‘Cat’s’ Out of the Bag

The story lines to “Boogie Nights” and “Goodfellas” were playing through Scott Lucas’ mind, and classic albums by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones were on his stereo as he and partner Joe Daniels concocted their third album as the hard-rocking Chicago duo Local H.

Lucas, who sings, plays guitar and writes the lyrics, wanted an album that told a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end. The music had to be catchy and varied enough to carry a listener along for the ride and make the album potentially as timeless as the ‘70s favorites that had recaptured him and still sounded fresh.

He and Daniels, who started Local H in 1988 as high school seniors in Zion, Ill., came up with a cautionary tale, set in a rock ‘n’ roll milieu, about what happens when an earthy, humble, small-town nobody becomes a somebody and it goes to his head.

The album, “Pack Up the Cats,” came out in September to strong reviews and featured a grandly soaring, supremely catchy first single, “All the Kids Are Right.” The signs looked favorable for a band that had enjoyed a breakthrough with its previous release, “As Good as Dead.”

That 1996 album yielded a modern-rock hit, “Bound for the Floor,” highlighted by a Nirvana-like sense of structure and a Cobain-ish note of chesty, dyspeptic anguish in the singing. (It’s the one with the springy but stark chorus that rhymes “just don’t get it,” “copacetic” and “so pathetic.”)

Then the real world took its cue, and Local H learned just how perennially relevant cautionary story lines are in show biz, where comeuppance can come up easily.

The duo’s record company, Island, was taken over and gutted in the sweeping corporate downsizing wrought by Seagram Corp. to streamline its music-business holdings. Promoting “Pack Up the Cats” was not a priority for music executives going through a wrenching round of pack-up-the-label.

“It was a little frustrating because it was dragged out so long,” Lucas said by phone from a tour bus stopped in Austin, Texas. “For months there, it was ridiculous to go out on tour, so we didn’t. Why go out there when nobody [at the label] is thinking about you, because they’re worried about whether they have a job?

“I’m sorry to see so many people go who’ve been working with us the past few years,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m glad it’s over and we can get back to work. The last record was a success because we toured our [expletives] off for two years and had songs on the radio.”

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Daniels and Lucas, both 28, realize it won’t be easy to pick up lost career momentum; all they can do is play and hope--as they will Wednesday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana.

The show, Lucas promises, won’t be an enactment of the disastrous Local H gig sardonically portrayed in “All the Kids Are Right.”

Lucas sings the part of a musician who knows he stunk up the joint and is going to pay for it:

You heard that we were great

Now you think we’re lame

Since you saw the show last night. . .

No one likes to feel

That they’ve been had

It won’t be OK

To wear our T-shirts anymore.

That stinko show is fictional, Lucas said--a climactic but invented moment near the end of the album when the unpretentious, just-for-the-love-of-it rocker we meet at the start of “Pack Up the Cats” has allowed himself to turn egotistical, careless and jaded.

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For humor’s sake, “All the Kids Are Right” goes in for self-mockery, casting Local H itself as the villain of the piece (“Walking through the set, drunk as you could get / And what the hell was wrong with Joe?”).

“When I was younger, I didn’t go to a concert for the longest time because so many live records sounded [terrible],” Lucas said. “I got it in my mind that live bands just sucked.”

At 15, he says, he went to a Robert Plant show, then a punk gig by--he can’t remember which--7 Seconds or the Dead Milkman and saw that plunking down cash for concerts wasn’t necessarily a waste.

Lucas says bad live bands on the scene today are turning prospective customers into turned-off versions of his younger self.

“A lot of people just don’t try,” Lucas said. “There’s that fear of throwing away your money on a band that’s not going to give you anything. I paid to see Sebadoh [the notoriously temperamental alterna-rock band from Massachusetts], and they walked through every song they played.

“What’s going to happen when I see another band? You enter into this trust when people pay to see you,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how you’re feeling, or if there’s only 20 people there. You have to give them something.”

Local H first stood out for giving maximum sound with minimal means: just Daniels’ emphatic, nothing-fancy drumming and Lucas’ guitar playing, specially amplified to make the bass notes seem suitably heavy.

Daniels came from a family of musicians, and his father schooled him in blues and jazz drumming from the age of 3. By 7, he was performing in clubs; by 11 he’d given up the drums, feeling burned out.

He turned to break dancing and deejay work, but rap also lost its appeal. His father bought Daniels’ some electronic drums, hoping they would rekindle his interest, and a mutual acquaintance hooked him up with Lucas, who was trying to get a band together to play a show at their high school. The partnership took, and when the band’s bass player quit, they carried on as a duo.

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While that unorthodox approach was a calling card on the band’s first album, the grunge-saturated “Ham Fisted” from 1995, Local H doesn’t make a fetish of it. A second guitarist, Wes Kidd, is along for the current tour, playing parts on certain songs that demand more complexity; the band also has a road crew member sing backing vocals.

In keeping with its aim of trying to create something with staying power akin to their ‘70s faves, Local H hired Roy Thomas Baker, the producer noted for albums by Queen, the Cars and Cheap Trick.

“He helped us stretch,” said Daniels--especially on the album’s finale, “Lucky Time,” in which a soaring slide guitar and chiming piano pump up a mood of stately grandeur that deliberately evokes that classic-rock staple “Layla” by Derek & the Dominos.

The song finds the humbled hero reaching optimistically for a chance to redeem himself and not make the same mistakes again.

“It’s that moment of clarity,” Lucas said. “ ‘I realize what I’ve done, give me a another chance, I won’t [mess] up.’

“I see that process in myself, and I can see it in a lot of other people--a classic type of rise and fall thing,” where ego overshadows the initial, uncomplicated joy of just playing music.

“It’s what I see everybody doing whether they want to admit it or not,” he said. “I didn’t want to make a record you can relate to only if you’re a rock critic or in a band; on the other hand, I love rock and wanted to make a statement about it.”

* Local H, Fuel and Mayfield Four play Wednesday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $12.50-$14.50. (714) 957-0600.