Dial-7 Makes a Clear Connection

There’s a mystique about the number seven. The seventh day of Genesis. The seventh seal of Revelation. The seventh son of blues-song mythology.

“It’s the number, the all-powerful number,” said Michael Lord, singer of Dial-7, the rock-and-rap band whose name alludes to that numerological aura.

If Dial-7 rolls a seven with “Never Enough Time,” its just-released debut album for Warner Bros., success would bring a deserved jackpot for the most distinctive and thematically worthwhile band to come out of the local rock scene since Sublime.

While Orange County ska heroes such as Save Ferris, Home Grown and Reel Big Fish spam the nation with their lyrics’ inconsequence, and Sugar Ray and Kottonmouth Kings vie for the dubious title of world’s most knuckleheaded band, Dial-7 grapples with racism, grief and the struggle to stay mentally alert and spiritually afloat in times of tribulation.

It often takes harsh experience to achieve that kind of creative depth, and this band knows very well what it means to sit at life’s gaming table and have the dice come up snake-eyes.

In 1996, the band was coalescing while its six members lived in a tiny communal space in a warehouse in Laguna Canyon. (Dial-7’s lyrics also invest 133, the route number of Laguna Canyon Road, with magical-mystical powers.)

Then rapper Steven “Kid Bone” Lord--younger brother of Michael and protege of Dial-7’s other rapper, Shaun “Shauny B.” Baxstrum, 20--was killed, along with two other passengers, in a car driven by a 17-year-old girl who had been drinking.

The band can sing convincingly about difficult trials leading to a clearer vision because it lived through it with Kid Bone’s death.

“A major change happened,” bassist Barrett said. “Everybody had a purpose and a goal, instead of jamming just for fun.”

“It became a mission of letting our insides out,” said Michael Lord, 25. “We have this time, we have this life. Let’s make sure we don’t let these things go by. The [emotions] I feel every day, I can’t let that not be heard. The point was to carry on; I couldn’t, being his brother, let [his death] be in vain.”

Life has given Lord and Shauny B., the band’s lyricists, plenty to write about. Both came out of a tough, tense neighborhood in Ontario in San Bernardino County.

As African Americans living in Orange County, they say they have encountered other sorts of pressure--Shauny B. says the Irvine police used to routinely pull him over when he drove through the city in his low-rider van; the song “MacFly,” more bewildered than angry, was written after Lord was bloodied by a skinhead after a Dial-7 show in Newport Beach.

Faith and Promise

Now Lord’s older sister, Sharon--the ex-girlfriend of Shauny B. and the mother of his 9-year-old son--is battling brain cancer.

“I believe in God,” Lord said when asked how he manages not to be deflated by so much family heartache. “You can’t have testimony without your test.”

During an interview, the Dial-7 members lounged around a cramped recreational vehicle parked outside their rehearsal studio in Fountain Valley. The camper has been their home since mid-September, when they embarked on the first national tour of their career.

The band’s three instrumentalists are bassist Barrett (who goes by his last name, eschewing his first, Russell), drummer Mikey Clamz (whose unused surname is Hernandez) and guitarist Chris Robosan, who joined a year ago after playing in the hoary O.C. punk band D.I.

Lord and Shauny B. did most of the talking during the interview; in conversation, as on stage, they contrast with and complement each other.

Shauny B. is small and wiry and speaks at nothing less than a fevered pitch of attention-grabbing theatricality. In performance, he sprints the stage and hurls himself into the crowd. Lord, a large, well-muscled man, has a powerful singing voice but is a soft-spoken, philosophical talker who projects uncommon conviction and seriousness.

George Catsouras, owner of the White House club in Laguna Beach, regularly booked Dial-7 as it emerged on the local scene. He became a friend and supporter of the band, advancing it the money for its first CD, the independently released “. . . Yesterday Was Allday.”

“Michael Lord is the real spiritual Jedi type, and Shauny B. is just a firecracker,” Catsouras said. “He walks into a room anywhere and he just brings the whole place to life. Mike’s really laid back. They’re each other’s yin and yang.”

About eight years ago, Shauny B.’s streetwise ways prompted the Lord family’s move to Irvine, hoping to break off his romance with Sharon.

