Planning a Return Trip : Mother Hips, After a Recent Move Into Alternative Country Music, Is Ready to Go Back Home to Rock

Mother Hips has been an eclectic outfit ever since four Cal State Chico students formed the band eight years ago. It started as a trippy, psychedelic band, then shifted to a more straightforward, though still varied, brand of rock.

That said, the band’s members concede that they may have been asking too much of its fans last year when they swung into alternative country with their “Later Days” album. They saw it as an honest reflection of the band’s country-rock influences, but it left a lot of fans shaking their heads. That’s why the group, which plays the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight, plans to move back to rock with its next album.

“ ‘Later Days’ was well received [by our hard-core fans], but I think a lot of [other] fans wanted to hear more of a rock record,” said Mother Hips vocalist and principal songwriter Tim Bluhm. “[Plus] when you’re trying to get new fans, you have to have a definitive genre. We’ve never really had that.”

It has, however, had something of a neo-hippie band reputation. The group’s support base is partly made up of Grateful Dead-type fans who follow the group from show to show, record and trade bootleg tapes of its concerts.

Bluhm and his bandmates, though, have no real affinity for the Dead or other bands reflecting that musical and philosophical free spirit. It’s been several years since Mother Hips’ concerts dripped with free-form psychedelia, a change Bluhm attributed to the departure of original drummer Mike Wofchuck.

“Mike was the most hippie of anyone in the band,” Bluhm reveals. “I don’t know if it was Mike specifically [who was responsible for that phase]. But we definitely were more into space jams and psychedelia [when he was in the band].”

Mother Hips hasn’t entirely lost its hippie following, in part because, like the Dead and Phish, it never plays the same set of songs twice. While extended improvisational jams are largely a thing of the past, the group has more than 400 songs in its repertoire from which to draw each night.

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For Mother Hips, which until recently played up to 250 shows a year, variety was not only the spice of life, but also a necessity to stave off boredom.

By the end of this year, however, Bluhm figures, the band will have only played about 125 shows.

“We realized that if we just stick to the bigger shows and play fewer shows we end up making more money than if we go out and try to play seven nights a week,” he said. “You end up spending a lot of your money traveling [when you tour constantly]. Your expenses exceed your profit. About a year ago we kind of figured that out.

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“It’s nice because we clear about the same amount of money and we don’t have to work as much,” he said. “‘We have more time at home, more time to write music and more time to record. The show has more energy because we’re not so burned out.”

Yet at the same time that its less-rigorous touring schedule has made performing more enjoyable, making albums has become more difficult.

It’s been several years since the band was dropped by the Rick Rubin-run American Records label. The group released “Later Days” on its Mother Hips label and plans to do the same with its next album, which should come out early next year.

But because of its minimal budget for recording, the group has found itself scrounging for free or inexpensive studio facilities. They’ve been using various homes, garages and practice spaces as well as conventional recording studios to record new material.

Bluhm is optimistic that Mother Hips will get another shot at singing with a big record company. He insists that if that doesn’t happen, the group will be happy operating at a grass-roots level.

“I think our fans appreciate the way we do [everything ourselves],” Bluhm observed. “It’s very pure. There’s no hype at all. Just because a band is built on money, hype and radio play doesn’t mean the music it plays is good. We don’t have that kind of support so the fact that we sell out almost every show we play is a testament to nothing more than our musical appeal.”

* Mother Hips plays tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, 8. $10-$12. [949] 496-8927.