Building a Foundation on ‘Cement’ Steps : While Performing to Promote Their First Album, Trouble Dolls Will Be Keeping Their Day Jobs

The four members of Trouble Dolls are not daydreaming that their debut album will be a towering success in independent-rock circles.

Instead, they say they will be happy to lay a solid foundation and build from there. Given that philosophy, it makes a good deal of sense that they named the album “Cement.”

“It’s a baby-steps thing,” bassist Mark Soden said as the band sat chatting Wednesday outside its stuffy rehearsal hall in a long, low-slung industrial building here. “We like baby steps.”

Hence, it doesn’t bother the Dolls that they are not yet a prominent local draw (they will play one of their highest-profile shows so far tonight when they share top billing at Bogart’s with another good, rising local band, Standard Fruit). Nor do the four players regret that the release of their album on Doctor Dream Records won’t be accompanied by a national tour of grass-roots alternative rock clubs--a customary strategy that, depending on how you look at it, can be taken as one of the great perks or harrowing ordeals of being in a rock band.

Soden took the album-then-tour approach a few years back when he was in another Doctor Dream band, Ann De Jarnett and the Falcons. The group toured for a while, then collapsed as the talented and charismatic De Jarnett decided she’d had enough of the rock ‘n’ roll life.

“One thing I learned with the De Jarnett band was that the (one-shot) national tour doesn’t do it,” Soden said. “If you can live with (extensive touring), that’s fine. We’ve chosen a different strategy.” The idea is to play mainly in California and neighboring states, making short trips to hit the same clubs repeatedly and build a following.

There’s a practical issue at hand: All four Trouble Dolls have full-time jobs. Drummer Ron Cambra sells industrial supplies, singer/guitarist John Surge writes and lays out ads for a Santa Ana advertising agency, Soden is a longtime jack-of-many-trades member of the non-teaching staff at Fountain Valley High School, and guitarist/singer Michael Bay does quality control testing on Japanese-manufactured guitars for Fender Musical Instruments in Brea.

“Doctor Dream is saying that California is a country in itself, that if you can conquer California, go for it,” Surge said. “I think some bands (tour nationally) just to do it. We’d rather play good shows. A Monday night in Dubuque, Iowa, doesn’t sound too exciting at this point. Nobody knows us in the Midwest and East. Until people get the record and like it, I don’t see the point of doing it.”

The goal, then, is to create a regional buzz that will capture the attention of radio stations elsewhere that watch West Coast playlists, and to impress bigger record companies by winning fans show by show.

Trouble Dolls’ main weapons in this conquer-California strategy are their knack for strong melodies and harmonies, both vocal and instrumental, and their ability to apply a punkish thrust to this pop element. That puts the band in the basic ballpark of the Replacements, the quintessential melodic guitar-band that could play it hard and fast as well. At various times on “Cement,” you can hear echoes of R.E.M. and of such older pop-rock sources as the Who. Surge, the main songwriter, admits that one song, “Nevertheless,” inadvertently nicked the familiar core riff of “Refugee,” the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers nugget.

“It’s the same chord progression, (in) a different key,” the soft-spoken singer said. “I think (that echoing past rock) is inevitable, and we’ll keep it if we really like it. There’s two guitars, bass and drums, we’re playing three-chord rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s a very long tradition. Three-chord rock ‘n’ roll--that’s what moves me, that’s what I enjoy.”

Life’s less enjoyable side dominates Surge’s lyrics, which are filled with ethical confusion, relationship turmoil and sundry other woes that prompt him, in the album’s final chorus, to declare: “My head feels like a bucket of cement.”

If the songs sound conflicted, perhaps that’s because Surge’s writing method is to imagine characters representing different aspects of himself arguing with each other. “I have voices fighting inside my brain,” he said. No wonder it feels like a bucket of cement.

“It tends to be that when I’m happy, having a good time, I’m not writing songs. When I have to get something off my chest or work through a problem, or I’m just bummed out, that’s when I’m alone and writing songs. It’s a release.”

