Ready to Roll the Vice : O.C.’s Guttermouth Is [Expletive] Poised to Strike With a New [Expletive] Album

These are eventful times in punk rock, especially for Orange County’s Guttermouth.

The band’s last round of touring, in 1995, saw singer Mark Adkins bloodied by an enraged vegetarian in Florida and handcuffed by sheriff’s deputies after a punk rock riot in San Bernardino.

It also saw the quintet attract a significant audience for Adkins’ unpredictable antics and facetiously intended rabble rousing--and for his four bandmates’ tightly played version of the driving-but-catchy style of punk that took hold in Orange County in the early ‘80s. It’s a style that Guttermouth’s members, now in their mid- to late-20s, soaked up as high school kids attending backyard parties where they would hear the music of the Adolescents, Social Distortion, the Vandals, T.S.O.L. and other cornerstones of the local punk movement.

Along the way, Guttermouth saw an old friendship turn into a career-enhancing boost when the Offspring, Guttermouth’s longtime scuffling mates from the local punk grass-roots, suddenly became mega-selling international rock stars.

Guttermouth toured the United States and Europe as Offspring’s opening act, and Guttermouth’s 1994 album, “Friendly People,” was the first release on Nitro Records, the label Offspring singer Dexter Holland launched with some of the spoils of his success.

Guttermouth’s album has sold 50,000 copies, according to Holland, an impressive base upon which the band and Nitro hope to build with “Teri Yakimoto,” the just-released follow-up. Guttermouth will headline the Palace in Hollywood on Saturday, Soma in San Diego on Sunday and the San Bernardino Arena on June 15.

“We’re stoked, and they’re stoked,” Holland said, speaking in his capacity as Nitro’s boss. “It’s a good record, a big jump for them.”

Adkins, drummer Jamie Nunn and guitarists Eric Davis and Scott Sheldon grew up in La Habra and Brea and were in and out of low-profile bands with each other from 1983 until 1989, when they started Guttermouth. They gathered recently in the sunken den of a small house that Nunn shares with bassist Steve Rapp, who joined Guttermouth last year.

It wasn’t difficult to spot signs of punk affiliation: Large photographs of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten held places of honor flanking the fireplace; the room also housed stacks of punk CDs and LPs. Elsewhere was a gift from the Offspring, a framed copy of a platinum record awarded for their “Smash” album.

In Guttermouth’s hands, punk rock is essentially about two things: high-energy music and irreverent, fun-poking lyrics coupled with on-stage foolery. Among the band’s targets are guardians of political correctness and starry-eyed promoters of multiculturalism, long-haired hippies, animal lovers, vegetarians, drug fiends and various factions within punk rock itself.

In a profanely titled song it has used as a show-closing anthem, Guttermouth declares that everything is fair game for ridicule, not excluding Guttermouth.

“Everyone’s an [expletive]/My mom’s an [expletive]/You’re a [expletive expletive]/And I’m a [expletive expletive]” goes the refrain.

Adkins, 29, and Nunn, 26, collaborate on most of the lyrics.

“Whatever makes us laugh” is considered suitable fodder for songwriting, said Nunn, a tall, hefty fellow who, like his mates, sports a uniform of baggy shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps worn backward.

“If we can sit there and chuckle together, it’s going to be on the record,” Adkins said. The singer has an obvious front man’s instinct for hamming it up, abetted by a large, oval face and thick, arched brows that afford him naturally what most circus clowns have to paint on. But in conversation, he adopts an even tone, sometimes underscored with lightly sarcastic barbs reserved for those who can’t take Guttermouth’s scattershot abuse for the joke it is.

“People know by now that we’re screwing around,” Adkins said. “It’s all in the name of fun. If you can’t feed off the energy of the show, you’re sadly mistaken” about what the band is about.

Among a crowd of knowing fans, Adkins can pull off pranks that might land other performers in court. In Fullerton, for instance, he once poked fun mercilessly at a long-haired kid, even commanding the assembled short-hairs to beat him up. Adkins knew he wouldn’t be taken at his word, and as for the target of his abuse, far from fearing for his safety, “he was cracking up” with laughter, Adkins reports.

But, Nunn acknowledges, “We play off stereotypes a lot, and that can get you into trouble.” Not everybody gets the joke.

