House of Games Rocks With R&B; : The high-powered sounds are the product of some veteran Ventura musicians.

The House of Games, once up to six members with dreams of eight and now stripped down to a tight quartet, will bring its R&B-powered; rock show to Garfields, that friendly neighborhood bar in Ventura, Saturday night.

The House of Games is the local equivalent of the house-monikered outfits cropping up like condos on farmland. It joins A House, House of Freaks, House of Large Sizes, House of Lords, and House of Love in the “H” file.

House of Games has gone through personnel changes rivaling those on the Starship Enterprise. The band appears satisfied with the current lineup of Daphne Jones (vocals, keyboards), Roy Jones (guitar), Glade Rasmussen (bass) and Donna Eveland (drums).

The band plays high-powered rock with some bluesy overtones. Roy Jones knocks out some tight but abbreviated solos while Daphne Jones has a strong, clear rock ‘n’ roll voice that is up there with any of the famous femmes on MTV. In addition to old classics such as “Knock On Wood,” the band covers tunes by artists as diverse as Omar & the Howlers and Tina Turner, plus a ton of originals. They’ve clearly done this before.

“Daphne and I met 20 years ago--we’ve been married for 18 years--and we’ve probably been in about half a dozen bands over the years,” Roy Jones said. “We started this band around 1990, and we wanted to do all originals. Now we do a 50-50 mix of originals, blues and old R&B;, Motown, the stuff we love. We do rockin’ R&B.; We’re tighter now and this is the most fun of any band we’ve ever been in.”

The band has been hitting the club circuit hard the last few months after a layoff. For a while, Eveland went drumming with those rockabilly revivalists, the Roadhouse Rockers out of Santa Barbara. And then there was the problem afflicting at least 75% of all temporarily inert rock bands--Need A Bass Player. Rasmussen, besides being a great bass player, has his own guitar repair shop in Ventura, Glade’s World. If you can strum it, you can break it, but Rasmussen can fix it. Before that, he toured with Barbara Mandrell, Travis Tritt and Reba McEntire as the road guitar technician.

The Joneses came from Texas but have been here long enough to have lost their Texas twang. They ended up in Ventura by accident and got an acoustic gig at Eric Ericsson’s playing Dan Fogelberg-style songs, and stayed.

“There’s not enough places to play in Ventura,” Roy Jones said. “We lost the Bermuda Triangle and then the Midnight Hour. There’s tons of bands with nowhere to play. It’s just a drag. We need some serious people with some serious cash to open a serious club. We need some sort of center in Downtown with a bunch of clubs where people can walk or take a cab between them, and where restaurants open at night. When the city does something, they seem to think music is chamber music. In Santa Barbara, there are so many clubs you can’t see all the bands in a night.”

House of Games has its name on drum kits and is into its second generation of T-shirts, so the band is halfway to rock stardom. The Joneses have no illusions about the music biz. Both work at Heck Music in Ventura, where all the local musicians spend their cash and spin their sob stories, delusions of grandeur and broken MTV dreams, where “almost” and “tomorrow” are the operative words.

“Since we work in a music store, we know all the local bands,” Roy Jones said. “Just about every one of them will tell me something like, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to play for so-and-so.’ Then I’ll see them six months later and they’ll tell me, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to play for so-and-so from whatever record company.’ I wish any band all the luck in the world. To get signed you have to have as much luck as it takes to win the lottery. After we do some recording with this four-piece, we’ll probably go to L.A., and do the pay-to-play thing. What else can you do? We’ll have to do whatever else everyone else does--work hard, spend lots of money and try to dodge all the jerks. You’ve gotta be doing this for fun, or else why do it?”

Details

* WHAT: House of Games

* WHERE: Garfields, 2789 E. Main St., Ventura

* WHEN: Saturday, about 9

* COST: Two bucks

* ETC.: Call 648-1917