Surge, who grew up in Southern California, earned a journalism degree at Humboldt State, then hooked up with Cambra in a Long Beach band, Nervous Touch. Cambra is a solidly built hot-rod fanatic whose toothy, dimpled grin brings Gary Busey to mind. He grew up in a musical family in San Francisco (his brother, Gary, plays keyboards in the Tubes), and came to Southern California six years ago to leave behind a soured marriage.

During his Nervous Touch days, Surge put his writing background to work as publisher of Blow Up, a fanzine that covered the Orange County/Long Beach grass-roots rock scene from 1988 to 1991. He finally got too busy launching Trouble Dolls to keep putting it out.

Deciding they wanted a new direction, Cambra and Surge split from Nervous Touch about three years ago. They had known Bay, a recent emigrant from Rochester, N.Y., as a solo-acoustic performer who shared their musical tastes. When it turned out he could play hot electric guitar as well, they signed him up.

Soden arrived via a bassist-wanted ad. At the audition, the others were impressed that he had enough musical acumen to write down their chord changes. He, meanwhile, thought their songs were the best he’d heard in a long round of auditions he had played while seeking a new gig after the De Jarnett band’s breakup.

Soden certainly has ample grounds for comparison when it comes to bands. He saw plenty of them while working as sound and lighting man at the Cuckoo’s Nest, the legendary Costa Mesa dive that was the cradle of the Orange County punk scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“I got unemployed and needed money real bad, and it stimulated working in sleazy bars like the Cuckoo’s Nest,” recalls the thirty-something bassist, who is a few years older than his band-mates. “Doing sound was an ironic thing in the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was all steel, and you’d get this roaring low frequency and piercing high frequency.”

During his Cuckoo’s Nest tenure, Soden says, he learned that “the key to lighting punk rock is don’t turn the lights off between songs, because the bands need to find their liquor. A good, warm red usually works.”

Soden gave the band its name, basing it on some voodoo lore he’d picked up on pleasure trips to New Orleans. Trouble Dolls, he explained, are tiny figures made of matchsticks and yarn that come in sets of seven--a doll for each day. The owner of a set assigns one of his or her troubles to each doll in the set, then burns them one by one. Supposedly, one’s troubles go up in smoke as well.

Adopting its slow, incremental approach from the start, Trouble Dolls built its own eight-track recording studio and took about six months to record “Cement.” Doctor Dream liked the finished product and signed the band in February.

“Right after the band started, we made a decision that we weren’t going to get into that trap of (chasing) the ever-elusive record contract,” said Surge. “Bands get wrapped up in the business side of things more than the music side of things, and maybe change what they believe in, based on what music industry people tell them. We spend more time making music than chasing this pie-in-the-sky kind of thing.”

Aside from having made a good album, the band hasn’t notched any great accomplishments to boast about. Asked to name Trouble Dolls’ high point so far, members pointed to a deserted club gig in San Diego when they played to nobody but the bartenders and their pals in the co-billed band, the Leonards, but managed to have a lot of fun anyway.

The low point came early in Trouble Dolls’ existence when the producer of a Hollywood cable program called Video Asylum read an article on the band in BAM magazine and invited the Dolls to his studio to make a video for broadcast.

“We thought we were gonna play live,” Surge recalls. “He said, ‘You’re gonna lip-sync to your song.’ All of a sudden, he’s got makeup on and he (and a crew of scantily clad female dancers) are running around us” while the cameras rolled.

“This girl was dancing around me in lingerie. She crawled through John’s legs,” Cambra remembers.

“He was dressed up in bondage gear,” Soden said. “He’d hobble on and introduce the bands (while wearing) a straitjacket. The high point was me falling into the drum set. I always wanted to do that.”

“We were just a little naive,” Surge said. “If we had it to do over again, we would have walked out. That (video) will come back to haunt us someday.”

It’s an optimistic thought, actually. Only bands that succeed in building from a foundation need worry about someday being haunted by their baby steps.

* Trouble Dolls, Standard Fruit, Caution Orange and Girl on Top play tonight at Bogart’s in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Show time: 9 p.m. $6. (310) 594-8975. Trouble Dolls play Sept. 18 at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. $5. (714) 533-1286.