Sweet Sounds : As an Emerging Master of the Pure-Pop Universe, Matthew Sweet Knows Life Is More Than ‘100% Fun’

The cover of Matthew Sweet’s new album, “100% Fun,” is a photo of the singer as a cute 10-year-old, captured listening to records in his boyhood home in Lincoln, Neb. Bulky stereo headphones encase his ears, and a wide, toothy, angelic smile lights up his face.

So why is this kid grinning?

Maybe he has had a sudden, psychic vision of his future. He is sitting there in 1974, a time when the rock ‘n’ roll planet has come to be ruled by the bellowing mastodons of arena rock. The likes of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Aerosmith have thrown the Beatles’ and Byrds’ pure-pop tradition of sweet harmonies and soaring melodies into the shadows.

Sixties-pop’s most promising American heir, Big Star, is dying in its crib of failure to thrive. Pete Ham, the primary singer of Britain’s Badfinger, which had carried the Beatles’ style into the ‘70s, will soon die an all-too-literal death, by his own hand. But there is little Matthew, beaming because he has looked into the future and knows that by 30 he will have earned one gold record, with good prospects for another, all by playing rock that breathes life into the commercially dormant ‘60s tradition.

Being a buff of sci-fi films and movie monsters, the 10-year-old Sweet might have enjoyed such fanciful speculation. But the grown-up Sweet will tell you that the kid in the picture wasn’t thinking about rocking at all; that’s a “King Kong” soundtrack album in his lap, not a Beatles, Byrds, Big Star or Badfinger record.

No, Sweet said over the phone last week from a hotel in San Jose, he didn’t choose the picture because it showed little Matthew having a life-changing musical epiphany; he chose it because Big Matthew tends to be shy about putting his matured mug on album covers.

“It’s just that I look so happy [in the childhood photo], and I hate having my picture taken [as an adult]. I thought, ‘There’s an unguarded moment they’ll never get now.’ ”

The part of the above speculation, however, about Sweet making a strong go of tradition-minded pure-pop after it had been largely written off as a commercial force is indeed factual. His 1991 breakthrough album, “Girlfriend,” recently passed the gold sales mark of 500,000. While its 1993 follow-up, “Altered Beast,” has sold only about half as well, a new release, “100% Fun,” features some of Sweet’s most splendid pop craft and has gotten off to a good commercial start: The video for “Sick of Myself” is getting lots of MTV play, and the album is rising on the charts (it was at No. 76 last week) as it nears 200,000 sales.

Sweet will preside over his own pure-pop universe as he headlines Wednesday at the Coach House, then step into a den dominated by some of today’s new breed of bellowing arena mastodons as he performs Saturday on the punk and hard rock-oriented KROQ Weenie Roast bill at Irvine Meadows.

“Obviously I don’t exactly fit into that category, so it’s slightly strange,” said Sweet, who has played recently on several similar festival bills sponsored by punk-leaning modern rock radio stations. “We’re not without our punkier aspects, either, in a live situation, so I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch. A lot of the [new punk] bands blur together for me, and I’m thinking it’s [going to be] a passing fad, but I’m not naming names,” he added with a chuckle.

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While Sweet is no bellower or screamer, his music does have ballast that keeps his high-reaching melodies and sometimes fragile and yearning tone from sounding sugary or fey. Despite his naturally reedy voice, Sweet can sing from his gut when he needs to, as he proved on the dark, caustic songs that dominated “Altered Beast.” And if his song craft and harmony singing are rooted in Beatles and Byrds pure-pop, the tough, jagged guitar sound on his albums harks back to the mid-’70s New York rock underground of Television and Richard Hell & the Voidoids, two bands that influenced the first wave of English punk.

Sweet’s primary guitar sidekicks on tour and in the studio have been Television alumnus Richard Lloyd and two former Voidoids, Robert Quine and Ivan Julian (Julian is in Sweet’s current touring band, along with bassist Tony Marsico and drummer Stuart Johnson). Sweet also has made regular studio use of Greg Leisz, the Fullerton-raised pedal steel guitar ace who joined Sweet for his 1993 show at the Coach House.

On “Altered Beast,” Sweet said, “I wanted to go off the edge and do something that was more extreme. I think it was harder for people to get into, but when I made it I didn’t care what anybody thought. I felt it was a renegade kind of record, and was surprised the record company thought it had so much potential. I got some of my most satisfying reviews, but it was a much murkier, much weirder record than ‘Girlfriend.’ ”

As he prepared to record again, Sweet said, “I was listening to the Byrds a lot, and I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll make a pop record--not as stylized a record as “Girlfriend,” but run with the pop angle.’ ”

The new album’s title started as a joke.

