Lowery Trades His Guitar for Keyboard

“Simon Sez,” the recent Dennis Rodman action movie that suffered a critical drubbing and a shrug from the ticket-buying public, is partly the brainchild of Andrew Lowery, whose nascent career as a Hollywood screenwriter is nevertheless going great guns.

As a rocker, the former Fullerton resident helped conceive a masterpiece that, alas, died aborning because of music industry malpractice.

Call it the Great Lost Orange County Rock Album: Standard Fruit’s 1995 album that never was released.

This grand pop-rock record, which showed influences ranging from the Beach Boys to R.E.M. and the Smiths, but really didn’t sound like anything else, was so good that I broke a rule and reviewed it that June, even though it wasn’t available for readers to buy:

“An array of songs that do justice to life’s poignant and pathetic side, yet redeem the pain with the invigorating burst of joy-inducing vitality that is one of the unique gifts we can get from a great pop song. The album is loaded--absolutely packed--with songs that can take you out of yourself for their three-minute duration.”

After that, Standard Fruit--with Lowery as main songwriter and rhythm guitarist, singer Denys Gawronski, drummer Ernest Woody, bassist Roger Smith and guitarist Clark Fisher--got romanced, then jilted, by a record label and gave up the project.

The band, which did issue a promising, literally homemade debut CD in 1993, parted with Fisher, renamed itself South (in wry recognition of its career trajectory) and moved on, never bothering to do an independent release of its unnamed masterwork. South stopped playing about February 1998.

Lowery, who had financed the band with his earnings as a regularly working, if not marquee-level, film and television actor, turned to screenwriting with partner Andrew Miller, whom he had met while working on the TV film “JFK: Reckless Youth.”

They were hired to concoct a script for “Simon Sez” around a story conceived by two of the film’s producers.

“It’s horrible” is Lowery’s own thumbs-way-down review; he said he and Miller got hired because “we worked cheap enough.”

Since then, Lowery said, they have been on “this unbelievable successful run.” Another of their scripts, “Boys and Girls”--starring Freddie Prinze Jr.--began filming earlier this month. They also have a two-picture deal with Miramax that Lowery said is worth $1 million.

One flicker of hope for fans who remember the Fruit fondly: Lowery said he recently hooked up again with his old bandmates--minus Fisher--for a series of songwriting sessions, with hopes of placing a song in “Boys and Girls” or other pictures.

Gawronski is a singer-actor in the Universal Studios “Blues Brothers” revue, Woody manages Ocean Way recording studios in Hollywood, and Smith, the only member left in Orange County, is a student at Fullerton College, aiming for a career as an elementary school teacher. They practice about once a week in the living room of Woody’s home in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood.

“We can just mess around with songs and we don’t have to worry about anyone ever hearing it,” Lowery said. “It’s music for music’s sake.”

Lowery hardly ever thinks about the Great Lost Standard Fruit album. “I financed the band for seven years. It’s my most unsuccessful venture ever. I never knew why [record labels rejected it]. It seemed good.”

Former Orange County music impresario Sam Lanni, who owned the legendary Safari Sam’s rock club in Huntington Beach, was Standard Fruit’s manager and remains friendly with band members.

Lanni said he might want to take a shot at interesting a small label in releasing and distributing the missing masterpiece, although it’s doubtful Standard Fruit/South would be available for a touring campaign to promote it.

“We kind of gave up on it because nobody would pay attention to the band,” Lanni said. “It’s one of the saddest things of my life.”