POP : EXPOSING A SERIOUS SIDE : On First Album, Barenaked Ladies Put Up a Comic Front--This Time, They Go <i> Au Naturel</i>

In their latest official press photo, the five members of Barenaked Ladies sit piled onto a single Victorian ottoman, with not a smile or even an eye-twinkle among them.

Ed Robertson, the lead guitarist and co-founder, looks off sternly to one side, his back to his bandmates. Primary singer Steven Page, the bass and keyboards brother team of Jim and Andrew Creeggan, and drummer Tyler Stewart stare into the distance, wearing the worried/expectant expressions of a clan of meerkats on the alert for danger.

So why aren’t these guys smiling?

It’s a pretty fair question, considering the past profile of the band.

With its debut album “Gordon,” Barenaked Ladies emerged from Toronto in 1992 as one of rock’s most entertaining and humorous bands. While it had its wistful side with openly emotive songs about post-adolescent growing pains, a slew of the album’s most memorable songs were sheer whimsy. Jaunty, catchy, crisply played pop songs like “Grade 9,” “Be My Yoko Ono” and “If I Had A Million Dollars” stood out from the brooding grunge of the day. Almost as a matter of habit, Barenaked Ladies strewed their lyrics with witty, cheeky pop-culture references, like so many flower petals in a bridal procession.

The reception the album was given in their homeland certainly gave Barenaked Ladies reason to grin. It sold more than 800,000 copies in Canada--a phenomenal number in a nation where 100,000 gets you platinum. While American radio and MTV were less keen on Barenaked Ladies, committed rounds of club touring earned a respectable cult following. The band made three sweeps through Southern California in 1992-93, moving from third-billed at Bogart’s behind Throwing Muses to a second slot warming up for John Wesley Harding at the Rhythm Cafe to a sold-out show as Coach House headliners.

That concert, in August of last year, was a thoroughly winning display in which manic energy, impromptu, quipping asides and offbeat, humorous digressions were flawlessly coupled with accomplished ensemble singing and expert, wide-ranging musicianship.

With all that rookie success, and all the fun they seemed to have reaping it, it came as a surprise when press copies of their new album, “Maybe You Should Drive,” arrived with that photo making Barenaked Ladies look as pensive as jurors at a murder trial.

“Actually, the photographer said, ‘Don’t smile, you’re not allowed to smile,’ ” Page recalled recently from his home in Toronto, where he was waiting for the start of a U.S. tour that begins at the Coach House on Monday. “It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done, I think. When there’s a camera in front of us, we’re instantly mugging. The photographer thought if we weren’t mugging we’d look natural, but I think we looked a little more ‘Joshua Tree’ than we wanted to.”

(Page is even more likely to litter his conversation with the bric-a-brac of rock culture--like this allusion to U2’s important-looking pose on an album cover--than he is to decorate his lyrics with it).

While the 24-year-old isn’t repentant about the band’s decision to lead with its lighthearted side on “Gordon,” he said the approach for its second record was deliberately different.

“Last album, we gave only one image of the group, the ‘Me in Grade Nine’ thing,” referring to a song that relived the puerile fun of being 13, and gave cues for the zany cover and CD booklet photos that accompanied “Gordon” and made Barenaked Ladies seem like slightly more grown-up brothers to the Little Rascals.

“I think it made people ignore a lot of the other stuff. We had a concrete image of being jovial, fat guys in shorts.” With “Maybe You Should Drive,” he said, “we made a concerted effort to not seem we were trying as hard. If there was a mistake on the last record, it was saying, ‘Like us! Like us! Be our friends!’ On this record, we’re trying to be more natural.”

The most jocund song on “Drive” is “Alternative Girlfriend” which stylistically is a send-up of the Lemonheads/Juliana Hatfield brand of alternative rock that tries to be both sweet and abrasive. While the style is satirized, the lyrics fall in line with the fairly straightforward subtext that runs through the album--the difficulty of making relationships work.

“There are a lot more girl-boy songs on this one,” Page said. “Maybe I’m not as scared of girls any more.”

He and Robertson, who founded Barenaked Ladies as an acoustic duo six years ago, wrote most of the songs on “Gordon” as a team. The follow-up album includes only two that they wrote together--and one of them, the downcast “Great Provider,” dates from the band’s early days.

