Moonlighting Becomes Them

If even the losers get lucky sometimes, Golden Smog may yet turn into a proper rock super group, like the Traveling Wilburys.

This collection of buddies from twangy Midwestern bands with ‘80s college-rock roots used to have at least one thing in common with the Wilburys: the use of cute pseudonyms. But even that passing similarity has vanished.

In a small victory for musicians who know what it means to go hitless on the pop charts, the six Smoggers won the right on their new album, “Weird Tales,” to finally stop calling themselves silly things like Jarrett Decatur, Scott Summitt and Raymond Virginia, and start using their real names.

“We used those names before because we had to,” said Gary Louris, the Jayhawks front man who is one of four singer-songwriters who share the spotlight in Golden Smog. “It was the way our [main bands’] labels wanted it at the time. [Eventually] they realized Golden Smog wasn’t preventing any world domination [by those other bands] anyway.”

The only Golden Smog member who has reaped gold or platinum returns is Dan Murphy, the guitarist and second-chair singer-songwriter in Soul Asylum behind Dave Pirner. (Pirner took part in Golden Smog’s first incarnation as a consortium of drinking buddies playing cover songs in Minneapolis bars, resulting in a 1992 debut EP.)

Louris and bassist Marc Perlman hail from the long-struggling Jayhawks and Kraig Johnson plays in the even lower-profile Run Westy Run (he’s also now an adjunct Jayhawks member). The star of the bunch is Jeff Tweedy, of the creatively high-achieving but commercially under-rewarded Chicago-based band Wilco.

When Golden Smog needed a new drummer to record “Weird Tales,” it was only fitting that the job went to Jody Stephens, who played in Big Star, the Memphis-based band from the early ‘70s that ranks high on rock’s all-time list of buried treasures.

Classic-rock sources such as the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, vintage Rod Stewart and Neil Young & Crazy Horse feed Golden Smog’s sound. The band’s first album of originals, “Down by the Old Mainstream” (1996), was a charming, offhanded patchwork. “Weird Tales” is much more cohesive, with stately tempos and a unifying mood of elegiac longing.

“There was absolutely no discussion of [a unified] concept, but I’m happy this record holds together as well as it does,” Louris, 43, said over the phone from his home in Minneapolis. “It’s no small feat, considering you have six chefs and a lot of different lead singers.”

The pieces may fit together better because Golden Smog took more time in the studio to sand them down.

“The last record was recorded in five days,” Louris said. “This one, there wasn’t a lot of huddling and planning ahead of time, but we spent a month on it, and we had more time to . . . become more of a band. It’s hard when you don’t all hang out together all the time.”

Tour Offers Creative Break

For Louris, Perlman and Johnson, Golden Smog’s weeklong West Coast tour, ending Sunday at the Galaxy in Santa Ana, offers a break from their work on the next Jayhawks album; Louris, an expecting father, is counting down to the April due date for his first child. Wilco is gearing up for the March release of “Summer Teeth,” its already finished third album (not counting “Mermaid Avenue,” a Grammy-nominated 1998 collaboration with Billy Bragg that put music to unrecorded lyrics by Woody Guthrie).

Tweedy’s fans will find his four dusty, folk- and country-based songs on “Weird Tales” more familiarly Wilco-like than the more pop-baroque offerings on “Summer Teeth.”

Louris has contributed some outstanding songs to Golden Smog, notably “V,” an openhearted tribute to a kindly waitress most of the band members knew or dated, and the new album’s “Until You Came Along,” which borrows signature Byrds harmonies and chiming guitars while also nicking the bass line and warm feel of Stewart’s “Maggie May.”

Given that either song could well have been viewed as the Jayhawks’ ticket to bigger things, what are the songwriters’ criteria for tossing a song into Golden Smog’s pile, rather than holding it back for their main bands?

“For me, it’s hard,” Louris said. “If I like a song, I can get it onto a Jayhawks record, and you don’t necessarily want to give the greatest song you ever wrote to your side band.

“A lot of times a song you wrote for your own band doesn’t work for chemistry reasons,” he said, “ ‘Until You Came Along’ never worked with the Jayhawks, and it did with Golden Smog, where it’s just a bunch of pals in a sing-along. The Jayhawks . . . maybe made it too good, too right. It didn’t have the swagger it does with the Smog.”

For Golden Smog, prolonged absences between records and tours keep the get-togethers fonder, and the onstage music-making looser in a ragged-but-right way.

“The more we rehearse, the worse we are, I think,” Louris said. “We need the mistakes.”

Egos Checked at the Door

One mistake Golden Smog avoids is the too-many-creative-egos problem that typically sows rancor in bands with three or four talented singer-songwriters--witness the undoing of the Beatles, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Blind Faith.

“I don’t think the Golden Smog could ever work as our only band. There would be too many people fighting for space,” Louris said. But as an occasional side-project, what would otherwise be unwieldy functions nicely as a rock artists’ cooperative.

“The biggest egos might be me and Jeff, but we have our own bands to get a lot of that out,” Louris said. “It’s almost fun to step back a little. Everybody’s pulling for Kraig and Dan, because Kraig doesn’t get many of his songs out [elsewhere], and he’s a brilliant, natural musician, and Dan only gets to do one or two songs a record on Soul Asylum’s albums. The main difference [from volatile super groups of the past] is that everybody knows we’re touring for just 10 days and we won’t see each other for six months, and it may be two years before we make another record.”

* Golden Smog and Hazeldine play Sunday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $17.50-$19.50. (714) 957-0600.