Pop Review / Mike Boehm : Possum Dixon: A Method to Their Mayhem

Possum Dixon named itself after a fugitive wanted for murder. Playing Thursday night at the Coach House, the Los Angeles band lived up to that self-billing in method, if not in madness.

The four members slashed and bashed for 47 non-fastidious minutes, but they committed their flavorfully poppy mayhem with a collective grin rather than a malicious fury.

There is frustration enough in the songs that chief writers Rob Zabrecky and Robert O’Sullivan churned out for the band’s 1993 debut album--most of them take on the old “can’t get no satisfaction” theme, with dull, dead-end jobs and inaccessible objects of lust the chief sources of discontent.

On stage, Possum Dixon just mowed down those troubles and turned its songs into springboards for old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll exuberance, applied with plenty of bouncing around and shaking all over.

Bassist Zabrecky, pianist-guitarist O’Sullivan and guitarist Celso Chavez were all from the bowling-pin school of rock stagecraft, repeatedly flopping to the floor and rolling about while attempting to extract something more or less (usually less) coherent from their instruments.

What held it together was the band’s knack for the catchy, sing-along hook.

Sameness would threaten to set in as one fast-paced song barreled into the next, with Zabrecky’s ordinary sing-speak vocals out front. But then a crisp pop morsel would appear and lend the material as much liveliness as the performance.

“Invisible,” with its canned techno-pop pulse, served as a slower, more detached and off-kilter change of pace from the evening’s prevailing frenzy. The jaunty “Watch the Girl Destroy Me” was another helpful departure, sounding a bit like a ‘90s updating of the Small Faces’ ‘60s chestnut, “Itchycoo Park.”

Without blatantly copying, Possum Dixon mainly recalled such garage-y, late-’70s-vintage New Wave bands as Talking Heads and the B-52’s, or perhaps Elvis Costello & the Attractions at their most careless. But Possum Dixon lacked the art-kitsch trappings of the first two, or the howling chagrin of Costello.

With his perpetual look of boyish mischief, Zabrecky was not trying to purge anger or pose ironies. His agenda as lead singer and primary human jumping bean and St. Vitus dancer was simple fun. The band seemed not the least daunted by a sparse turnout of perhaps 100 fans.

Besides running through 10 songs from its album and a small handful of originals not on it, Possum Dixon offered a couple of little-altered, if rough-hewn, covers: “For Your Love” by the Yardbirds and the stormy, set-closing “Days of Wine and Roses,” by the ‘80s Los Angeles band Dream Syndicate. Zabrecky also inserted a couple of mocking, lounge-singer snippets of Madonna tunes during the Possum number “Executive Slacks.”

At this point, Possum Dixon is a friendly diversion of a band. It won’t haunt or rivet an audience, but it does a good job of representing the just-messing-around school of rock ‘n’ roll fun in a way that’s sufficiently attentive to pop craft and brisk concert pacing not to let just-messing spill over into an aimless mess.

The musicianship could stand some tightening, but not so much that the band would lose its likable rawness. Possum Dixon’s challenge is to develop the offhanded expertise of a band like Cracker and the muscular drive of the Smithereens, without reining in any of its gleeful exuberance and freewheeling charm.

The second-billed Trouble Dolls have added a solid bassist in Dan Elliott but remain a band in transition. Michael Bay, the guitarist who quit the band last year along with its bassist, Mark Soden, was back as a favor to his old buddies. Founders John Surge and Ron Cambra are still looking for a new lead guitarist to complete the band.

The set hit an early peak with the Who-ish “I Know,” from the band’s 1993 debut album, “Cement.” But it failed to build from there, and two new songs were not striking on first hearing. The band’s recasting of the old Bachman-Turner Overdrive barn-burner, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” as a slow, nervous-sounding plaint was more interesting in concept than in execution.