Ventura Local Has Figured Out Pop : JuJu Eyeball Front Man Is a Mainstay of the Area Music Scene

Too many songwriters these days wouldn’t know a hook if they went fishing with the Beatles. Peerless purveyors of pop rock know better. Pop songs have a beginning, a middle and an end, the type of tune just right for crooning in the shower when you want to irk the termites or to trick the neighbors into thinking your significant other is killing you. Ventura local Frank Barajas has that three-minute pop song figured out.

His latest band, JuJu Eyeball, will play Saturday night at the Bermuda Triangle in Ventura--amazing almost everyone except for the indifferent pool players who wouldn’t look up if the three remaining Beatles re-formed behind them.

The band will also play Sunday at the Midnight Hour in Ventura along with Big Sandy & the Fly-Rite Boys. Unlike last time at the latter venue, Barajas will insist the sound guy turn up the vocals before the set is half over. Since JuJu Eyeball is not a karaoke band, a lack of lead vocals is not conducive to making new fans.

Barajas has been a mainstay of the local music scene for more than a dozen years. Before the JuJu band, Barajas was to blame for the Strangers and Durango 95, a couple of pop-rock outfits that left a horde of dancers panting in their wake. The Strangers was a pop-rock band with Matt Muldoon on guitar, and it did mostly originals but also covers as disparate as Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” and “A Million Miles Away” by the Plimsouls. Durango 95 had a couple of albums, one on vinyl.

Joining Barajas in JuJu’s melodic maelstrom is Rick Pizana on Rickenbacker bass, T-Bone Connell on lead guitar and Jerry Anderson on drums. Pizana and Connell add harmony vocals, but JuJu eyeball is not Durango 96.

“This band is better,” said Barajas. “It doesn’t have a lot of old baggage.”

JuJu Eyeball recently recorded a three-song demo tape because club owners--right after they say, “I can’t pay much,” “Your girlfriend can get in for half price” and “Sure, you can have one light beer each”--inevitably ask for a tape before they book the band. One of the JuJu songs is “You Let Me Down Again,” the musical equivalent of “Bound For You” off the last Durango 95 tape.

“Matt Schulte helped me write that song,” said Barajas, alluding to the Matt half of the folk singing Matt & Bill, and former head of the Crashing Plains. “One time, he was playing me a tape of a bunch of his songs and I asked him if I could use that line, ‘You let me down again,’ so that’s where that came from. Matt’s working in a record store in Portland now.”

JuJu Eyeball has only been together since June but already has 13 songs, all originals and not a Durango 95 or Strangers’ number on the set list. The band has played about a dozen times and practices religiously in an industrial area of El Rio, a place where no one will ever find them or complain about noise if they do. Beavis and Butt-head would hate these guys. Good. So maybe there’s hope for musicians who know what a song should sound like and that grunge is something the big truck took to the landfill.

“It’s gnarly guitars and melodic vocals,” said Connell, the gnarly guitarist. There are no 10-minute guitar solos in this band--they’re all clear and concise.

“I was talking to Rick before I went to Europe about two years ago,” Barajas said. “After I came back, I kept in touch with Rick. Then, Jerry was the DJ at Matt Schulte’s wedding and we decided to start a band. I thought it was going to be a three-piece, but I was sort of panicky because I’m not that swift of a guitar player. Then I met T-Bone at a show in Santa Barbara, and I thought, ‘All right, here’s a really good guitar player.’ When we got together the first time, everybody was really good and everything just sort of clicked.”

Seeing Barajas front another band is enough to remind the Ventura locals of the good old days when Charlie’s on the beach in Ventura was still open and the Bass Ale was flowing like sweat off Roseanne Barr trying to squeeze into Billy Barty’s wet suit.

Since Charlie’s closed a little more than a year ago, throwing the local music scene into indifferent chaos, hardly a chair has been moved, and the venue remains just another empty monument to a recession that recedes more slowly than Al Bundy’s hairline.

“I don’t think the level of camaraderie is there for local bands the way it used to be,” Barajas said. “There seemed to be five or six bands that got along and created kind of a scene. If it even was as scene, who knows? Right now, we hardly get together with anybody. For awhile, we were kinda in there with J.D.’s Last Ride, but now they’re on hiatus.”

Named for a line in the Beatles’ “Come Together,” JuJu Eyeball owes a debt not only to the Fab Four but to other pop rockers from Buddy Holly to Marshall Crenshaw to Tommy Keene. It could’ve been different, the name not taken. The band could’ve been “Good Rocky’s Revival,” “Dead Dog’s Eye” or “The Bathroom Window.”

Bill Locey, who writes regularly on rock ‘n’ roll, has survived the mosh pit and the local music scene for many years.

PERFORMANCES: An opinionated guide to rock ‘n’ roll in the next week appears in the 11-Day Calendar section today. Page 21

Details

* WHAT: JuJu Eyeball

* WHEN: Saturday about 9 p.m.

* WHERE: Bermuda Triangle, 577 E. Main St., Ventura, 653-0466

* COST: Two or three bucks