Abrasive Sugar Ray Drops Its ‘Stupider Than Thou’ Shtick

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 and spouting crude nonsense. He says that such impulsively idiotic moves as hurling filled cans of beer into concert crowds 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.”

It seemed that Sugar Ray’s karma would be fulfilled at any instant with the failure of “Lemonade and Brownies,” the 1995 debut album that was a monument to frat-rock inanity. But inspiration knocked instead.

The desperate rap-metal band, which also includes McGrath’s Newport Beach high school chums Murphy Karges, Stan Frazier and Rodney Sheppard, plus Pasadena-raised turntable ace Craig “DJ Homicide” Bullock, came up with “Fly,” an anomalously breezy pop song from its second album, that became a huge national hit in the summer of 1997.

Karma is smiling on Sugar Ray now. Taking full wing along the sweetened pop path blazed with “Fly,” the band indeed has scored a second modern-rock radio hit with the mellow, sunny track “Every Morning.” A third album, “14:59” (the title wryly alludes to critics’ assumption that Sugar Ray had to be 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.

McGrath has rewritten his script from hell-raising party animal to sensitive romantic. When he 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 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.

Sugar Ray’s members are disarmingly open and unpretentious about their lack of artistic heft and what McGrath calls his “stupider than thou” moves. “We never had any credibility,” Karges said. “Nobody ever gave us any, so how could we lose any?”

Reconciling the band’s wayward head-banger past with its sensitive pop-troubadour present could take some doing.

Will McGrath be able to rein in his onstage excesses?

“I’ve moved on,” vows McGrath, 29, who wouldn’t be averse to parlaying his good looks into an acting sideline. “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.”

Is he 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’ 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.”