“When we finished touring last September, we took four months off, and we really needed it,” Page explained. “We were pretty sick of touring and pretty sick of each other by that time. Ed and I used to sit around and write songs just to entertain ourselves, to try to make the other guy laugh. A lot of these (new) songs came out of that private time.”

Page did find a new songwriting partner in Stephen Duffy, a veteran English pop craftsman who played in a pre-stardom Duran Duran and later emerged under the moniker Tin Tin and, later, with Lilac Time. Page e was in his teens when he first contacted Duffy by writing a fan letter.

The new album’s first single, “Jane,” is about a fictitious woman named Jane St. Clair who has no faith in men’s intentions and rebuffs the sincere suitor who narrates the song.

“Duffy opened a map of Toronto and decided Toronto had the most beautiful street names,” Page said. Thus, the song’s character was named for a Toronto intersection, Jane and St. Clair. To deflate the romance of it a bit, Page noted: “It’s only about a block from the biggest stockyard and slaughterhouse in the city, so it’s not the most beautiful place.”

Page has had better luck than the frustrated beau in “Jane”: Eight months ago, he married Carolyn Ricketts, a schoolteacher and musician who plays flute on the new album. He met her during his teens at the suburban Toronto sleep-over camp for budding musicians where he and Robertson began their partnership in 1988. Robertson, whose songs and voice have a more folkish slant that complements Page’s inclination toward pure-pop, also is recently married.

Page and Robertson dubbed themselves Barenaked Ladies during a giggling fit at a Bob Dylan concert: The show was a bore, so they amused themselves by concocting silly band names. Soon they were on the road, playing Canadian college campuses as the opening act for a comedy group.

“People came expecting to see a comedy show, and we were a (musical act). We found a lot of adversity in the audience. We started (being humorous) to make ourselves more comfortable on stage. As the band got bigger and bigger (with the addition of Stewart and the Creeggan brothers), the energy got bigger. I remember the first time I played on a large stage. I thought, ‘I can run laps on this.’ So I did.’ ”

That sort of impromptu thinking and sweaty playfulness still characterizes Barenaked Ladies’ shows. Page said the humorous between-songs banter and wry asides that turn up are “all spontaneous. If it works, then great. If it doesn’t--whoops. I try not to use any of that stuff twice. The point is to entertain the guys in the band more than the audience. If they like it, the audience will, too. The songs are very well rehearsed, but with the banter, everything that seems ad-libbed is ad-libbed.

“Most of our banter or patter between songs is based just on what happened to us that day,” he continued. The need to come up with fresh material “keeps you observant and aware of the world around you. It makes you have to take a look at the city you’re in that day, which is good, because you can really turn into a zombie when you’re on the road.

“You try to find the cool place to eat in the town, and then make your way back to the hotel. That’s a good mission. Along the way you’re going to have some kind of interesting experience. I try to keep that stuff secret from the guys in band so it can seem fresh” when he starts riffing on the day’s developments onstage.

Barenaked Ladies’ most unexpected on-the-road experience was a terrible one. Late in June, 1993, they were waiting for a flight at London’s Heathrow Airport when Robertson heard his name called over an intercom. Summoned to a telephone, he learned that his older brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident.

The band couldn’t cancel its next gig, a July 1 stadium concert in Vancouver before a Canada Day holiday crowd of 22,000.

“We’re a pretty great team (and that show) is one of those things that made us realize that,” Page said. With his brother’s funeral awaiting him, Robertson “pulled it off like a total pro. I don’t think anyone in the audience noticed” that anything was wrong.

“He has an ideal he tries to achieve every show, a level he wants to (reach). I let my mood take me. I’m more volatile, a lot more ups and downs. He stayed even (despite the pressure of playing through grief). It was one of the biggest shows we’d ever done, and it was good to see the rest of us pick up the slack” in delivering the customary Barenaked zest and antic fun, while the shaken lead guitarist stuck to his musicianship.

