Gaines: Not Plain Folk

Beset by career uncertainty, mulling over his life’s fundamental contradictions, Jeffrey Gaines is in much the same position as many others in this age of anxiety, except this rock troubadour from Pennsylvania sounds as if he’s handling it a lot more cheerfully than most.

Gaines first won notice with an album of deeply felt, self-revealing, psychologically insightful songs. To go with his stance as a sensitive, intelligent, socially aware singer-songwriter, he cooked up a tasteful montage of folk, pop, rock and soul influences, with Elvis Costello, John Lennon and David Bowie among his most obvious reference points. Gaines’ self-titled debut got good reviews, kept him on the road for more than 200 solo gigs and sold well enough to give him a promising commercial outlook.

Now Gaines wishes he could stop laying his inner life bare and come out of the closet--bringing with him the flashy stage garb he has stashed there, a wardrobe befitting a rowdy, rockin’ son of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, or maybe even Gene Simmons.

“I’ve got a bunch of amazing leather pants in my closet in my apartment,” Gaines said with a mixture of wistfulness and enthusiasm as he spoke recently from Denver, a stop on a solo-acoustic tour that brings the Philadelphia-based singer to the Coach House tonight.

Gaines, 28, didn’t have to add that solo folk-rockers tend to look a little silly in leather and other rock-star stage garb. But that doesn’t stop him from entertaining some fantasies that are at odds with his present career reality.

“When I get up there on stage, it’s a contradiction,” Gaines said of life as a serious-minded troubadour expected to give emotional, highly personal performances that can touch people deeply.

“I’d love to be getting women backstage and driving around in a tour bus, having Kiss rock ‘n’ roll fantasies. But that’s not the deal. The deal is people are looking at you like you know something, and they need something. You don’t know exactly what that is, so you just give them stuff. And afterward, they might say, ‘Can I hug you?’ ”

Gaines says he will give them a hearty hug back, even though he isn’t sure he wants to be the kind of artist people look to for emotional support. Given his druthers, he would rather be up there with a full band, pumping out less-than-sensitive walls of sound and being worshiped for it. And who wouldn’t?

“I’d rather incite more excitement than reflection,” Gaines said. “You grow up thinking a concert’s supposed to be an exciting event.”

Gaines wants to play for crowds who dance and shout as he struts his stuff. Instead, he gets the kind of polite applause reserved for golf galleries.

“There are people who won’t breathe because they think they might bother the deep singer-songwriter who’s baring his soul right now.”

Gaines got that reputation with songs that dredged deeply into his own experience, including such painful ones as the strained father-son relationship recounted in “Sorry the Very Next Day” and, in “Didn’t Wanna Be a Daddy,” his own unwillingness to shoulder the responsibilities of fatherhood.

On his recent sophomore release, “Somewhat Slightly Dazed,” Gaines deliberately changed his approach as he came out rocking with an almost willfully inarticulate anthem called “I Like You.” It sounded like Cheap Trick doing one of its lighthearted Beatles knock-offs, and signaled his determination not to be pegged as a profound, brooding soul.

Besides making a bigger noise, Gaines said, he wrote the song because he wanted to show that not all life should be analyzed and probed; one should also be able to turn off the brain and simply celebrate a moment of joy. Gaines’s serious-minded side, though, is still well-represented on the Beatles-influenced record.

However, he says that the audience that bought about 100,000 copies of his folkish debut--a solid start--has dwindled to about 30,000 buyers for “Somewhat Slightly Dazed.” After fronting a four-piece band in dates following the new album’s release, Gaines is back in touring’s economy class, playing solo to cut expenses.

Gaines is part of the wave of black American pop figures who have managed over the past few years to knock down some of the narrow racial compartments created by the segmented radio programming of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Blacks were assumed to be funk and R & B performers, playing for predominantly black audiences, while whites played rock and folk for other whites. Prince, Terrence Trent D’Arby, Tracy Chapman, Living Colour, Lenny Kravitz and others have been able to challenge some of those assumptions.

Gaines said he was surrounded by “black” music--’60s soul and ‘70s funk--while growing up in Harrisburg, Pa. Wanting something of his own in a family where everybody was pretty good at singing soul songs around the house, he began cultivating an interest in rock music, from Kiss to the Beatles and Elvis Presley. As a teen-ager, he fell for the brooding-Brit style of Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen.

But he almost wound up a funk singer anyway.

He was 22, singing with a funk band in Pennsylvania to get experience and earn some money, when he was discovered by a New York City R & B band, Maggie’s Dream. They enlisted Gaines and were about to record an album for Capitol with him when he bailed out. Gaines decided to pursue his own career as a singer-songwriter.

Ironically, Gaines said, he sometimes gets accused of not sounding black enough.

“I get into disputes here and there, ‘What’s your roots? What’s your culture?’ ” His answer is that blacks should be free to make whatever music is true to their own tastes and interests. “I tell them, ‘I’m what Martin Luther King got shot for. Deal with that.’ ”

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Now Gaines is trying to figure out how to deal with his latest batch of still-unrecorded songs, which have been coming out sounding like the early Who. Not, he acknowledges, the sort of thing that’s been ruling the charts lately.

“I think, ‘Oh man, are you digging your grave, are you insane?’ What I’m thinking of doing is not something that makes a (commercial) difference any more. Why am I still questing at it? So, basically, I have a lot to think about on my next record.”

Gaines sees some absurdity in his position. Wondering how popular he can be, preoccupied with what styles he should adopt, what kind of career he should aspire to have, he gets a sense of deja vu: “My adolescent life continues on in what’s supposed to be my adult life. It’s so odd. When will this not be high school? It still is.”

Still, even as he debates whether to be confessionally folkish or rocking in leather, he is certain that he likes the basic enterprise of playing music.

“There’s nothing torturing me. People let me get up and sing my thing. So I say, thank you for letting me be myself for another night.”

* Jeffrey Gaines and Paula Cole play tonight at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.