Studebaker Shows No Sign of Running Out of Gas : Named after a car out of the past, the group has been a longtime fixture on the local music scene.

Studebakers were around for an amazing 64 years (1902-1966) and the band Studebaker has been around for about 14 years, with an occasional break now and again.

Since most bands last about as long as the dream that the IRS owes you money, that’s amazing. The Studebaker band gets the tough nights (Monday and Tuesday) to make fans at the Whale’s Tail in Oxnard. But, like someone looking for surf at Lake Casitas, guitarist Jerry Pugh is an optimist.

“Sometimes, there’ll be a surge of people, but even on a slow night, the people that work here dig us,” he said. “The way I see it, even if there’s only one person out there, you gotta give it all you got.”

From the restaurant’s bar, one can see Channel Islands Harbor. The stage is small, but the four guys in the band fit fine, if closely. Besides Pugh, there is drummer Bobby Guidotti, Cary Morris on bass and Jim Caliere, the guy without a hat, on keyboards and sax. There have been enough ex-Studebakers for a football game or to staff a music awards show.

“There are 30 or 40 ex-members of Studebaker--enough to fill this club. We’ve had this particular lineup for about a year and a half,” Pugh said. “When I joined the band in 1981, they had only been going for three weeks. The next thing I knew, we were playing in Ojai five, six, seven nights a week at a lot of places that aren’t even there now. And we played the Wheel up on Highway 33 for about eleven years. Cary came from the Marshall Brothers. Bobby, who owns Maxie’s, invited me to come and sit in with the Marshall Brothers because I was taking a break from Studebaker. He told me every time they played to just show up. And Jim has been a Studebaker off and on now for about 10 years.”

Originally nearer to the Other Ocean, Pugh headed west in the ‘70s, playing in a lot of bands before he became a Studebaker, then The Studebaker.

“I came out here in the mid-70s from Philadelphia,” he said. “My father used to write music for Bill Haley & the Comets. I started playing drums in 1962, then the guitar.”

Pugh is a master of the shredding blues guitar solo, not unlike all those Southern rockers, yet he’s equally adept at something as seemingly alien as Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk.” He can play anything. Pugh learned his craft from kinfolk deep in the backwoods of Virginia.

“When I was 15-years-old, my dad took me to see a relative who played Chet Atkins stuff on the guitar,” he said. “It was way back in the hills of Virginia. We drove something like seven miles up this dirt road, then walked two more to get to his house. He had a bunch of extension cords hooked together that ran clear down to the road. When we got there, he unplugged the washing machine and plugged in his guitar. I didn’t know a thing about finger picking, and he never said a word, but he just sat there and played for two and a half hours.”

Between Pugh and Caliere, Studebaker must know a million songs. Caliere is a songwriter on his own, and also a member of Little Jonny & the Giants and does solo gigs. He has a sweet voice. Pugh and Caliere trade lead vocals, or frequently harmonize. The band has a country set, a country rock set, a Southern rock set, a ‘50s set, plus a bunch of originals, most of which fall into the Bob Seger/Allman Brothers style of raucous rock.

“We have about 15 original songs, but we play a lot of other people’s songs. But once we get hold of them, we make them our own,” Pugh said. “When people go into a club, they pay a lot for drinks, and they pay our wages. Unless you have some sort of mystique, I don’t see anything wrong with playing other people’s songs.”

Especially these days, Pugh said, when the bar scene, and thus the local band scene, is in sort of a rock recession. Bars are closing, leaving fewer and fewer venues for more and more bands.

“I never expected to have to say it, but karaoke hurts live bands. How often can you watch your drunk friends sing the same songs out of key?” said Pugh.

The connection between rock ‘n’ roll and cars is well established. But why Studebaker and not an Edsel, a Comet or a Corvair?

“We liked the interchangeable fenders and the bullet nose of the Studebaker,” said Pugh. “The Golden Hawk from 1950; that’s our logo. There’s car bands in every town--there’s lots of Cadillacs and Pontiacs.”

Details

* WHAT: Studebaker.

* WHERE: The Whale’s Tail, 3950 Bluefin Circle, Oxnard.

* WHEN: Monday and Tuesday nights at 9 p.m.

* HOW MUCH: No cover.

* FYI: 985-2511.