Sugar Ray: 2-Hit Wonders

Instant karma was gonna get Sugar Ray, and no rock band deserved it more.

This was as boneheaded a bunch of uncouth exhibitionists as the Orange County music scene ever had belched up.

Singer Mark McGrath was known for baiting audiences, spouting crude nonsense, brandishing a hockey stick onstage like a battle-ax and taking long, chimp-like excursions in which he would climb a venue’s walls and swing from the rafters.

Impulsively idiotic moves such as hurtling filled cans of beer into concert crowds, McGrath says, even earned him death threats during the band’s early days. Looking back, McGrath sees his stage persona as a mask for deep insecurity about his singing ability: “I used to scream and yell, any kind of antics to get away from my voice.”

Things only got worse when Sugar Ray landed a record deal with Atlantic, thanks largely to a homemade video paid for and directed by Corona del Mar High School chum McG Nichol, who remains a close friend and advisor while pursuing a career as an A-list director of hit videos on MTV.

The resulting 1995 debut album, “Lemonade and Brownies,” was a monument to frat-rock inanity, from its puerile, potty-humor title and cheesecake album cover, to hip-hop-accented hard-rock songs that were either utterly meaningless or totally obnoxious. One track fawned over Mike Tyson and howled that his rape conviction was a miscarriage of justice; the edifying refrain of another found upper-class Newport Beach white kid McGrath hollering, “Back off, big black woman” over and over.

“Lemonade and Brownies” stiffed; deep in debt and afraid that Atlantic would drop them at any moment, Sugar Ray’s members gathered in a dingy rehearsal studio in New York City, hoping to generate new songs that would save the band’s career. When McGrath stormed out of a practice there in October 1996 (he wanted Sugar Ray to play screaming metal like Korn; cohorts Rodney Sheppard, Stan Frazier, Murphy Karges and Craig “DJ Homicide” Bullock were holding out for a more melodic rock approach), it seemed that Sugar Ray’s karma would be fulfilled at any instant.

Inspiration knocked instead.

Karges started noodling a two-chord figure on his bass, and Bullock fell in and scratched out a beat on his turntable. Sheppard entered with an airy, descending guitar hook, and Frazier got up from his drum kit, grabbed a microphone, and started singing what he felt, which was a need to escape the band’s dismal condition at that moment: “I just want to fly, put your arms around me, baby.”

McGrath hated it, but Nichol talked McGrath into developing lyrics around what his bandmates had written.

“When I first heard the beginnings of ‘Fly,’ I said, ‘I’m quitting,’ ” McGrath recalled. “But McG has been very involved from day one as the band’s psychologist, therapist and collaborator. He said, ‘Where else you gonna go--work at Del Taco?’ ”

McGrath saw the wisdom in that.

Further influenced by the fact that producer David Kahne was keen on the song, and that female fans who had heard the rough track (recorded by McGrath’s bandmates) had taken to humming it over and over, he decided to play along and flesh out the music and refrain with lyrics. He came up with a pastiche of phrases lifted from Gilbert O’Sullivan, Killing Joke and the Beatles--indicating a broad range of musical tastes, if not any great drive for fresh creativity.

‘Fly’ Sweetens the Sugar Ray Pot

“Fly” sounded nothing like the hard rock that dominated the rest of Sugar Ray’s 1997 sophomore release, “Floored,” but it didn’t matter. The song was a huge summer hit, and the album went double-platinum. Critics scoffed and painted Sugar Ray as the epitome of a new breed of one-hit wonders on the modern rock scene.

But karma is smiling on Sugar Ray now. Taking full wing along the sweetened pop path blazed with “Fly,” the band has scored a second modern-rock radio hit with “Every Morning,” a sunny grafting of a mellow Rascals “Groovin’ ” vibe onto the old Velvet Underground “Sweet Jane” riff.

The band’s third album, “14:59” (the title wryly alludes to critics’ assumption that Sugar Ray was down to its last tick on the Warholian quarter-hour of fame), comes out Tuesday and features a number of other nicely crafted pop goodies that promise to buy Sugar Ray at least another 15 minutes. The band introduces its newer, cuddlier self with a performance Tuesday on “The Tonight Show.”

McGrath has rewritten his role from hell-raising party animal to sensitive romantic waxing alternately wistful or glowingly appreciative about the loss or possession of a good woman’s love. When McGrath skipped an interview last week at a Hollywood coffee shop, he wasn’t being a truant but a Boy Scout: His 85-year-old grandma needed a ride from Newport Beach to San Diego for emergency postoperative cataract treatment, so McGrath left it to his four upbeat and enthusiastic bandmates to hold forth over soup and cappuccino.

Calling the following day from his apartment in Hollywood, McGrath outdid his cohorts in upbeat enthusiasm, cheerfully complaining that publishing his excuse would undo his bad-boy credentials.

