Plain Label, Top Quality

It’s a time of great expectations on the local alternative-rock scene. It would be hard for grass-roots rockers not to get their hopes up after big breakthroughs by the Offspring, No Doubt, Korn and Sublime, coupled with contender status for many other bands on major labels and solid independents.

Then there is Willoughby, a band whose expectations at the moment are as meager as its pop-rock artistry is great.

Over the past 10 years, first as a side player in Circadian Rhythm and since 1994 as the front man of Willoughby, Mike Flanagan has emerged as one of the most gifted songwriters on the Orange County-Long Beach scene.

He works in the tradition of Elvis Costello, Dramarama, the Beatles and the Kinks--coupling catchy melodies with artful lyrics that range from poignant to wry. Flanagan puts them across in a stringy but tuneful voice well adapted to telling stories and creating a rich weave of warmth, pathos, twisted humor, urgency and sarcastic resentfulness.

Rewarding as all this is for fans of classic pop-rock song-craft, Willoughby’s career path so far has been a back road leading to frustration and underdog status. On the freeway map of modern-rock careerism, the diamond lanes belong to bands offering shades of punk rock, hip-hop, ska and, perhaps, the electronic music that has been pegged as the next big thing.

*

So far, Willoughby’s main practical achievements have been pressing 1,000 copies of a debut CD, “Be Better Soon,” and getting two of the songs from it onto the soundtrack of “Humanoids From the Deep,” a B-movie carried last year on the cable channel Showtime. Willoughby will try to add another small accomplishment to its resume tonight when it competes in a battle of the bands at Moose McGillycuddy’s in Long Beach.

“Oh, no, we’re not frustrated at all,” Flanagan, 29, said with a forced-sounding laugh as he and his three bandmates sat recently in the living room of the musty-smelling, not-exactly-space-age bachelor pad that he and Willoughby bassist Doug Keidel share with two housemates. Posters of the Beatles--a Flanagan fave--are prominent in the wall decor. “Of course we are [frustrated]. But how deserving we are of our frustration is hard to say.”

Flanagan admits that Willoughby, which also includes drummer Steve Pertschi and lead guitarist Toby Tryon, has not exactly mastered--or even really attempted--the art of wooing the music industry, something that only the luckiest bands can afford to neglect and still get ahead.

“None of us are completely gung-ho about doing the business end of it, which is too bad, because it’s stuff that needs to be done,” said Flanagan, a tall, lanky man with a wry but soft-spoken way of talking. “Circadian Rhythm tried to [court labels] a lot, and I got a real bad taste in my mouth about it.

“I’d prefer if it would evolve more organically. I didn’t feel up to [pleading]: ‘Please Mr. Record Company Guy, come to our shows.’ But slowly and surely we’re doing more [promotional work]. When we started this band, I had no idea how much non-music work was involved in making a band thrive.”

*

Michael Taub, a friend whose film-world connections helped Willoughby place its songs in “Humanoids From the Deep” and in another low-budget film, the as-yet-unreleased “Born Bad,” said he thinks Willoughby will be rewarded if it persists. “My feeling is that every label has a good pop band, and it’s just a matter of time until somebody wants [Willoughby] to be theirs.”

Growing up in Los Alamitos, Flanagan started playing music for the purest of reasons. “My mom tried to teach me piano when I was 7, but I rebelled hideously,” he recalled. “The next year I took up clarinet. My best friend, Gene, was playing clarinet, and I decided I wanted to do the same thing so I could spend more time with him.”

In junior high, Flanagan fell for ragtime music and belatedly took up his mother’s offer of piano lessons. He also learned saxophone, guitar and mandolin. With his Los Alamitos High School classmate, Dren McDonald--now the leader of Giant Ant Farm--Flanagan began playing in a high school band whose repertoire consisted of joke songs. Later, influenced by the Beatles, he decided to shift his writing efforts from fiction and comical sketches to songs.

*

Flanagan wrote songs for Circadian Rhythm, which formed at Cal State Long Beach, but he didn’t sing much, concentrating on keyboards and saxophone (the band’s influences were ‘80s rock acts including the Plimsouls and the Smithereens, U2 and the Alarm).

By 1993 the other members fell away, but Flanagan and Pertschi, who had grown up in Palos Verdes Estates and joined Circadian Rhythm when he was still in high school, decided to keep going. After many auditions, they found Keidel and Tryon. Keidel had finished film studies at the University of Wisconsin and moved to Long Beach hoping to hook up with a band, while Tryon, a Buena Park resident, had been playing in low-profile bands on the Orange County rock scene.

Willoughby took its name from a “Twilight Zone” episode in which the protagonist, a pressured businessman, escapes into dreams of a friendly, placid, turn-of-the-century burg called Willoughby. The vision leads him to his death, but in death his blissful escape becomes real.

The name is appropriate to Willoughby’s music, in which escapes from life’s tumult coexist with hard realities. Supported by a band that can blaze hard into propulsive psychedelia, waltz gracefully or break into wry, bouncy, quasi-vaudevillian shuffles, Flanagan sings about trying to stay afloat in life while the undertow exerts its pull.

“Drain,” an affirmatively surging and chiming song from “Be Better Soon,” is about finding the will to appreciate life despite its nagging woes.

Drain out all the details

And all the eight-to-fives,

And all my worst addictions,

It’s good to be alive.

And when I’m over-full and heavy,

All I have to do is drain.

And the dearest part of me is comin’ back again.

“It was very therapeutic to write those words,” Flanagan said. “I actually brought myself to say, ‘It’s good to be alive.’ That was strange, because I’m such a goober most of the time. When things kind of suck, that song can change my mood pretty well.”

Among the other attractions on “Be Better Soon” are songs deeply moving (“Borrow My Shoulder,” a folk-rock waltz about the jealousies and bonds of love at the core of sibling relationships) and witty and twisted (“Behavior’s Not Permitted,” a jaunty tale of a philandering mommy who alienates her brood in Daddy’s absence--to the point where they turn murderous).

Willoughby’s members, who are in their late 20s, either go to college or work in office day jobs. They play shows only about twice a month and feel frustrated that it’s hard to land club gigs where they can be billed with fellow pop-rockers rather than with bands that sound like Rage Against the Machine. Meanwhile, the band has been working on stretching out instrumentally to expand on its well-crafted song structures.

Flanagan also contributes songs to and plays clarinet and saxophone in Giant Ant Farm, which is now based in the Bay Area. Willoughby is his main pursuit, but it’s his GAF membership that has gotten him on the road--including tours of Europe the past two autumns.

Flanagan isn’t averse to taking some risks for his art. Sometimes he drives one-handed while using his right hand to try out chords on a portable, battery-operated keyboard he keeps in his Chevy van.

“Usually a melodic idea will come into may head while I’m just driving along,” he said. “If I sing it back and forth to myself and get chords behind it, I’ll remember the melody and chord progression a lot better until I can get home and get it down with a guitar. It was a lot harder when I was driving my stick shift.”

* Willoughby, Kamenwelth, Sacred Ground and Bionic Jodi compete in a battle of the bands tonightat Moose McGillycuddy’s in Seaport Village, 190 Marina Drive, Long Beach. 9 p.m. Free. (310) 596-8108.