“During [his touring for] ‘Altered Beast,’ I was getting comments about how dark the record was. I said, ‘Fine, I’ll call my next record “100% Fun” and it’ll be real happy.’ ”

The phrase stuck in Sweet’s mind; some months later, rock fans learned that it was one of the last phrases to cross Kurt Cobain’s mind: The Nirvana singer’s suicide note lamented that he couldn’t go on as a rocker because “The worst crime I can think of would be . . . faking it and pretending as if I were having 100% fun.”

“It struck me as a sad thing that anyone would expect to have 100% fun,” Sweet said. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a kind of high standard.’ It helped me see [the phrase he’d been kicking around as a possible title] as a little more melancholy. It took on this sad, wistful quality. What is 100% fun, who ever has it, and does it last?”

After the lovelorn “Girlfriend” and the bitter “Altered Beast,” in which the wistfully put romantic trials of “Girlfriend” are seen turning into curdled disgust with life, Sweet’s new album finds him looking for an accommodation with life’s disappointments. Such songs as “We’re the Same,” “Come to Love” and “Get Older” reach for equanimity and hopeful possibilities even as they acknowledge the inevitability of sorrow and frustration.

“When I write, I don’t intellectualize it; it’s very much a gut-level feeling. Sometimes the songs touch on something important,” said Sweet, whose only shortcoming as a pop craftsman is a tendency to paint his lyrical scenarios in generalized or abstract terms, while neglecting to summon the concrete details and unexpected images that might make those situations come as fully alive as his accompanying music. (The new album’s closing track, “Smog Moon,” is more evocative lyrically and is a partial step in the right direction.)

“If anything, as I thought back on this record, I felt it was more of an attempt to sort of find a way through [unhappiness], where before I was more likely to state the problem as if there was no solution. For many things there isn’t a solution, but in this record I think there is a kind of struggle to find some kind of peace. Maybe that’s a new aspect.”

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Sweet embarked on a rocker’s path a few years after the moment captured on his album’s cover. He had begun playing in high school bands, covering songs by the Buzzcocks, Nick Lowe and Generation X, when he was one of a handful of people who turned out for R.E.M.’s first show in Lincoln. At the time, Sweet said, R.E.M. had released just one independent single, “Radio Free Europe,” and as he chatted with band members afterward they were delighted to find that somebody in Nebraska owned it--namely, Matthew Sweet.

“I became pen pals with Michael [Stipe] for a while,” Sweet said. Connections with R.E.M. and its producer, Mitch Easter, eventually led Sweet to Athens, Ga., where he enrolled at the University of Georgia to please his parents while majoring in extracurricular rock ensembles to please himself. His next stop was New York City, where he landed a record deal and began to develop contacts with the impressive assortment of New York guitarists who have figured on his records since his 1989 sophomore release, “Earth.”

“I was interested in combining a really modernistic approach [including computerized rhythm tracks] with really heartfelt songs, and I couldn’t get it to work together,” recalls Sweet, who nevertheless received strong reviews (but light sales) for “Earth” and for his 1986 solo debut, “Inside.”

“Once I made an organic record with ‘Girlfriend,’ it really came to life.”

Sweet, who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, says he never expected to reap the level of success that “Girlfriend” brought him; consequently, he says, he was able to weather the relative sales slump of “Altered Beast” without undue anxiety.

“For me, music is a natural byproduct of living. It’s an urge I get. I do it and I feel better. I usually don’t think of it in terms of what I’m trying to achieve [commercially]. It’s what I am, for better or worse.”

Even with the solid, if not quite sensational, success he has enjoyed, Sweet’s allegiance to pure-pop still casts him in the underdog’s role at a time when punk’s new generation and a fresh crop of hard-rock bands are claiming the greatest share of the rock market.

“I do get a lot of people saying to me in interviews that this kind of music never sells, and isn’t it hard being a pop guy living in today’s world. It hasn’t been since the ‘60s that this has been real mainstream, that Byrds, Big Star kind of thing. For me, it’s who I am and it’s where I am. I don’t think of its limitations. I think of the freedom of writing what you like and doing what you’re into.”

* Matthew Sweet, Mary Karlzen and Think Tank play Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $18.50. (714) 496-8930.