“Please don’t say anything. It’s not too rock ‘n’ roll, is it? It’ll ruin my whole ‘stupider than thou’ image.”

Blatant About-Face of Style on ‘14:59’

Sugar Ray’s members are disarmingly open and unpretentious about their lack of artistic heft and the buffoonery of some of those questionable “stupider than thou” moves. They say “Lemonade and Brownies” was the outgrowth of an “Animal House” period in which the band members and Nichol moved from Newport Beach to cheaper digs in Los Angeles so they could cut costs, make music and carouse.

It was also a chance to rebuild unity after a yearlong breakup brought on by McGrath’s decision to bail out of rock ‘n’ roll and try to do something with his communications degree from USC. Nichol, who considers McGrath his best friend, says his buddy instead fell into a depression and failed to make any headway in the working world; patching it up with his somewhat embittered ex-bandmates (in those days, Sugar Ray was known as the Shrinky Dinx) proved to be his rescue.

Also disarming is Sugar Ray’s refusal to lash back after having played the critics’ whipping boy. “Aim for Me,” a rousing, Clash-like rockabilly-punk sing-along from “14:59,” buoyantly accepts the slings and arrows, finding compensation in the band’s own camaraderie: “We got a lot to learn, but we started out with nothing/With my friends we’re going on our way. . . . When it’s said and done and you’ve got us on the run/That’s OK, we’ll never come undone.”

With an album that takes a blatant stylistic about-face to cash in on the success of their only previous hit, Sugar Ray’s members know they’ll never acquire that much cherished ‘90s rock commodity, alternative credibility. But they’ve made it this far.

“We never had any credibility,” Karges said. “Nobody ever gave us any, so how could we lose any?”

While readily conceding much that would embarrass most alterna-bands, Sugar Ray’s members gently insist that the smiling pop of “14:59” reflects not just a shrewd gambit to avoid the scrapheap of one-hit wonderdom (although they’ll admit that’s part of it), but also a natural outgrowth of their musical backgrounds and interests.

It also marks their development from young frat-rockers to the more matured crew they are now that they’ve arrived in their late 20s and early 30s. Sensitive songs were verboten on the first two Sugar Ray albums; anyone who brought one in probably would have been laughed out of the rehearsal room in accordance with the band’s Animal House rules.

“We couldn’t break down that wall and say, ‘This is a song about my girlfriend, you guys, and I don’t wanna hear [any guff] about it,’ ” Frazier said.

Said McGrath: “There’s always been a sort of implicit rule in this band that you can’t talk about relationships, a sort of macho posturing where you couldn’t say, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I’m hurting.’ I don’t think we ever believed in ourselves that we could say something universal and personal. But it has evolved.”

Sheppard notes that the band members always have had pop-leaning tastes, dating to the Tories, a mid-’80s high school precursor to Sugar Ray that covered Beatles and New Wave pop. The most fetching song on “14:59” is “Ode to the Lonely Hearted,” a 15-year-old Tories holdover in which McGrath, who credits producer Kahne’s coaching with making him more comfortable with his voice, does his best wispy-plaintive Jackson Browne, supported by his bandmates’ Beatles-derived backup.

“Five years down the line from our first record, I would hope we would sound very different,” Sheppard said. Sugar Ray doesn’t make any claims to relevance, importance, originality or insight, he admits. “But we are claiming we have gotten better, and here’s where we’re at now.”

Looking Beyond 1-Hit-Wonder Status

The band’s challenge at the moment is to fashion a coherent set to take on the road. Reconciling its wayward head-banger past with its sensitive pop-troubador present could take some doing.

Will McGrath be able to rein in his onstage excesses? It’s a tall order for someone proven so impulsive and who, according to friend Nichol, can still bungle a show if the old insecurities about his singing well up: “When he’s not confident, that’s when he gets the most crass.”

“I’ve said [not to mention done] a lot of off-putting things onstage, but I’ve moved on,” vows McGrath, 29, who also says he wouldn’t be averse to parlaying his good looks into an acting sidelight. “We’re finding our niche now, and we’re certainly not trying to turn people off. I think this is the first listenable record we’ve made. The thing I feel best about is when you buy this record, I know you’ll be happy with it. I sound like a used-car salesman.”

“14:59” has a good chance of flying off the lot. “Every Morning” ensures that Sugar Ray will be at least a two-hit wonder, and, unlike “Floored,” the new album is stocked with several other hit-potential pop sweets to entice the vast preteens-to-grownups demographic that fell for fellow Orange Countians No Doubt.

Is McGrath feeling vindicated nowadays after all the scoffing about Sugar Ray?

“Vindicated? I was so happy to be a one-hit wonder I wasn’t going to let hearsay ruin that for me or the band. ‘Vindicated’ is a strong word. It sounds like there’s a lot of spite or hate. I feel most vindicated that we wrote a bunch of good songs. We did it amongst ourselves.”