“I think his song ‘Am I the Only One’ (from the new album) has something to do with” the brother’s death, Page said. “He wrote the song as he was trying to deal with it. The death of his brother gave him some perspective. I think he felt he was pushing people away from him. And when that happened he changed around and tried to cling to the people around him. Since then he has gotten very close to his family, gotten married . . . “

Page said that “Great Provider,” the album-closing song that he and Robertson wrote years ago, partly reflects the distanced and strained relations between Robertson and his father when Barenaked Ladies first left home to go on tour. “It’s unfortunate (when it takes) a tragedy like that to bring people together,” Page said, “but (in Robertson’s family) I think it has.”

With the recent release of “Maybe You Should Drive,” Barenaked Ladies face two challenges: maintaining their following in Canada--which started snowballing with an independent EP even before the band landed the Sire Records deal that led to “Gordon”--and expanding it in the United States. According to a recent Billboard feature on the group, “Gordon” has sold just over 90,000 copies in the States--a solid but not startling beginning.

“I think in Canada we either created a time, or landed in a time, when people were very excited about what was new and independent,” Page said when asked about the cross-border disparity in popularity. “I think we became a figurehead for that.

“In the United States there was already totally happening music. We didn’t get the MTV play. I don’t know why, really. As far as radio, we were too mainstream for alternative, too alternative for mainstream; I think we just fell between the formats. Now there’s this Triple A format (Adult Album Alternative, with its welcome new Los Angeles representative KSCA, 101.9-FM) that we’re crossing our fingers for.”

In Canada, “I really expected big-time backlash” against the new album, Page said. “We got some (negative) reviews, the odd person saying ‘this band’s lost the naive charm that made them so unique, now they’re just a boring pop band.’ But the album entered the charts at No. 8 and the single’s doing well.

“In the United States apparently (‘Jane’) is getting added all over the place” to radio playlists. The new album debuted last week at a modest No. 175 on the Billboard album chart, but Page noted that “Gordon” failed to register at all in the Top 200, “so it’s very exciting.”

He said the band would be happy to become a theater-level draw in the United States, able to reliably pull in 2,000 or so fans per show. Otherwise, he said, the immediate goal is to release another album within a year, rather than waiting another two years between releases. He also hopes the band can keep coming up with the unexpected.

“If you re-create what you did before, you get stale. I’m excited by artists who react against what their last record was. The Beastie Boys I’m real hot on now. I can’t believe how they’ve turned themselves around in eight years, from guys singing about girls cleaning the bathroom to Zen Buddhist snowboarders. Tom Waits excites me.”

Optimistically surveying the pop landscape, Page said anything is possible in music. “Ace of Base could turn around and come out with a death metal album next. Counting Crows could come off sounding really happy with their lives.”

As for his own life, “Now I’ve got a mortgage just like my parents. I’m trying very hard to live a life that’s not exactly like our parents live. It would be very easy to fall into a very middle-class suburban lifestyle. I drive by the local school at 3:15 every day until I realize I don’t have any kids,” he joked. “What I do to resist it is, I don’t do any gardening.”

* What: Barenaked Ladies.

* When: Monday, Sept. 12, at 8 p.m., with Friendly Indians.

* Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (5) Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit and turn left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

* Wherewithal: $16.50.

* Where to call: (714) 496-8930.

MORE POP

IN ANAHEIM: LIQUOR GIANTS

Ward Dotson has been compared to Paul Westerberg--except that Dotson’s output over the past five years has been consistently stellar. Perhaps the finest ‘60s-influenced songwriter ever to emerge from O.C., he will lead his Liquor Giants at Linda’s Doll Hut Saturday, Sept. 10. (714) 533-1286.

IN DANA POINT: THE YOUNG DUBLINERS

This band from Los Angeles won a hometown club following playing rock ‘n’ roll with a Celtic touch. Earlier this year, it released its first album, “Rocky Road,” an EP on the Scotti Bros. label; Friday, Sept. 9, the band plays at the Heritage Brewing Company. (714) 240-2060.

IN LONG BEACH: 15TH ANNUAL BLUES FESTIVAL

Robert Cray tops the bill Saturday, Sept. 10, at Cal State Long Beach. The program on Sunday, Sept. 11, is a star-studded tribute to Chess Records with Bo Diddley, Johnny Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Taj Mahal and the Staple Singers. (310) 985-7000 (box office).