Was (Not Was) are (yes, again)

In the early ‘80s, the tranquillity of Morning in America was disrupted by a fearsome funk hybrid out of Detroit, a crazy melange of dance music and spoken collage, heavy-metal guitar and beat poetry, free jazz and Motown.

While the music created by the band known as Was (Not Was) embodied the renegade spirit, the lyrics to songs such as “I Blew Up the United States” and “Knocked Down, Made Small” depicted damaged and drifting souls whose struggles suggested that all was not as well as the nation’s leadership proclaimed.

Twenty years later, the right rules again, which might be as good a reason as any for Was (Not Was) to return after a 14-year hiatus.

“We started in the Reagan era. That’s the resonance of doing this again,” says David Weiss, known as David Was in the Was (Not Was) world. “It’s such a shock to the system to have this crowd of crony capitalists back in Washington.... There has to be someone to wake everyone from this stupor and this fear that they’re arrested in now.”

For the group’s co-leader, Don Fagenson (a.k.a. Don Was), the impetus was strictly personal. Cleaning out his house a year ago, he came across some old Was (Not Was) tour posters and started doing the math.

“Fifteen times around the world. It spanned at least a decade,” he says. “Even to a 52-year-old guy, that’s a big chunk of your life. The realization that we were 52 and not 25, that was the shocker. You better get down to it. We’ve been talking about it for a long time. What was missing was the fear factor.”

The Wases are sitting in a lounge at a historic Hollywood recording studio where Don blossomed into a top-tier record producer on the side, overseeing Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time” and, with David, Bob Dylan’s “Under the Red Sky.” Other production clients included Brian Wilson, Ringo Starr and the Rolling Stones.

David, who plays reeds and writes the lyrics in Was (Not Was), has also done some production (Rickie Lee Jones, Holly Cole, et al.) during the group’s hiatus, as well as writing TV scores and serving as music director for “The X Files” series and movie.

They’ve been stirring things up since they met at junior high school in Detroit. It’s been an intense relationship. When they found that their facial expressions became distracting when they were writing songs together, they took to wearing masks during composing sessions. Don would don a JFK and David a Col. Sanders.

Whatever tensions surfaced around their breakup in 1993, they now have an easy camaraderie as they take a break from finishing up the first Was (Not Was) album since “What Up, Dog?” in 1988. They’re talking to labels and expect an April release, after a “best of” collection.

Their rev-it-up tour (which includes shows at the two area House of Blues clubs next week) figures to reanimate the cult audience of like-minded malcontents they accrued in their first incarnation, when their subversively seductive sound even yielded a few hits, including “Walk the Dinosaur” and “Spy in the House of Love.” There are plans for a tour in the spring with Algeria’s Khaled and Mexican rocker Saul Hernandez.

Fiery R&B; singer Sweet Pea Atkinson, a vocal focal point of the old band, is back for this round, as well as saxophonist David McMurray and guitarist Randy Jacobs. Drummer Sergio Gonzalez and keyboardist Tio Banks are fresh recruits.

“You can find a new universe every night to play in these songs,” Don says of the group. “This band can stretch. We’re not going to play these songs the same every night. We used to do good representations of the records. Now everyone knows how to listen better, and everyone’s a little more relaxed. There’s an intuitive lock when you’ve got 25, 30 years of history playing with people.”

Was (Not Was) earned a reputation as a searing live dance band and became a critics’ favorite for putting a cerebral slant on the relentless groove.

“I believe we’re a pretty good reflection of the times we grew up in,” Don says. “That’s what it was like in Detroit. You really did see a couple of the MC5 guys playing on acid with Pharoah Sanders.... The idea was to do something new all the time, and that’s what we were trying to do, we were trying to twist dance music around and put our own thing on it, and we drew from William Burroughs, Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, MC5, George Clinton, the Stooges, Bob Dylan, all the bebop stuff.”

That mandate led to some memorably high-concept recordings, including “Shake Your Head,” which paired Kim Basinger and Ozzy Osbourne.

They say it shut down because of increasing record-label indifference as commercial music shifted toward canned pop.

“You could sort of see the writing on the wall, that the kind of music we were making was not getting on the radio,” Don says. “Now you can feel it switching back. It reminds me of when we did ‘Nick of Time,’ right in that room. If Bonnie hadn’t made that record at that moment, someone else would have....

“People just wanted to hear someone really play the drums again, live. Something would have come along to fill that slot. And it feels the same to me now. It’s just the end of the cycle.... It seems like it might be time for what we do again.”

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Was (Not Was)

Where: House of Blues Anaheim, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive, Anaheim

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Price: $25

Info: (714) 778-2583

Where: House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $25

Info: (323) 848-5100