Creating a World in Shades of White

Realism holds such a lofty place in today’s pop music culture that it is used to justify anything--from gangsta rap’s worst excesses of violence and misogyny to the banalities of modern-rockers who feel entitled to blurt out any artless declaration of pain and still call it art, as long as the pain is theirs, and therefore “real.”

For a deeper respect of the “real” in all its complexity and elusiveness, look to somebody who doubts that what’s visible and tangible is all there is--somebody who can vouch, along with Hamlet, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any just-the-facts-ma’am view of reality. Look to somebody who has a vivid imagination.

Jim White, whose debut album, “Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” deserves to be one of the most heralded new arrivals of 1997, will readily admit that he has a tenuous purchase on reality--although his idea of reality is a good deal more philosophically exacting than the average guy in the street’s.

White, who plays Monday at Linda’s Doll Hut, fills his songs with ghosts and omens and angels, magic and death, enchanted insomniacs and humorously desperate inmates on the run, all moving through a dimly lit dream world that the off-kilter folk accents of his musical arrangements locate in some Gothic, swamp-misted imaginary corner of the Deep South.

Casting a strange aura over this night world is the presence of an unknowable God--a subject of special fascination to White, a lapsed Christian fundamentalist who grew up in Pensacola, capital of the Gulf Coast panhandle region of Florida.

White is an expansive talker who will tell you at length about his life and times and artistry (but who won’t divulge his age, which appears to be mid- to upper-30s). He fills his tales with a word-lover’s delight in phraseology and an enthusiastic storyteller’s bent that projects events as larger than life and fraught with portents and hidden meanings.

Speaking over the phone Thursday from a friend’s house in Los Angeles, White related a long, strange life’s trip that took him from being a competitive surfer and committed Christian believer in his teens to a three-year sojourn as a fashion model in Europe, to film studies at New York University (where he says he paid his way by driving a New York City cab), to a post-graduate sick bed in Pensacola, where his career as a recording artist had its improbable genesis.

“Oh, we’ve just scratched the surface,” the affable White said after more than 90 minutes of relating his colorful life and times and his opinions about music, film and books. “The amount of years I’ve lived don’t justify the way I feel. I feel very old inside.”

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He grew up Mike Pratt, but recently adopted a stage name to honor Jim Krieg and Steve White, two friends he credits with pushing him to turn his songwriting from a private fixation to a public expression. White said he began playing guitar and writing songs at 18, when a broken leg forced him to lay off from surfing.

Fundamentalist religion wasn’t part of his home life, but he says that where he grew up, kids who wanted to fit in with a group either jumped into the drug culture or pledged themselves to Jesus.

Having had his brushes with drugs, White said, “I started hanging out with the fundamentalist Christians more out of a sense of survival. For about eight years [from his mid-teens to early 20s], I fervently believed that at any moment the Rapture would take place. I had to proselytize people and try to save their souls.”

Cut to 1982, when, through a series of improbable connections, White became a fashion model based in Italy. Television had been his addiction, and he was at a loss without TV he could comprehend. So he cultivated a new addiction--books--and began sowing the mental furrows that would later produce an album of vivid imagery and skewed storytelling.

Fast forward to 1994. Depleted from having finished an hourlong film as his senior project at NYU, and shaken by a romantic disaster, White was back in Florida, bedridden from some mystery illness.

“I was laying in bed, very ill and worried if I would get better,” White recalled. Strumming in a sparse, Appalachian style he developed after maiming the fingers of his left hand on a power-saw blade in 1985, he sang “a real heartbreak song I’d written the day before. I sung it to the ceiling, finished, and heard applause in the next room.”

The hand-clapping came from Krieg, now a television writer in Los Angeles, who had befriended White at NYU and was hanging out in Pensacola, working on a script. He’d sneaked into the house when he heard the music from outside. He demanded that White stop keeping his songs to himself.

There followed another series of improbable connections, which, a year and a half ago, landed White a deal with Luaka Bop Records, the label headed by David Byrne.

The former Talking Heads singer was “very much” involved in the making of “Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” White said. “He’s never pushed anything at all, he just made pleasant suggestions. Sometimes I followed them, and sometimes I didn’t.” One Byrne suggestion was the ghostly musical saw that crops up on one track.

“I wanted to merge white-trash hillbilly music with Sufi music,” White said of his mystical take on folk, which can recall the mood of Mazzy Star or Cowboy Junkies--two bands he says he doesn’t know much about.

He cites Tom Waits, Neil Young and Rickie Lee Jones as his key pop influences, while giving at least equal weight to the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Jim Thompson, William Faulkner and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“When I lived in New York, I heard all these different kinds of [world] music and thought how they reminded me of Appalachian music, and I wanted to make a fusion of them, or a confusion, if you will.”

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The songs on his album stem from personal experience, he said, but they are transformed by metaphors and symbols that spring from his convictions about the strangeness, elusiveness and inexplicability of life.

“I have this idea there is some absolute truth and beauty we must try to approach, but we cannot [reach] it,” White said. “We cannot approach it face-forward. We have to do it from a state of humility. I feel everything I say is a lie; the best I can say is something that’s less untrue.”

It’s this refusal to believe in simple, cut-and-dried realities, whether daily or ultimate, that fuels White’s art and puts him at vehement odds with the fundamentalist theology of his past.

“It makes me angry they’re so quick to send someone off to hell, which is where they’d send me to,” White said. “I think a lot of damage is done by the fundamentalist church, and I speak out against it.”

Back in the commonly perceived real world, White is hanging out in L.A. for most of April, playing local gigs with his guitar-and-percussion backup duo until his album comes out April 22.

He has such mundane but potentially important decisions to make as what single to release: “Book of Angels,” a perfect introduction to his David Lynch-like weird dreamscapes, or “Heaven of My Heart,” a winning pop ditty that has the catchy exuberance of the old Steve Forbert hit, “Romeo’s Tune.”

Adult album alternative radio should love it, but many fans who might easily fall for this totally anomalous, sunny, determined-suitor’s sweet plaint would stand to be greatly surprised and possibly dismayed by the Twilight Zone ambience that otherwise dominates the album.

An unlikely pop arrival to begin with, White says he has little idea where it all will lead once the album comes out and he begins touring in May.

“I’ve sort of ridden along on this, just interested in where it was going. I’m not a type of person who has strategies for the future. I don’t think I’m an especially good songwriter or musician, but I have a funny way with words and some odd ideas that, if nothing else, they’re sincere. I don’t know where that will lead me, but it’s pleasant where it’s gone so far.”

* Jim White and Jimmy Camp play today at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. 9 p.m. $5. (714) 533-1286.