For Jack Grisham, Time for a Move Up

Jack Grisham sits on his bedroom floor, admiring the latest bit of unpremeditated chaos he has wrought in the world of punk rock.

Delightedly, he is screening rough footage for a video for “Go Bang,” a song by his new band, the Joykiller. The track and the explosive, catchy debut album it is taken from could turn Grisham from a local legend--known for his charismatic presence, his wild and sometimes violent behavior and his career-long commercial underachieving--into a bona fide rock star.

The Joykiller’s album was released Tuesday amid unusually high hopes for a new band on an independent label. Epitaph, the Los Angeles record company that gave us Offspring’s multi-platinum album “Smash,” already has pressed more than 100,000 copies of “The Joykiller,” according to Andy Kaulkin, part of the team overseeing the record’s marketing and promotion.

“Our expectations are that it’s going to be pretty big,” Kaulkin said.

Grisham turns 34 in July and has spent half his years fronting punk and hard-edged alternative-rock bands. “The Joykiller” is a return to early roots he never entirely relinquished; if success comes, it will be a vindication for an old-line punker whose overlooked early-’80s recordings with T.S.O.L. helped lay the groundwork for punk’s eruption into the mainstream more than a decade later.

The Joykiller singer clearly hasn’t lost his notorious knack for wild surprises.

On screen, as the “Go Bang” video footage plays, the strapping, athletically built Grisham can be seen stalking around the set with a mischievous look in his eyes and a rather large kitchen knife in his right hand.

While the on-screen Jack threatens mayhem, his flesh-and-blood double watches with an appreciative smile and repeatedly rewinds the video to the moment when he stampedes past piano player Ronnie King and inadvertently nicks him with the blade. King, uninjured, keeps grinning for the camera, but spends the rest of the shot with a wary eye on the rampaging vocalist.

The sequence ends when Grisham puts the knife in his mouth, then spits it out. The part you don’t see, he says, is the panicky camera crew diving to grab the weapon as soon as it hits the floor, for fear he might pick it up again and accidentally turn “Go Bang” into rock’s first snuff video.

The question that faces the Joykiller now is whether Grisham has snuffed, or at least tamed, the darker impulses from his past that sometimes made this extraordinarily handsome, charming man a truly dangerous, self-defeating and deeply strange fellow to be around.

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Stories abound of extremist Grisham behavior: the one-punch knockdown in 1982 of T.S.O.L.’s first record company boss, Robbie Fields, stemming from a dispute over royalties. The time Grisham refused to go on a T.S.O.L. road trip, locking all the band’s equipment in his garage and threatening to call the police if his band mates tried to get it out. The 1989 incident when he finished an argument with bassist Robbie Allen by heaving a stereo speaker onto Allen’s back, landing him in the hospital. The show when Grisham saw a man acting rough with a woman in the audience, jumped down, punched the guy out and got back on stage and finished the song. That might sound gallant, but Grisham also could take out his anger on his own girlfriends, as he recounted in “Rage I Sell” from “If Anger Were Soul, I’d Be James Brown,” the intensely personal, demon-wrestling album he released with Tender Fury in 1991:

Well I loved her and needed her

But that never stopped me from beating her

. . . It’s rage I sell.

“If we had a local Enquirer, he’d be on the cover of it, and most of it would be true,” says Dan Root, who played guitar alongside Grisham in Tender Fury and his other post-T.S.O.L. band, Cathedral of Tears.

Last week, though, it was a bright, personable and considerate Grisham who sat on the sunbaked patio of the house he shares with his wife, Maggie, and her mother. Anastasia, Grisham’s 7-year-old daughter by a former girlfriend, was visiting, and doting Dad insisted on a hug and kiss whenever the little blonde he calls “Peanut” came by.

Grisham says he gave up alcohol and drugs in January, 1989, and embarked on a regimen of therapy and meditation as he tried to control his anger and fear.

“Believe me, that took a lot of work,” he said. “I come from a family where everybody got hit. There were some problems there, and you take that out (into the world) and that’s what you do.

”. . . I’m not a vicious person. I mean well, and I am sincerely sorry for everything I’ve done. Violence now makes me sick. It should make someone sick.”

For more than two years, from 1992 until mid-1994, Grisham stayed offstage and concentrated on writing and recording in hopes of landing a major-label contract. He eventually grew disgusted with tinkering and pressure from label scouts who wanted to hear a narrower range of material than the array of styles he was writing with pianist King and bassist Billy Persons.

