, attempting to write or wanting to write songs,” said Pedersen, an intense, soft-spoken man whose green knit cap, sturdy build and Van Dyke beard give him the look of a merchant sailor.

“The night I got out of the Marine Corps,” he said, “I opened for Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at this place called the Four Muses in San Clemente.”

The club was a combination music store and folk-music nightspot that featured the likes of Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. There, Pedersen ran into Hawkins, a Tustin High graduate who also came from a military family. The two also got to know Cotinola, who had grown up in Albuquerque, N.M., and come to Orange County at 18.

Cotinola had a fleeting shot at national recognition as drummer of the Funky Kings, a mid-’70s rock band that put out one major label album (it was fronted by three notable singer-songwriters: Tempchin, Richard Stekol and Jules Shear).

In the early ‘80s, Cotinola toured with Jose Feliciano, and he also served for about a year in the Walter Trout Band, which allowed him to make some British and European contacts that may now benefit the Missiles of October. Perez got some national touring experience with the Pointer Sisters during the early 1980s.

But for the most part, the Missiles have scraped out their living on the Orange County club scene.

Hawkins said the bands he played in would make occasional overtures to record companies in hopes of a shot at bigger things, but “for me, the day-to-day scaring up work took a lot of energy and took precedence.”

“That’s the thing that made me buy into playing gigs,” chimed in Pedersen. “I’d line up 14 or 15 in a row, and you’d end up chasing your tail just to pay bills. The Heat Band (Pedersen’s primary group during the 1980s) pursued record deals and wrote songs, but out of the necessity of making money,” those efforts came a distant second.

“I was pretty much a prostitute,” Cotinola said, summing up the way he spent the 1980s, when he’d play club dates with “anybody who would call me and give me money.”

About three years ago, Pedersen decided he had to get out of the bar-band routine. He headed to Austin, a booming music scene that also happened to be his old hometown.

“I wanted to break the pattern I had here,” he said. “Austin was a great music town, and I knew people there. I was also bonding with my father, who I never got along with.”

Pedersen didn’t find a niche in Austin, but he says his year there restored his creative spark.

“To not be playing and just kind of observe, I needed that. I got to experience alternative music, which I really like a lot. It was very inspiring. I felt I had been kind of staying in one thing, and there was so much more out there that I wasn’t observing.”

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Pedersen returned to Orange County in 1991, determined to get out of the dance-club cycle and make his mark as a singer-songwriter. He started by hooking up with Hawkins in an acoustic duo based at the Marine Room.

“It reminded me of a ‘90s, totally hip Everly Brothers,” recalled Cotinola, who would sit in with the two guitarists when not touring with the Walter Trout Band. Cotinola joined the duo full time after a falling out with Trout early last year.

After some months as a trio, they recruited Perez from the Heat Band to round out the rhythm section. The four players didn’t adopt a name for themselves until last November, when they were forced to do so after landing an opening slot at the Coach House on a bill with Joe Ely.

Until then, in a running joke, Pedersen would make up a name on the spot each night when it came time to introduce the band. “I would call out at the end of the first set whatever came into my mind.” One day, out popped “the Missiles of October.”

Pedersen decided it was a keeper.

“That name represents the era we grew up in and the music we were affected by--the music of the early ‘60s,” he said.

The Missiles’ shows still include a good deal of cover material, but they choose outside writers’ songs for emotional impact rather than dance appeal.

“Most of the cover stuff I choose to do is based around Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Richard Thompson, people like that,” Pedersen said. “It’s my influences. I didn’t want to do anything that didn’t say anything.”

His own best songs say plenty, in a simply stated, eminently hummable way. In “Look at Daddy Run,” the Missiles play with an infectious bounce that peaks in a jaunty, sing-along chorus. But the song has a most bitter undercurrent: It’s a son’s ruthless indictment of his absentee father, ending with the tag line, “I call him Daddy-O. The O’s for nothin.”’

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Pedersen said his own thorny but now-improved relationship with his father “probably gave me some insight” as he wrote the song. But it was written primarily from observation, not from his own childhood experience.

“People who hear the song ask me, ‘God, was your father like that to you?’ It’s about somebody else, definitely not my own father. In general, I think there’s a lot of deadbeat fathers out there, and I resent the fact that they don’t take care of their children.”

The biggest question facing the Missiles now is whether record labels will take much interest in four players in their early to mid-40s, all sporting long resumes as bar musicians, not to mention a few wrinkles and at least a touch of gray.

Despite the punkish name, this isn’t a band for the MTV generation. Although neo-Deadheads and young roots-rock fans might be drawn in, the Missiles’ natural constituency is probably the older, baby-boom crowd that’s into Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton.

“There’s a lot of people out there our age, and even older,” who might form a national fan base that the Missiles could target, Pedersen said in a hopeful tone.

“You’ve got to be aware of the realities of the music business, but I think you can find a place for everything,” Hawkins added when the question of age was raised.

“What’s amazing is the wide array of ages we draw,” he said. “We’ve got little kids hanging at the window to hear the band, up to people in their 70s.”

Jimmy Johnson, the veteran Muscle Shoals Sound Studios producer who has worked with some good ones in his time and who wants to produce the Missiles, hopes the record business won’t keep them waiting too long.

“Some bands peak at a certain point, and I think they’re very close to that peak if they haven’t already arrived,” he said by phone from his studio in Alabama. “Sometimes when (an opportunity) doesn’t happen for a band, it can cause problems. I really feel like this band is ready. I can see ‘em and hear ‘em on ‘Saturday Night Live’ right now.”

* The Missiles of October play tonight and every Thursday from 8 to midnight at the Marine Room Tavern, 214 Ocean Ave., Laguna Beach. $1. (714) 494-3027. The Missiles also play Sundays at the Marine Room from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. ($1), and Wednesdays from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., with no cover, at the Jailhouse Restaurant, 111 Avenida Palizada, San Clemente. (714) 498-4800.