Fling Is Over for Throwing Muses : Creative Spark Thrives, but Poor Record Sales Force Rockers--in O.C. Sunday--to Bow Out

If ever a major-label rock band lived by the principle of art for art’s sake, it was Throwing Muses.

Now Throwing Muses is about to die by its principles. After much critical acclaim but only limited commercial appeal in a career that has yielded seven albums and two EPs since 1986, Throwing Muses will finish its run with shows Sunday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana and Monday at the Whisky in West Hollywood.

“We can’t afford to go on,” Kristin Hersh, the band’s singer and creative main cog, said Tuesday from a hotel in Spokane, Wash. “It’s heartbreaking for me.”

Hersh will continue with an already established solo-acoustic career that allows her to keep expenses down and income to herself.

For most of the Muses’ run, she said, “we did just fine. We paid the rent and then some, and that’s exactly what we wanted. Now we’re not paying the rent. This [past] year just killed us. The slump in the [record] business kills bands like us. It was like the stock market collapsed, and we’re all living through the Depression.”

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Not that the Muses’ commercial stock ever really soared. The band’s relative successes, “The Real Ramona” (1991) and “University” (1995), have sold in the 60,000 range in the United States, according to the SoundScan tracking service. So has “Hips and Makers,” Hersh’s solo album from 1994. “Limbo,” released last year, has sold 19,000 copies. While the Muses do about as well in Europe as in the United States, Hersh said the numbers they can generate no longer are enough to support a band--not to mention her young family.

Hersh, 30, chatted while nursing Wyatt, the 4-month-old who is the youngest of her three sons. She and her husband-manager Billy O’Connell recently moved from Newport, R.I., where the Muses began in the early ‘80s as a band of high school classmates, to the Southern California desert community of Pioneertown, near Joshua Tree National Park.

“It’s like the white trash moon, which I guess is where I belong,” Hersh said jokingly, referring to the craggy silence of her new surroundings.

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Hersh and drummer David Narcizo have been along for the Muses’ entire ride; bassist Bernard Georges, whose immediate future lies in bicycle sales, has been a member since 1992.

For Hersh, breaking up is even harder to say than it is to do. “We’re not saying we’re ‘breaking up,’ because we would all like to continue being a band. If one of us wins the lottery, we’ll be a band again.”

While Hersh works on her second solo album in the coming months, Narcizo will begin creating rhythms for an instrumental album that he and Hersh are planning. For this incarnation, they plan to use the name Lakuna rather than, as Narcizo puts it, “put a ‘P.S.’ onto the Muses’ career.”

Narcizo said he played drums on several tracks of the upcoming solo debut by Tanya Donelly, the Muses co-founder who left the band in 1991 to start the now-defunct Belly. He has signed on to be Donelly’s tour drummer, starting this summer.

“But I don’t think I’ll be pursuing a career in music,” he said in a separate interview. “I don’t want to have to force it to work. I’ll do [gigs] that I like, but I don’t want to have to make drumming work as a career.” As for earning a living, he said, “If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears. It’s not something that worries me.”

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The band had some commercial hopes during a career spent mostly on the Sire and Reprise labels, but it never yielded to rock formulas in pursuit of them. Throwing Muses always has been about the jarring rhythms, surprising shifts in dynamics and oblique imagery that Hersh maintains she creates by channeling subconscious forces, rather than through conscious effort.

The Muses’ music is full of propulsive beats, hooky melody lines and strong, distinctive lead voices that could make the band a plausible candidate for wide acceptance. But Hersh’s insistence on writing through inspiration rather than craft does not permit her to sketch in narrative contexts and details that would give a listener a clue in deciphering what is going on, and to whom it is happening. That makes the Muses mysteriously alluring for their cadre of fans--but more or less impossible to pin down for others who don’t like to be kept off-balance.

The band’s debut, “Throwing Muses” (1986), originally was released only in England, where the Muses emerged as the first American band signed by the forward-looking 4AD label. It was one of the decade’s most striking arrivals, a rich, strange, utterly original trip through the passageways of Hersh’s troubled--but occasionally quite funny--teenage psyche.

“House Tornado” and “Red Heaven” were the band’s thorniest, less-accessible releases; the debut album, “Hunkpapa” and “The Real Ramona” lean toward the catchier, less densely packed side. The Muses’ most recent albums, “University” and “Limbo,” capture the brawnier and rhythmically more straightforward guitar-rock attack that the band developed after Donelly left and the others carried on as a trio.

“We always did see success as making the records we wanted to make, and that’s exactly what we did,” Hersh said. She admits to one twinge of second-guessing:

“I have never regretted not selling out. That was never an option. But I did feel guilty--for a moment at about 3 a.m., with a diaper in one hand and a baby in another--about beginning our career with such an angst-ridden record. If we hadn’t begun that way, the whole ride would have been different. I don’t like angst-ridden material in general.”

But, she added quickly, the songs on “Throwing Muses” stemmed from what was in her head at the time, “so there really was no option there, either.”

She certainly has had enough real-life fodder for the sort of retailable, confessional songwriting that can give a band a salable story-line to go with its music. She lost a custody battle over her first son, Dylan, now 10 (she gets him for visits); she weathered brain surgery; and last year she spent four months in bed after doctors warned that her pregnancy and her life could be in danger.

But where others might craft songs from the things that happen to them, Hersh’s aesthetic requires that the songs simply happen to her.

Certainly, artistically pure and worthy songs--like any other works of art--can be brought into being through a conscious application of sweat and know-how, as long as some core insight or emotional reaction underlies the labor and taps into a current of unpremeditated inspiration.

“I agree,” Hersh said. “But I have never had any control over the music and have chosen not to. That certainly gives it a Rorschach ink blot sensibility. But at least it has never been me asking people to care about Kristin’s story.”

During the 1980s, Hersh said, her Muse arrived with more compulsiveness and internal amplification than she sometimes could stand. “It was just making me insane, to have a song playing louder [in her head] than anything else that was going on in the real world, so I couldn’t carry on a conversation. And I would get seizures if I didn’t write it. I don’t like melodrama, and it made me angry that I couldn’t be normal.”

Now, she says, “I live with it, and they’re a little kinder, gentler force. But they can make me sick. In fact, the first song I wrote since this baby was born . . . that day he would have nothing to do with me. He would cry whenever I would hold him.”

In her solo shows, Hersh has cut a surprisingly relaxed, humorously chatty figure between songs. With Throwing Muses, her signature posture is standing still at the microphone, eyes fixed hypnotically on empty space. What does she think about while she’s singing?

“Absolutely nothing. It’s a very Zen state of mind. That’s why I choose not to analyze the songs.”

She wonders whether she will be able to maintain that Zen-like composure through the Muses’ final shows. The band plans a two-hour retrospective in which fans are invited to request favorites.

“I’m very emotional about it. We all are, but I’m pathetic,” Hersh said. “I don’t like that to show, because that’s not being invisible”--in keeping with her it’s-the-song-not-the-singer philosophy. “It’s hard for me, but I’m in love with my band; I love the people; I love the music, and [feeling the sorrow of parting] is not a bad thing.”

* Throwing Muses, Magnapop and Walnut Grove play Sunday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $16.50-$18.50. (714) 957-0600.