But Shauny B. persisted and eventually won the relationship a belated parental blessing. He says the relationship fizzled partly because he was more alluring to Sharon when he was forbidden fruit.

Roads Not Taken

Lord says his first career choice after graduating from University High School was petty crime, as recounted in the song “133”: “I could think of hard times, when there was a life of crime / Takin’ things that weren’t mine, gettin’ caught and doin’ time.”

He says he served a few weeks in Orange County’s minimum-security jail for stealing computers. Lord decided music promised a better future.

He had sung in church choirs but never in a band--until Clamz met him at a party and invited him to join the band he and Barrett had formed. (Clamz grew up in Fresno, Barrett in Moreno Valley; they met in Orange County and, never having played in bands before, decided to try.)

Release was the band name; with Lord as frontman, they played straightforward rock--until, at the Coach House on night, Kid Bone sat in and did some human beatbox rhythms and freestyle rapping to cap the set.

“The whole crowd was just going off,” Lord recalled. “The next day it was assumed [that the band would start incorporating rap with rock]: ‘OK, where are we taking it from here?’ ”

Developing Dial-7’s mix of rap, reggae inflections and Hendrix-like hard rock wasn’t a laborious process, said Barrett, who writes much of the band’s music. “We just kept playing and it evolved,” he said. “There was no plan for it. We kept pouring [stuff] into the pot and cooked it up.”

Shauny B. had become an aspiring hip-hop record producer; one of his projects was turning Kid Bone into “the new LL Cool J.” But Lord said his younger brother was getting into trouble; after one stretch in juvenile hall, Kid Bone moved into Lord’s Costa Mesa apartment.

“He brought the ghetto to my house,” Lord said. “House parties, smoking [marijuana] at 3 a.m., and I had to get up in the morning to work.” After big brother threw him out, Kid Bone’s pattern of troublemaking and incarceration resumed.

Lord said things changed in 1995 when he warily invited his brother to move into Dial-7’s communal flat in Laguna Canyon. “I said, ‘Don’t bring that whole environment with you like you did last time.’ He had seen enough time in juvie, and he knew what was beautiful.

“You come to a resolution. When he got out and stepped inside Laguna Canyon, looking at the beauty of the hills, and all my friends welcomed him, he changed his whole life,” Lord said. “It was just about working to make enough money to do what he loved to do, and being happy.”

Shauny B. began hanging out with Dial-7 and eventually joined the group; he craved the chance to perform live and saw few avenues to get on stage in hip-hop, where few acts get to tour.

Shauny B. also sees Dial-7 as a refuge. “There are a lot of things I don’t want to speak on right now, but I’ve got a whole lot of stories to tell,” he said, noting that he had the scars on his right cheek before he started leaping into crowds at Dial-7 shows.

“If I started, you’d sit here and wonder why I’m not dead,” he said. “I can’t change my past, but I can be damn sure I can make my present. What I can do now that’s good, maybe it will balance out what I’ve done bad.”

“Never Enough Time” weaves much of the story together. “133” is an ode to what Lord sees as the transformative power of living in Laguna Canyon and playing in Dial-7. (After giving up their canyon digs a little over a year ago, the band members say they have since lived itinerant lives in O.C., mainly staying with friends.)

“SJL” works through the band’s grief over Steven Lord’s death, reaching for a higher sense of purpose. “Pirate’s Fate” injects romance, with a touring Lord pining for the girl he left behind. “One 2 Grow On” is a lilting morality tale about the struggle between one’s better and baser selves: “The soul that’s human in me / Is fighting with the human, it’s plain to see.”

Yet the album has its dark moments, especially on the frenetic “Faster,” and the imagery grows increasingly foreboding. “Haven’t You Heard” mounts a scathing attack on social injustice, with intimations that change won’t come without spasms of violence.

“It’s our dark side,” Lord said. He says fans in their teens and 20s will see their own struggles and mood swings embodied in Dial-7’s music. Still, he said, the ultimate message is one of coping and change for the better.

“I’m going to show everybody how we came up, and that everything will be OK,” Lord said. “To me there has always been some kind of happy ending, and it was always about music.”

* Dial-7 plays today at Virgin Megastore in Triangle Square, Costa Mesa. 7:30 p.m. Free. (949) 645-9906.