Altered States

Film Star’s music is trippy in the best sense of the word.

The songs on the Costa Mesa band’s two CDs--including the excellent just-released “Tranquil Eyes”--probe psychedelic realms, but their spacey moods and astral concepts are anchored by earthy, garage-rock underpinnings and, on the new album, forthright emotion.

Members Piers Brown, Jamie Fletcher and Geoff Harrington get where they’re going fast. Unlike the indulgent, patience-taxing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” school of psychedelia, Film Star’s songs average no more than three minutes. But that’s room enough for this guitar-drums-keyboards trio, augmented by a rotation of hireling bassists, to enliven every track with surprising progressions of mood and delicious tonal variations.

It’s fitting that a Film Star song never takes a predictable path. The band hasn’t, either.

Brown, a lanky, urbane fellow whose features and bowl-cut bangs recall ‘60s actor David Hemmings, spent his early childhood in the Basque region of Spain. Fletcher’s mound of curls, ample sideburns and colorful vintage garb at a recent Film Star gig made him look as if he had stepped out of a Kinks or Traffic album cover, circa 1968. His history runs parallel to Brown’s: an overseas boyhood (in England), followed by family migration to Orange County. Also like Brown, his key musical influences remain classic ‘60s stuff from his parents’ record collection.

The highly unorthodox Harrington got into music via punk-rock, but he plays an assortment of vintage keyboards more allied with psychedelic and progressive bands. He grew up in Laguna Beach and is accustomed to a nomadic lifestyle. Sleeping in crash pads on the extended tours Film Star hopes to play would fit his on-the-move existence.

Drummer Fletcher and guitarist Brown, now in their mid-20s, started making homemade recordings together in 1991, after meeting in a voice class at Orange Coast College. In 1994, already calling themselves Film Star, they hooked up with Harrington at Saturation, the small recording studio he ran in a Costa Mesa warehouse. The three gradually realized they were a combination that worked.

“I listened to some of their songs, and at first I wasn’t impressed at all,” said Harrington, a tall, spindly 29-year-old who speaks in a fatigued-sounding, 2 a.m. voice and has the slightly disheveled look of a renegade academic.

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As a producer and engineer, Harrington had other work to do. His credits include recording and playing keyboards on releases by Rocket From the Crypt, the admirable San Diego band, and record production for O.C. alterna-rock stalwarts Big Drill Car, Supernova and Smile. But he agreed to give Film Star free studio time as a favor to Fletcher--the two had played together in the Women, a grass-roots Costa Mesa band.

“As the songs formulated on tape, I got sucked into it more and more,” Harrington recalled.

Film Star developed slowly until the release last year of the band’s self-titled debut CD. “Film Star” had a dark, spooky allure, with songs about paranoia, Edgar Allan Poe and weird mental interiors.

Mental interiors continue to be in vogue on “Tranquil Eyes,” an album whose druggy title pun and cover shot of a woman in a poppy field reflect Harrington’s and Brown’s fascination with altered states of consciousness.

Harrington said his mind was probably a tad too altered during the making of the band’s first album in 1994-95.

“I was pretty much spaced out. To be honest, I don’t remember recording much of the first record.”

If nothing else, Harrington’s fogginess at the time helped inspire “Without Love,” one of the catchiest and hardest-hitting songs on “Tranquil Eyes” (its feel recalls Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”). In it, writer Brown sings of being “lost in the strangest nightmare, with this peculiar friend” who has a “self-medicated dark side.”

“That’s pretty much about [Harrington],” Brown said. “He’s obviously a quirky guy, and there were some nights when he seemed more somewhere else than there.”

In the past two years, Harrington said, the birth of his daughter and his decision to get out of the hectic business of running a recording studio have helped give his life more focus.

But with Harrington, “focus” may be a relative term. He said he doesn’t just want to play psychedelic music, but to “constantly” seek transcendent inner experiences.

Harrington and Brown, the band’s singer-songwriters, don’t collaborate on writing songs, but they have become partners in exploring matters speculative and metaphysical. Each talks of achieving a state of “fourth-dimensional mind,” in which thought and inner perception would be so vivid that the shackles of everyday reality would fall away.

