Ukiah’s underdogs find art in darkness

The man in black waits and waits, brooding patiently at the microphone. Singer Davey Havok, fingernails painted black and a heart-shaped medallion hanging over his chest, watches over a near-empty room as the other members of AFI slowly piece together their punk-rock roar for an afternoon sound check at the Hollywood Palladium.

AFI begins to feel its way: a raw pattern of riffs from guitarist Jade Puget, a heavy beat from Adam Carson. The bassist called Hunter stands on a speaker and Havok finally wails a line from “Girl’s Not Gray,” the band’s first song to be embraced, or even noticed, by commercial rock radio.

This would be the band’s first headlining gig at the Palladium, though it has played the old dance hall before as a support act. Usually, AFI spends part of its sound check playing songs by Jane’s Addiction, Motley Crue, Concrete Blonde and Poison, and it often invites fans lined up early outside the building to come in and watch.

Not today. MTV is here with a video crew, one sign of the rising expectations surrounding a veteran band experiencing its first taste of mainstream success.

“Nothing really changes anything, but it’s real exciting to have interest from fans that we’ve never had before and for the first time to see your video on MTV,” says Havok, sitting backstage after the sound check. AFI (for “a fire inside”) is set to return as part of the KROQ Weenie Roast today at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, continuing the momentum of the quartet’s “Sing the Sorrow” album, which has sold more than 400,000 copies since its release in March.

It’s all a payoff of 12 years of slow growth. The band’s last album spent a week at the bottom of the sales chart in 2000 before disappearing. The success owes much to the ambitious scope undertaken for AFI’s first release on a major label, DreamWorks Records.

“It’s pretty outrageous and bombastic and exciting what they do, but they’re fearless at it -- and it connects,” says DreamWorks artists and repertoire executive Luke Wood, who signed the band. “Ideologically, they come from hard-core and punk rock. They have a good sense of community. When you marry that to the artistic ambition they have, that’s what’s allowed them to make the jump.”

“Sing the Sorrow” was recorded last year right across the street at Ocean Way Studios, with producers Jerry Finn (Green Day, Blink-182) and Butch Vig (Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins). The album opens slowly with “Miseria Cantere -- The Beginning,” a gathering storm of static and ominous beats evoking everything from Bauhaus to “A Clockwork Orange,” the sort of sound that had critics calling the album a punk-rock version of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”

Other tracks enjoy the same sly sizzle, or interrupt the gloom with sudden bursts of euphoria. Elsewhere, songs are truer to AFI’s roots as a Northern California hard-core outfit armed with anthem-like melodies.

The result has been a level of mainstream acceptance unimaginable when the core members of AFI were teenage punk kids in the ‘80s suffering through existence in Ukiah, a town of about 30,000 residents located two hours north of San Francisco. There were three punk bands in town then, including AFI, and no place to play. There still isn’t. That isolation somehow fed into their sound.

They were dyed-hair skate punks, with cross earrings, black raincoats and combat boots, finding inspiration in the relentless ‘80s assault of Minor Threat, GBH, Exploited and Social Distortion. “Bad Mohawks, bad dye jobs,” remembers guitarist Puget, who, like his bandmates, is in his 20s. “Plus, every group -- the metal-heads, the rednecks and the jocks -- all hated us. You were just totally hated. In a small town there weren’t very many punks, and you had to deal with that constantly. You couldn’t go down any street without the chance of somebody trying to beat you up or give you a hard time.”

These days on the road, the musicians are a lot less likely to spin an old Germs CD on the bus than they are to wind down to the ethereal waves of Sigur Ros.

“In the beginning we were hard-core punk,” Havok says. “We’re obviously not anymore, and we don’t feel right saying that anymore because there are bands who are hard-core punk and who truly believe in staying in that genre and don’t want to stray from that. And I respect that.”

The shift came about slowly, as the members grew as players and songwriters. By the time AFI finally signed with DreamWorks last year, they were ready to fully branch out, to add layers of darkness and melody.

“In the last two records, I was more reticent to experiment because we had a signature sound,” Puget says. “But a lot of things happened between this album and the last one. I just felt like I wanted to go try whatever I wanted. On the next record I want to go even farther than this one. Now we really don’t care anymore about limitations, to fit a genre or please a certain group of people. We want to make good music.”

Those new textures helped draw the attention of critics and radio. As a result, the band hasn’t spent much time in any one place lately, particularly Ukiah, where the players’ parents still live. AFI lives on the road, but the folks back home can at least catch them on MTV now. “I haven’t been back there in months,” Carson says with a smile. “My mom’s going to kill me.”

*

KROQ Weenie Roast

Where: Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine

When: Today, noon

Price: Sold out.

Contact: (949) 855-8096