VENTURA COUNTY WEEKEND : MUSIC : Punkers Still Purple, Pierced, but It’s a Whole New Mosh Pit : Today’s adolescent hipsters are varied and decidedly upbeat. Be they ‘hard-core’ or ‘retro,’ their motto is D.I.Y.--Do It Yourself.

Eric French’s Mohawk has lost its zing. French has depleted his stock of Elmer’s wood glue, and he’s not terribly keen on Aquanet, a.k.a. Aquarock, a.k.a. the Great White Death. So his fearsome hackles have the day off, and in their place is a bashful cow tongue of hair that licks his forehead from an otherwise fuzzy scalp.

While French’s crown may be devoid of goop, such will not be true of other teen-age noggins tonight, when Filter and Everclear play the Ventura Theatre. The concert is expected to be a regular punker convention, drawing brightly plumed, multiple-pierced specimens from far and wide.

Just when you thought the world was safe for easy listenin’, punk is back, Day-Glo and cacophonous as ever. Punkers are proliferating, undaunted by the countywide dearth of all-age venues. When the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District organized a “Punk in the Park” concert last spring featuring six local bands, an estimated 1,200 hipsters showed up over the course of a day. “I’d never seen so many people dressed so funny in one place at one time,” said recreation supervisor Dennis Anderson.

Varied, inclusive and upbeat, today’s scene has little in common with the nihilistic frenzy of yore. The punk motto is D.I.Y., Do It Yourself, and indeed they do, writing and self-publishing fanzines, playing in myriad and ever-recombinant garage bands, and exercising their singular fashion design talents on themselves and each other.

Zach Carlson, 19, describes himself as “geek punk. There are also the mod kids who are into scooters, Elvis Costello and ska--their focus is youth empowerment, kids taking action,” said Carlson. “You’ve got the hard-core kids who don’t wash their clothes very often, also called crusties. Their lyrics are very political; anarchy is a common focus. Then there’s the emo-punks, who like the whiny love-song stuff. And there are the retros, who try to dress like they’re from 1962. The guys wear bowling shirts with not-their-names on the pockets, and the girls wear little skirts and carry silver purses.”

Carlson works at the Record Outlet in Ventura (there’s also a branch in Thousand Oaks), where, on a given afternoon, punkers can be observed wrestling with the Gilligan’s Island pinball machine and gabbing with employees. Record Outlet stocks obscure punk titles and carries vinyl, the medium of preference. (Compact discs are seen as a music industry ploy to fatten profit margins.)

Record Outlet also distributes fanzines--”zines” in punk parlance--Xeroxed newsletters that cover just about every topic imaginable. Carlson writes a zine called Meatnog; other Ventura zines include What Beatniks Eat by Jacob Davis, Lookit! by Mike Sterling and Wood-eye, a compilation of comics by local artists published by Rob Sisson, better known as Rob Travolta. (Travolta can be found, in the flesh, working at Ralph’s Comic Corner.)

In Thousand Oaks, Jessi Burk, a 19-year-old Twiggy twin (who, not coincidentally, is studying fashion design at Brooks College in Santa Barbara), writes Speakeasy, a zine she describes as “geeky, funny and quasi-feminist. I try to counter some of the destructive propaganda that’s out there about women.” On Valentine’s Day she published a special “Love Sucks” edition, complete with a no-win personality test.

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A portion of one particular Thousand Oaks garage is given over to “2,000 cans of ink, a bunch of paper, an offset printing press and a big mess,” says 21-year-old Greg Gilday, who has been writing Local Zine for nearly a decade. Gilday also prints album covers for Brrapp, a music label created by members of a Simi Valley band called The Gain.

Local bands span all ages and outlooks. Members of the Whatnauts and Peter Pan’s Army, both Ventura-based, average around 14 years of age.

The Conejo Grade is something of a cultural divide. Bands tend to consist of east county or west county players, there’s not a lot of cross-county pollination. “Probably because no one can afford a car that’ll make it up that hill,” suggests Thousand Oaks resident Chris Wilson, a guitar player for Mushface, a group that can occasionally be heard on KROC. The Vermicious Knids, the Skinny Rogers, Pal Walker and the Dirties, and Fix Hated are from the Camarillo-Oxnard-Ventura area; Sienna, Still Life, Red Fish, Glue Gun, Chromosome Tea, and Ten Foot Pole (on Epitaph Records) hail from the Thousand Oaks side of the grade.

