Another Joykiller Character Builder

Jack Grisham ought to be a well-known rock star, but for reasons of early-career bad timing, middle-period self-defeatism and recent bad luck, he’s still scraping to build a national profile.

Grisham, who hails from Long Beach and lives in Huntington Beach, was a punk hero with T.S.O.L. back in the early 1980s, when being a punk hero didn’t pay. His personal foibles, insecurities and bad habits kept his late-’80s / early-’90s band, Tender Fury, from touring and laying the national groundwork that could have positioned him to reap the rewards of the post-Nirvana alt-rock boom. But it’s plain bad luck that the Joykiller isn’t bigger than, say, Goldfinger or Third Eye Blind or any number of tuneful bands that can’t touch the character Grisham brings to his lyrics or the stylistic daring and sheer exuberance with which the Joykiller approaches making records.

“The Joykiller,” in 1995, recapitulated Grisham’s punk-rock roots and included a song, “Seventeen,” that should have been one of the great modern-rock radio anthems of the ‘90s. Somehow it got overlooked. Last year, “Static” found the Joykiller zooming like the world’s most muscular power-pop band. Now comes “Three,” in which our erstwhile punk hero goes orchestral without losing his rocking bite, his sense of humor or his knack for poignant snapshots of people washed up and bleeding on the treacherous shoals of love, sex and family dysfunction.

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There are solid precedents for Grisham’s journey from punk hellion to sweeping, string-driven power popster. England’s Damned and Australia’s Saints (on the brilliant 1987 album “All Fools’ Day”) have made the same progression. The Joykiller does it particularly well; because no string players are credited on the album, one assumes that keyboard player Ronnie King’s samplers are behind all that is-it-real-or-Memorex? luster in the cello and violin sounds.

The back cover wryly notes that “Three” was “Overproduced by Thom Wilson,” but in fact the veteran producer helps the Joykiller find its way to orchestral arrangements that are the equivalent of rich, tangy gravy rather than the syrupy treacle that has grounded many an attempt at rock-with-strings.

The band often sounds like a single instrument, thickly textured and with many facets, rather than a typical assemblage of distinct musical parts. Sometimes King’s keyboards, or a compact guitar lead by Sean Greaves will leap from the mix to join Grisham’s voice atop the wave of sound.

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On “The Doorway,” the Joykiller shows it won’t be bound by alt-rock conventions. This affecting song about a man’s realization that he can’t control the lover who’s abandoning him shuffles along on a midtempo country train rhythm, and when a plaintive harmonica joins King’s sampled orchestra, it’s as if we’re out on the Wichita line or driving bleary-eyed to Phoenix with Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb.

Grisham doesn’t shrink from what it’s like to be 36 and societally marginal, having spent all your adult life playing music for little reward. There’s a strong sense of identification, if not outright autobiography, in “Ordinary,” where he depicts a “Working class sucker / Who spent his life with mother / And he waited 10 years for a car.” But that song’s outright lament gives way to acerbic humor in “Anyone but You,” where Grisham finds he lacks the cachet to impress a star-struck woman: “You’re sick of being someone nobody wants to be / You’re sick of socializing with me.” And “Record Collection” is a funny glimpse of the downside of a struggling rocker’s life: Poor Jack can’t even get his significant other to listen to his albums, finding her sequestered instead with old vinyl of Elvis Presley, the Pretenders and the Sex Pistols.

How does our outraged artist respond to this disloyalty?

So I took a match to her record collection,

No, I woulda killed her, but I need the affection.

In the character study “What It’s Worth,” where a clueless macho fellow can’t understand why his virile and sometimes brutal knight-in-armor approach hasn’t earned him a lover’s faithfulness, or “Sex Attack,” where raging testosterone has its wryly noted consequences, Grisham shows his ability to make words count. In this lyrically appalling era of cliches, meaningless half-thoughts posing as profundities and cookie-cutter blandness, he has the knack for twists and details that hinge on just a phrase or two but that turn a song into a slice of vibrant, amusing, crushing life that seems to be happening before our eyes and ears.

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Grisham’s drawling voice may not have the throw-weight of a top-line talent, but if the object is to convey feeling and personality while having a distinctive sound, he has nothing to be embarrassed about. There is a seamlessness to Joykiller albums that some might criticize as sameness, but that quality also makes each CD seem like a rushing theme-park ride that picks you up at the start and deposits you at the finish 35 or 40 minutes later, punchy but pleased from all that has flown by.

Oh, yes: “Three” includes “Super Vision,” a pop song so catchy, so warm, poignant and deeply human in its depiction of distrust seeping into a relationship, so altogether wonderful and spin-it-three-times-straight perfect that it would make David Bowie and the Cure envious. While modern-rock’s star machinery focuses on oafs such as Sugar Ray and unnourishing musical snack-packers such as Save Ferris, Jack and the Joykiller are off in the margins, showing what made Orange County’s alt-rock legacy great--and still does.

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.