Certainly not the committed vegetarian in Orlando, Fla., who started pounding on Adkins’ head after Adkins jumped into the audience to “float” on a sea of shoulders and hands.

Instead of returning the blows, Guttermouth invited the assailant--a crew member for Earth Crisis, an environmentalist punk band that was sharing the bill--to address the crowd with his objections.

“We gave him a chance to make his point without violence, and he made no sense,” Davis said. Adkins, who said he almost never premeditates what he’ll say or do on stage, responded the next night by buying $30 worth of 39-cent cheeseburgers and distributing them to fans.

Guttermouth’s most serious, and notorious, in-concert fracas occurred last June at the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion. In the capper to a big, problem-plagued punk festival staged by novice promoters at a venue new to punk rock, Guttermouth got into a verbal set-to with the house security staff. Venue management cut the band’s performance short, and the crowd responded by prying metal drainage grates from the Pavilion’s floor and hurling them at the stage.

There was much dispute over who was at fault. Did Adkins goad the crowd to assault the stage security? Or, as he contends, did he merely reprimand bouncers for what he saw as out-of-line aggressiveness?

The episode landed Adkins in jail for two days on suspicion of starting a riot (Rolling Stone magazine ran a picture of him cuffed and surrounded by deputies, whose presence Nunn suspects may have saved Adkins a thrashing at the hands of irate bouncers).

The San Bernardino County district attorney has not decided whether to file charges against Adkins. “The case is still pending,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Fagen said.

“They’ve got up to a year [from the time of the arrest]. We’re taking the position that no news is good news,” said Adkins’ attorney, Michael McDonald.

Feeding off a punk tradition in which seminal songs by the Sex Pistols and the Clash brandish such catch phrases as “I wanna be anarchy” and “I want a riot, a riot of my own,” Guttermouth is aware that there are limits to how far a punk band can go. Geared to promote tumult for the fun of it, the members said they know they can’t step over a certain line.

Adkins was there for the old days at the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Costa Mesa club that was the main launching pad for the O.C. punk movement. He recalls hearing the singer of the band Wasted Youth, irate over what he perceived as an exorbitant $6 ticket price, urge the crowd to tear the place apart; nobody in authority paid him any mind.

That was then, when punk was a tiny cult unto itself, and irresponsibility could run free with few consequences. Guttermouth operates in the this-is-now, when punk plays mainstream venues, and “anything goes” is no longer a workable rule.

“It just seems such a contradiction, playing a punk rock show and having to worry about lawsuits and liability,” Sheldon said.

With “Teri Yakimoto” (which takes its name from the fictitious heroine of a silly new song about an ideal punk rock girlfriend), Guttermouth has mixed in a few more straightforward songs than in the past. “Use Your Mind” urges independent thinking, and several other numbers depict overwhelmed, self-doubting characters struggling for balance in a pressured world.

“You can’t make every song hilarious,” said Nunn, who writes the more serious lyrics without help from Adkins, “so you have a couple that talk about other things. We try hard musically and lyrically now not to be labeled in any one way. It allows us to write any kind of song we want in the future.”

With their new album’s release, Guttermouth’s members are staking their future entirely on music. Davis and Adkins recently gave up day jobs (as a carpenter and fire sprinkler installer, respectively), leaving the band as the sole source of income for each member.

Right now, Sheldon said, being in Guttermouth is a no-frills living.

“I have a wife and a kid [a 2-year-old daughter], and we don’t do anything [for fun] except go to the beach. It’s very low-level.

“My wife’s mom has always been sure that we’re gonna make it big,” he added. “She’s been keeping this hope up the whole time that I thought was unrealistic.” But, with punk’s explosion into the mainstream, “now it’s become more or less true” that there’s a chance to make a good living by playing Guttermouth’s hard-core version of punk.

Of course, it’s not “punk” to say so. Adkins shot Sheldon a mildly mocking look and asked if making it big was really his goal.

“No, no,” the big, bearded guitarist answered hastily. “That’s my mother-in-law’s goal. She told me she wants to live on the grounds of my estate.”

* Guttermouth, Suicide Machine and One Hit Wonder play Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Palace, 1735 N. Vine St., Hollywood. $11. (714) 740-2000.