“You imagine something, and it becomes reality instantaneously,” Harrington explained. “The prize is complete bliss and peace of mind. Some people say that on planet Earth that may not be possible, but I think it’s important to find out.”

Where do psychedelic drugs fit into this quest?

“I’m not saying that drug use is going to be the way, although it’s as close as I’ve gotten to finding these states of mind,” Harrington said. “It’s a training ground. Now, in a more sober state of mind, I can find these places [without drugs].”

Brown cultivated his interest in mind expansion when he got a job as a library clerk and began reading about psychedelic pioneers such as Ken Kesey and the Beat writers. When it comes to hallucinogens, “I’m not so much into that side of it. I have had experiences with it, and it does offer you some different insights on how music fits together. If you can hold onto those, it gives you some insight on how you want [the sound] to come across. Ultimately, the goal is to write chords that bring to mind places I want to be.”

Rather than floating off into hazy escape, Harrington and Brown ground their musical searches for wonder by delving into the painful states they hope to alter through thought.

One of Film Star’s most remarkable songs, “Ooh Girl,” began rather mundanely, as Brown’s attempt to spoof the formulaic love ballads he heard while dating a woman who liked to tune in to the R&B; station KKBT-FM. But his trippy inclinations turned it into a strange, dreamlike piece, in which images of horror, death and helplessness are offset by a warm feeling of aching beauty. The music suggests both Smokey Robinson, circa “Ooh, Baby Baby,” and the yearning, anthemic side of Neil Young, a touchstone for a lot of Film Star’s music. Harrington clinches the song’s inviting, otherworldly character with lovely squiggles on his vintage ARP synthesizer.

Mike McHugh is an old friend of Harrington’s who took over his studio and helped produce “Tranquil Eyes” there.

“They’re out in their own zone,” he said. “I don’t know what planet they’re from. And it comes out in their music.”

Fletcher, Film Star’s youngest member, is left to anchor both the beat and the business of running the band while his mates indulge speculative interests.

“He’s a little more realistic,” said Harrington. “This whole fourth-dimensional thing he laughs at to a certain extent. But when we’re playing, he knows when we’re nailing it.”

Fletcher enjoys the open-mindedness that comes with the two songwriters’ otherworldly fixations.

“There is no guideline as to what the music is going to be. Whatever [idea] comes in, we try to make something of it, rather than saying, ‘It doesn’t sound like us, let’s not do it.’ ”

Indeed, Film Star sometimes plays R&B; instrumentals composed by Harrington, who during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s spent four years holed up in Seattle, devoting most of his time to honing his style on a Hammond B3 organ, with Booker T. Jones, Jimmy Smith and prog-rocker Keith Emerson as models.

Career advancement doesn’t rate high on Film Star’s list of priorities, though Brown and Harrington are eager to tour extensively. The band’s two CDs are on a tiny Los Angeles label, Super Cottonmouth. Before signing, the band members said, they turned down better-established labels that wanted to tinker with the music on their debut album, which they saw as a unified, not-to-be-altered piece.

“The things that have come to us have been out of the blue,” Fletcher said, referring to a record deal and several tours through the West. “Making plans that are more concrete isn’t the focus. It’s writing great songs and not being too concerned with the business side of it. We basically manage ourselves. There’s never been a big rush to go out and find someone to take 25% of what we make. At this point, it’s not much.”

Fletcher teaches SAT cram courses for a living, Brown has had his library clerk’s gig for six years, and Harrington said he has lived out of a suitcase since 1995, mainly staying with friends and doing occasional recording sessions and production work to earn money.

“I guess we should be looking out for our best interests,” Harrington said. “Just to have [Super Cottonmouth] put out our records and give us a little money to record them is a giant step.”

Film Star may be odd, but the heady combination of strangeness and accessibility captured on “Tranquil Eyes” should appeal to ears susceptible to Pavement, Lutefisk and others who play garage-rock with a twist.

“Our ultimate goal,” Brown said, “is to keep expanding our music till it reaches the point where a lot of people are affected by it.”

(Available from Super Cottonmouth Records, P.O. Box 480555, Los Angeles, CA 90048; www.supercottonmouth.com.)