Picking Up the Plimsouls Beat : After Taking a 10-Year Break, the Band Is Recharged and Ready for Action

Peter Case and David Pahoa sit in a parked car around the corner from the Alligator Lounge, the Santa Monica rock club where their band the Plimsouls will play in a few hours. Bassist Pahoa pops a tape into the cassette player and the car is filled with a rollicking, mid-tempo garage-rock blues, guitars chopping hard behind Case’s raspy vocal.

It’s the kind of sound that galvanized a good portion of the L.A. rock audience during the Plimsouls’ initial run in the first half of the ‘80s, but this song was recorded by the reunited quartet only yesterday.

“If we had two more days we’d be ready to put an album out,” Case quips.

The comment isn’t the joke it might seem. The Plimsouls have come back together after a 10-year hiatus without missing a beat.

“Immediately it had the whole thing going. It was like we’d taken a 10-minute break,” marvels Case later, as the band--original members Case, Pahoa and guitarist Eddie Munoz and new drummer Clem Burke--does its sound check at the Alligator.

The show that night is sold out, and Tony Berg, director of artists and repertoire at Geffen Records, expects to see a similar level of interest soon among record companies.

“I think there’s a lot of goodwill toward the Plimsouls in any music community, as long as it’s not nostalgically motivated,” Berg says.

*

“If they can continue to do it with the kind of verve they did when they were originally together, I think there will be a lot of receptivity to it.”

The Plimsouls built that goodwill during a five-year run on the L.A. rock scene, starting in 1980. The group went for the throat with a sound that combined early-rock rootsiness, enticing pop hooks and textures, a taut, throbbing foundation, garage-rock directness and Case’s raw, Lennon-like vocals.

At its best, the music crystallized the urgency of life lived hard in Los Angeles, and although the band’s two albums were commercial flops, its influence is being felt today.

“As far as the band being contemporary, I think it really works right now,” says new Plimsoul Burke, who made his name as the drummer for Blondie. “Listen to the music that’s happening now, from Green Day to Elastica. . . . Those people were listening to bands like Blondie and the Plimsouls. . . . Gin Blossoms are a good example of a band that is mining that same thing.”

Still, the failure of 1981’s “The Plimsouls” and 1984’s “Everywhere at Once” to capture the band’s musical essence was one of the prime motivators in Case’s decision to strike up the band again.

“[One] impetus was the band did all this work for years and years, did a lot of music and played all over the country and had a lot of fans. We only made two albums, and neither of them were like fully realized.

“[Another] impetus I guess was my songwriting really got in gear a few years back. Every third or fourth song I was writing was a rock ‘n’ roll kind of song. . . . I have played rock ‘n’ roll with a variety of musicians, and I was always trying to get them to sound like this band.”

Case, 41, has focused for the last decade on his career as a folk-flavored singer-songwriter in solo and small-group modes. He’s just released a new solo album on Vanguard Records, “Torn Again,” and will interrupt the Plimsouls reunion for a solo tour later next month.

“My record company thinks I’m crazy for doing it this way,” he says. His record company should have been around during the Plimsouls’ first incarnation.

“We were so disorganized,” Case recalls. “Sometimes we didn’t live anywhere. We used to sell our equipment and go to the racetrack. . . . We just didn’t take care of business. . . . I mean everybody in the band was nuts. We’d been playing this kind of music night after night after night for years, and it was very intense. . . . It’s like the whole thing just exploded.”

Case left the Plimsouls in 1985, disillusioned by what he perceived as a lack of communication between group and audience. Somehow the initial vision had been lost, and he needed “to get back to square one.”

“When we started out,” he recalls, “the idea was to do a really intense version of American soul and rock ‘n’ roll music coupled with kind of garage-band American music. . . . The Plimsouls is like a real intense rock ‘n’ roll experience, it’s not really about first love, you know what I mean? I didn’t sing a lot of love songs. I just sang songs about being angry.”

Ten years later, with families to attend to and a more disciplined approach to their craft, is it still possible to tap that anger?

“It’s always right there,” Case says. “It’s my shadow, man, he’s with me all the time, and now that I know where he’s at I don’t have to be as wacky. But I’ve got a lot of darkness that I carry around. If you’re not writing songs you get in trouble. If you’re not working you get in trouble. If you have that kind of energy, you’ve got to have a thing like the Plimsouls.”

* The Plimsouls play Saturday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, 8 p.m. $19.50. (714) 496-8927.