At this point, the tale takes on mystical trappings. Grisham says he went to a fortuneteller, whose advice led him to give up the search for a big contract. Then, in a vision he credits to his practice of meditation, a new direction suddenly came to him: He would concentrate on tougher music and would recruit Ron Emory, a guitar player he hadn’t worked with since a T.S.O.L. reunion show in 1991, and Chris Lagerborg, a young drummer who had filled in on some of those reunion gigs. The Joykiller was born.

Working with producer Thom Wilson, who had overseen two early T.S.O.L. records (as well as all three Offspring releases), Grisham and company came up with an album by turns funny, cynical and impassioned.

Emory, soon to be cut loose after disputes concerning his reliability and his drug use (see accompanying story), had a brilliant last hurrah in the studio, blazing out riffs and leads that hit with a palpable jolt. (The new Joykiller guitarist is Mark Phillips, a T.S.O.L. fan in his mid-20s who used to play in Down By Law.)

Grisham, a much more confident and original-sounding singer than in his T.S.O.L. days, displays his distinctive theatrical style, which mixes punk bite with wry, drawled phrasings that can call to mind such far-flung sources as the vaudeville tradition of Al Jolson.

The songs are filled with catchy hooks and memorable catch-phrases. “The Joykiller,” Grisham says with a puckish lilt in his voice, “is all about man-as-victim.” Most of the songs depict fellows getting ditched, dissed and left dejected in the romantic sweepstakes.

“Show Me the System” and the Bosnia-inspired “We Got a God” tap a darker vein with their dismayed but caustic visions of the violence embedded in human nature. “Seventeen,” the only slow song on an album that otherwise hurtles and gallops, is the finest moment of Grisham’s career. Its tale of a young man’s suicide and his family’s denial of responsibility is drawn with perfect economy, its foreboding verses exploding into the anguish-filled, anthem-like refrain “Seventeen dead.”

Grisham says he wrote the song after the suicide in 1994 of a friend who took a deliberate drug overdose. The story’s sobering impact deepens with its author’s explanation of the title: “Seventeen” wasn’t the dead man’s age; it was the body count of Grisham’s buddies who have died over the years from drugs or suicide--a tally he says recently rose to 18.

“I don’t mean to destroy (a listener’s) good time, but this is the reality of it,” he said of the album’s darker currents. “But there is a way out of it, too. Things can change, through self-discipline and (people) cleaning their own side of the street first.”

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For Grisham, the coming months will require the discipline to tour steadily--something he says he is prepared to do, even though for years now, he has stuck to the comforts of home, playing to friendly local crowds that regard him fondly as an old-line punk hero and a familiar and colorful part of their scene’s history.

“I’m liked around here,” Grisham said. “It’s easy here. It’s a security blanket. People know me, so I don’t really have to sell myself. But that can be a real trap,” preventing growth as a performer, not to mention blunting any chance for wider exposure. “People have accused me before: ‘You’re scared of being successful.’ That’s not true. I’m afraid of failure, of people saying, ‘This sucks.’ ”

Grisham said that when the Epitaph staff suggested a road trip to Austin, Tex., to play at last month’s South By Southwest music conference, an important showcase for emerging acts, his first thought was an instinctive refusal. But he quickly fought off his fears, focusing instead on how others in and around the band might benefit from a strong promotional effort.

The Texas trip went well, and Grisham says he is committed to touring steadily for the next 10 months.

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As the campaign begins, the Joykiller’s members are trying to be low-key amid great expectations.

“We’re in as good a position as a band can be with the climate the way it is now, but we’ll see what happens,” said bassist Persons.

Grisham himself says he hasn’t given much thought to business considerations, but he admits he is getting tired of hearing people talk about how underappreciated he has been throughout his career, how his records until now haven’t gotten the exposure they deserve.

“I’d be glad if it worked out. It would be fun, one time,” he said. “I’m sick of having people say, ‘You deserve (better)’ all the time. I’d like to make them happy and give them a gold record.”

* The Joykiller plays Friday at 9:45 p.m., opening for Down By Law at the Whisky A Go-Go, 8901 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. $10. (310) 652-4202. Also Sunday at 3 p.m. at BeachFest ’95 at Shoreline Park in Long Beach, $10, (310) 436-7727, and May 6 at 3:30 p.m. at the “Board in O.C.” festival at UC Irvine, which is sold out.