‘Mmm Mmm Mmm’ Says It All : The unlikely success of Crash Test Dummies’ enigmatic song propels the Canadian band’s second album up the mainstream pop charts

A boy’s hair turns white from the shock of an auto accident. A young girl’s schoolmates discover that her body is covered with birthmarks. Another boy is taken to church, where he watches as his parents flop around on the floor in a religious ecstasy.

These three cryptic vignettes, set in a mock-solemn, deliberate musical framework and intoned by a rough, bottom-feeding bass-baritone, form the Crash Test Dummies’ enigmatic but evocative song “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” the leading edge of the Canadian band’s unlikely penetration of the mainstream pop charts.

“Mmm” has helped boost “God Shuffled His Feet,” the band’s second album, to the brink of the Top 10 in the national album sales chart. The video for the song is a frequent sight on the music channels, and the group recently performed on “Saturday Night Live.” They’ll open for Elvis Costello at the Universal Amphitheatre on May 11 and 13 and Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on May 14.

The hit single’s title is drawn from its hummed chorus--a haunting, wordless expression of ambiguity.

“Frankly, the last thing I wanted to do was present the listener with some kind of tidy moral message about what it’s like to be a child,” says Brad Roberts, the group’s leader. “I think that would be condescending and pedantic.

“I think life is a complicated thing and there’s plenty of gray areas and not too many black-and-white areas, and writing pat, easy answers to problems would be trite and didactic.”

It’s not a surprise that Roberts, 30, sounds like an academic when he gets rolling like this. He was preparing to return to the University of Winnipeg as a graduate student in English literature a few years ago when he was sidetracked into music.

In rock ‘n’ roll, where impulsiveness, immediacy and expressive release are the prized values, Roberts is an intriguing anomaly--a self-described “icy rationalist” with a literary take on songwriting and a meticulous musical methodology.

“I don’t often write from life experience in a direct way,” says Roberts, sitting in the band’s tour bus outside the Ventura Theatre, where they are to perform in a few hours.

Wearing shorts and a black sweat shirt, his falling hair cut straight across at shoulder level, he could pass for one of the beach-town fans who will fill the theater.

“I write about things that I think about and things that I’ve read about and things that I wonder about,” he continues. “Off the top of my head, God, sex and death would be things that seem to crop up several times. . . .

“It would be very easy for those themes to be heavy-handed and annoying if they weren’t handled with a certain amount of levity. I find existential, Angst -ridden lyrics to be pretty tiresome pretty quickly.”

Roberts used to think that disc jockeys played the records that they liked. Now he can tell you the locations of the album-adult-alternative format radio stations closest to the Los Angeles market.

The Crash Test leader’s crash course in Music Biz 101 began when Canadian record companies launched a bidding war for his services after his demo tape made the rounds.

Up until then, Roberts had been in Winnipeg bar bands, mostly playing other acts’ songs just for fun while he was a student majoring in English literature and philosophy. He’d studied music for much of his life, but it was a visit to the Winnipeg Folk Festival after graduation that changed his plans.

“I saw Lyle Lovett playing some workshops, and I was very captivated by what he was doing. I liked the irony, I liked the quirky sensibility, I liked the marriage of unconventionality with a very conventional form of music, i.e. country music. And it really gave me the urge to try writing on my own.”

Roberts wrote four songs and recorded a demo tape that made its way to the Canadian labels. When he saw their interest escalating, he hired a lawyer, put together a permanent band and started figuring out how the business works--another example of his disciplined approach.

“I think some artists are alienated by that whole process,” he says. “They feel as soon as you start applying the word product to what they do that somehow their integrity has been pulled out from under their feet.

“I just think that’s completely naive. I mean, I don’t target a market when I’m writing. . . . But once the record’s been made, then it’s time to start thinking about who’s gonna play it. If you want to maintain any kind of control over your career and your destiny, you better bloody well figure out what’s going on.”

Arista Records signed the band (Roberts, keyboardist Ellen Reid, mandolinist and harmonica player Benjamin Darvill, drummer Michel Dorge and Roberts’ brother Dan on bass) and released its first album, “The Ghosts That Haunt Me,” in 1991. It didn’t make much of a mark, but the follow-up, “God Shuffled His Feet,” proved a very different kind of album when it came out last October.

Roberts’ humorous accounts of the physical body’s rise and fall, and his reflections on the metaphysical (the title song recounts an oddly touching impasse between the Supreme Being and his human creatures in the Garden of Eden) are accompanied by music whose subtle modulations in texture and key instill an element of surprise and tension in the simple-sounding pop structures.

“I would say the quirkiness of the material is both a strong point and a problem for us,” says Roberts. “It’s a problem to the extent that simply talking a (radio) program director into adding the record can be a tough sell. Most of the time . . . the song goes through the radio station’s music meeting and they just go, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”

But the relatively new, fairly free-form format known as triple-A--for “album-adult-alternative”--proved to be a perfect steppingstone to the mainstream.

Says Roberts, “Once it’s on the radio, then the fact that the record’s a bit quirky becomes a strong point, because people do actually react and they phone in and say what is that? . . . That’s kind of how it’s gone for us.”

It’s time for Roberts to join the rest of the band for a pre-concert dinner. Out on the sidewalk he leans into the bus door, and after a brief struggle manages to get it locked.

Roberts heads toward the theater, but instead of going to the stage door, he makes a wrong turn into the lobby. Though it’s two hours before show time, the room is full of young fans, and when they spot him they shout greetings and reach out to shake his hand. Roberts stiffens slightly and speeds up, climbing the stairs to the balcony in search of the band and his meal.

“That would be the result of too much MTV,” he says of the commotion he’s caused downstairs.

Roberts is a friendly, dryly witty man, but he seems utterly uncomfortable with the attention that comes to pop music performers in the age of music television.

“You know, I used to relish the anonymity of coming to America, because we weren’t as well-known and it was nice to get a respite,” he had said earlier. “But of course part and parcel of the anonymity was a lack of record sales . . .

“I like writing music and recording music . . . and that costs a lot of money. So for me the annoyances of being that heavily saturated into the public eye is more than compensated for by the fact that I know that I can go and make records. Because that’s really a treat, and that’s not something that I could have ever hoped to be able to do on my own.”