Cardiac Rock

Good rock ‘n’ roll grows on both sides of the mind/body divide, but most great rock ‘n’ roll is a hybrid strain that can engage the heart and imagination as well as pump the blood and shake the booty.

On Friday, the Lava Room hosted a two-course feast for lovers of loud guitar rock: Wayne Kramer, a ‘60s veteran fully at home with a melding of higher mind-rock and lowdown body music; and the headlining Supersuckers, a hellbent, old-fashioned, blazing-guitars band that can tickle the boogie-bone with the best of them.

The Supersuckers face some ticklish decisions about whether to play it safe with loud, lighthearted fun or to cultivate some new seeds within the band’s songwriting that point toward something more meaningful and complex.

The band moved from Tucson to Seattle in the grunge-fermenting year of 1989, but not to play grunge-rock. Signed to the Sub Pop label, the Supersuckers have served up a three-album barbecue of fatty, delicious, grease-spattered Berry/Richards licks, pumping those familiar riffs up past the red zones on the noise and volume meters.

In a packed club, that sort of body music can be relied upon to act on the sweat glands and the jumping feet, and an hour of the Supersuckers left the audience so spent or sated that it apparently didn’t have energy left to call for the encore that the band clearly had planned on playing.

The Supersuckers cranked out songs celebrating rock ‘n’ roll (including insider jokes about the indy rock world, and an appropriately juiced-up ode to the Gibson Les Paul guitar), marijuana consumption, trailer park romance and good-natured tough-guy swagger.

Fans would flash devil’s-horn hand signals at the band, which, with its traditionalist streak, likes to jokingly work the old rock-as-devil’s-music angle. Guitarists Dan Bolton and Ron Heathman and singer-bassist Eddie Spaghetti had a favorite salute of their own: They often would end numbers with instruments held aloft like the battle standards of a Roman legion, as they hammered out one last chord. Eddie and drummer Dan “Dancing Eagle” Seigal pummeled with lean vigor, and the guitarists swarmed and buzzed.

While on a single-minded mission to play rock for the dumb fun of it, the Supersuckers were smart enough not to fall into the trap of playing everything at maximum speed. They could downshift, taking advantage of the equation of rock ‘n’ roll physics in which the groove gets heavier and crunchier as the tempo gets slower.

Eddie’s bark was tuneful, in the mode of early-Replacements Paul Westerberg, and no Supersuckers number comes without a pretty good melodic hook. There even were traces of elegiac feeling in such songs as “Born With a Tail,” “Hittin’ the Gravel” and “The Thing About That,” all of which appear on last year’s release, “The Sacrilicious Sounds of the Supersuckers.” They show an emerging glimmer of recognition that the hellbent life, fun as it is, can have some uncomfortable consequences.

Still, the Supersuckers had no place in their live set for their forlorn country-blues ballad “Don’t Go Blue” or “Marie,” a memorable song from “Sacrilicious” in which Eddie sorts through the painful tumult of feelings that came with the heroin-related death of a former bandmate.

A band that cranks and carries a tune will always be worth an hour of a rock fan’s time, but the Supersuckers conceivably could shoot for the zone reached by Jason and the Scorchers at their brief mid-’80s peak, and the Replacements for a longer span during the same decade. Both were sizzling bands that lit up the body without flinching from the conflicts of the heart and mind.

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Kramer’s 45-minute set was engaging but frustratingly brief. He started with seven songs from his two recent albums, sticking mainly to the concise, recorded arrangements of numbers that surged with anthem-like force or generated hard-riffing tension as they related his dark vision of a nation spiraling toward social collapse.

Skillfully played as they were, those songs came across as an appetizer for the show’s concluding main course, a 10-minute-plus ride through “Kick Out the Jams,” the signature song of Kramer’s now-legendary ‘60s hard-rock band, the MC5.

A classic of body rock, it moved from a rush of smoking, hot-liquid guitar to a funk break with crowd call-and-response, to a passage of heavy, slow riffing that recalled Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies. Joining Kramer were bassist Paul Ill, who played with a remarkably full tone while generating lots of motion and melodic decoration, and a deft, hard-hitting drummer, Brock Avery.

Kramer’s music offers the diversity to sustain a full-length show. Given an additional 20 or 30 minutes, he might have been able to take another long, shifting excursion or two, and play one of the intriguing, edgy spoken narratives backed by improvised instrumental bursts that have been highlights of his albums.

He didn’t play “Back to Detroit,” the best and most personal of the dark anthems on his new album, “Dangerous Madness,” or “A Dead Man’s Vest,” a spoken narrative that puts that dark vision in starkly personal terms as he tells of reuniting with his long-lost father, only to have him soon die of cancer.

Those songs would have given a powerful introduction to who Kramer is. Instead, he leaned too heavily on the pundit-like commentary of “Wild America” and “Something Broken in the Promised Land,” two Springsteenian anthems.

By heavily playing the Springsteen card (which also turned up in the ballad “Junkie Romance”), this thinking-person’s rocker did draw a provocative contrast between the high romanticism and aspiration of the heartland rock tradition that Springsteen epitomizes and the visions of decay and desolation that Kramer now is using heartland styles to represent. There’s lots of irony in that contrast.

But in the music itself, the lustrous street glamour and upward anthem sweep of Springsteenian rock came through uncorroded. It was as if Kramer, despite the dark visions in his head, was not willing to let go of the hope in a rock romantic’s heart.

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Teen Angels, friends and Sub Pop label mates of the Supersuckers, opened this major-league bill with a minor-league performance.

The all-female garage-punk trio can whip up a respectable Stooges-like primitive racket, but offered only fleeting evidence that it knows or cares about crafting its ire into something other than a monolith of screaming sameness. Singer Jules, a wrathful pixie who said she used to live in Costa Mesa, clearly aimed to vent like Courtney Love caught up in a psychodrama. She managed only to sound like Donald Duck caught up in a conniption.