Strife (on Chicago indie label Victory Records) is a Newbury Park “straight-edge” band. “Straight-edge is the belief in a drug-, alcohol-, and cigarette-free lifestyle,” says singer Rick Rodney, a 23-year-old Ron Howard look-alike--if Ron Howard shaved his head and wore a dog collar. “We feel that drug use is a total degradation of self.” For its insignia, the straight-edge movement proudly appropriated the X, a mark bouncers make on your hand if you’re under the legal drinking age. Rodney has three scarlet Xs tattooed on his upper left arm.

He also has grommets in his earlobes, but that’s another story altogether.

Just as salmon seek the stream, so punkers seek the coffee shop. In Ventura they frequent Two West, a psychedelic down-the-rabbit-hole cafe on Main Street. In Thousand Oaks they inhabit the Denny’s on Moorpark Road, ordering coffee and fried mozzarella sticks, lollygagging along the flower-bed-retaining wall, and generally adding an eccentric splash to the primly groomed tract.

Denny’s doesn’t look fondly upon these patrons. “They buy coffee and then stay four or five hours,” gripes manager Raul Rodriguez. “And the police say they can’t make them leave.” Punkers call Denny’s intolerant. Besides, they say, there’s nowhere else to go; the area is a virtual morgue of all-age hangouts.

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With local pickings slim, bands and scenesters often trek to Los Angeles or Santa Barbara. Of late, the two most popular venues are the Cobalt Cafe in Canoga Park and the Living Room, a drug- and alcohol-free youth center in Goleta.

The Living Room is a standard-issue, one-story building, formerly a union’s administrative offices. Founded by Larry Mills, a Goleta resident and electronics engineer by day, the center offers recording studios, band practice rooms, and movie-and-pizza nights. A couple of evenings each week, local bands perform in the small auditorium to a crowd of oddly coiffed admirers (and the occasional proud parent). A sign in the foyer advertises earplugs--75 cents.

The other alternative for punkers is simply to risk annoying the neighbors. Of the several “concerts” Ventura-based Dick Circus has played, two were held at former band member Tony Lopez’s apartment. The place is pretty basic: a couple of couches, a stained beige carpet. Pinned up on a bedroom door is a large rendering of Dopey--with a nose ring, Mohawk and anarchy patch. To soundproof the living room, the band stacked couches and pillows in front of the windows. “People were jam-packed, jumping around, sweating, spilling beer. Look at my carpet. Just look at my carpet,” said the 19-year-old Lopez, moaning.

Dick Circus’ music is furious and jarring, a head-on collision of electric guitar and screaming vocals. A mosh pit develops whenever the band plays, audience members smashing against each other in a reckless tumult. Fans defend the practice as a benign way to vent aggression; one punker terms it therapeutic violence. “If you look at what kids are doing to have fun, this is a good way to stay out of a lot of trouble,” says 16-year-old Summer Carrick, a singer and songwriter in the band.

But venue managers have a less philosophical perspective. “It’s all fun and games until someone breaks their back and we get sued for it,” says Lisa Hicks, who books bands for the Ventura Theatre.

Cobalt Cafe owner David Politi says he’s planning to schedule fewer punk bands because of problems he’s had lately. “Unfortunately, the moshing gets out of control. Someone’s girlfriend will get hit accidentally, that starts a fight, and it just gets crazy. We don’t serve alcohol, but they drink out back, which doesn’t help.”

While the scene may have its share of troubles, participants attest that the overall experience is beneficial. The punk arts provide a creative outlet, they say, for people coping with difficult issues at a difficult time in life.

“Put it this way,” says Lopez. “You might think this is negative, but it’s really positive: Name the kid who’s at home, his dad’s a drunk, his mom’s a drug addict. They both abuse him, slap him around. But when 7 o’clock rolls around, his friends pull up and say, ‘Hey man, let’s go out, let’s go to a punk rock show.’ And he forgets about what’s going on at home.”

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DETAILS

* WHAT: Filter and Everclear.

* WHERE: Ventura Theatre, 26 S. Chestnut St., Ventura.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. today.

* HOW MUCH: $15.50.

* CALL: 648-1888.