POP MUSIC REVIEW : Joyride Jumps From Idle to Full-Throttle

Like a slugger coming off the disabled list, Joyride took its hardest cuts Friday night at Club 369, playing its first official local show after 10 months’ enforced absence.

If the band’s collective batting stroke was a little rusty, its 50-minute performance showed that this wonderful Orange County punk-pop group’s power and enthusiasm are burning brighter than they did before that long layoff. Despite many a rough patch (due in part to the band’s inability to hear itself properly because of onstage monitor problems), Joyride connected well enough to knock several songs far, far out of the park.

Steve Soto’s bout with cardiopulmonary illness, which left him bedridden all of last fall, was the reason for Joyride’s prolonged absence. In February, Soto, 31, was well enough to resume rehearsals with band mates Greg Antista, Sandy Hansen and Mike McKnight, who had kept up Joyride’s regular practice schedule without him. Now the band is almost finished recording its third album for Doctor Dream Records, and it gave test-spins to four new songs at Club 369. Joyride has set itself a high standard: “Johnny Bravo,” from 1992, and “Another Month of Mondays,” from 1993, are near-flawless examples of raucous punk spirit wedded to classic pop savvy and incisive, heart-filled songwriting.

While one hesitates to call a band as unpretentious and unabashedly scruffy as Joyride “important,” the band does embody the continuation of a significant chunk of O.C. alternative-rock history.

Drummer Hansen played in the Mechanics, a ‘70s Stooges-influenced band that all the major Fullerton punkers, including Social Distortion, the Adolescents and Agent Orange, cite as the bedrock on which their scene rose. Soto was a founding member of both Agent Orange and the Adolescents, playing bass on such crucial local punk cuts as Agent Orange’s “Bloodstains” and the Ads’ “Amoeba” and “Kids of the Black Hole.” Soto came into his own as a singer-songwriter on the Adolescents’ criminally neglected 1988 comeback album, “Balboa Fun Zone” (KROQ could do a lot worse than to give that album’s “Tattoo Time” and “Allen Hotel” a spin, along with its crunching cover of John Lennon’s “Instant Karma”). Soto and Hansen, who was part of that second-edition Adolescents, hooked up with old buddies Antista and McKnight in 1990 to form Joyride.

The two leading questions attending the Club 369 show were how well Soto had recovered from his illness and how well the new songs stack up against the old.

The answer to the first question was heartening: Soto, his hair cut short and dyed blue for the occasion, was more energetic on stage than he typically was before his illness, and his voice hasn’t lost a thing. The show found him roaring mightily one moment with a punker’s growl, dropping back to his clean, rangy pop-rock delivery the next, and capping it all with a sure falsetto during a closing rendition of one of Joyride’s favorite covers, Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

Soto says he has his doctors’ OK for a return to full activity, including touring, which should be abetted by Joyride’s recent signing with an established booking agency, FBI.

It was harder to get a reading on the new songs: Two of them were buried in sonic murk, but Antista’s “Today” and Soto’s rueful but energetic “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” sounded promising on first hearing, manifesting many of the virtues of the band’s previous work.

For Joyride, the gig was about exerting muscles that may have been underused, but proved to be not the least bit atrophied. Hansen, especially, put his hard-bodied muscularity to work in a hammering, furiously driven performance that called to mind what Arnold Schwarzenegger might sound like if he could keep a beat. Lead guitarist McKnight was buried in the mix, but emerged enough toward the end to show his slicing, lean touch on solos based not in the punk-guitar lexicon, but in such classic early ‘70s British sources as Traffic-era Steve Winwood, Mick Ralphs’ work with Mott the Hoople, and Mick Ronson’s playing with David Bowie.

It all came together on peak numbers such as Soto’s “Running Away” and “The Only Thing I Wanted Was You,” and Antista’s rousing “Better Off Dead,” which epitomized Joyride’s ability to alchemize deep emotional pain into exuberant, ferocious pop. Antista, the most rag-tag of rockers, has a voice about as accurate as buckshot, but he’s a fine poet of the wounded heart, who stanches the bleeding with gruff-voiced grit and resilient humor. In Soto, an openly emotional songwriter whose strong singing offers a perfect cushion, Antista has the ideal mate. With Joyride’s return--50-minute, 13-song sets are far too short, by the way, given this band’s wealth of must-hear material--we have back in our midst a prime example of how seriousness and fun, brute force and ear-pleasing melodiousness, converge in great rock songs. Next up is a show at Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim on July 7.

Along with Joyride’s return, the evening offered a chance to check out a significant new arrival on the local punk scene: X-Members, led by Mike (Gabby) Gaborno, former lead singer of the Cadillac Tramps. In guitarist Ray Rodriguez, bassist Johnny Barrios and drummer Mike Tracy, Gaborno has a strong, well-drilled crew that laid down basic, effective hard-and-fast punk riffs and beats. Other than a closing reworking of the Ides of March oldie, “Vehicle,” which rode the hard, bouncing tribal beat characteristic of much Tramps material, X-Members represent a turn from the roots-and-punk balance of Gaborno’s old band to the sort of straight punk sound that has won a large, young grass-roots audience for such local bands as Guttermouth, the Vandals and the Grabbers.

Gaborno retains from his Cadillac Tramps period an interest in things automotive--besides “Vehicle,” the 25-minute set included a humorous original song called “Car Trouble.” He also retains the engaging, comical stage personality he brought to the Tramps. The straight-punk energy, and the fact that he is no longer flanked by a couple of extroverted guitarists as he was in the Tramps--it’s now entirely his show--prodded Gaborno to a performance even more vigorous than was his norm with his former band.

Otherwise, it was the same old Gabby, a mixture of belly-displaying crudeness, bonhomie (few rockers relate as warmly to an audience), action-filled pantomiming of songs’ story lines, and quick-witted between-numbers repartee. Think of Henry Rollins with a funny bone, but without a gym membership.

Now that he’s dishing the hard-core sound, the young punk kids should take to Gaborno as they would to a favorite uncle who speaks on their level and is always full of fun. For fans seeking substance along with fun-punk antics, there was promise in a couple of more melodic tunes that turned up late in the short set, “I’m Home” and the tense, troubled “Lord Knows.”

Lethal Records is planning to release X-Members’ debut single soon, while Doctor Dream’s chief, David Hayes, reports that he has one final fix in store for Cadillac Tramps fans, a combination best-of and rarities package that is scheduled for a September release and will include five previously unreleased songs.