Don’t Mean Maybe Is Certain of Its Roots

True to its name, the Orange County rock band Don’t Mean Maybe doesn’t equivocate about its sources and inspirations.

“The Minutemen, to me, were a great band,” said Mark Andrea, Don’t Mean Maybe’s guitarist and founder. “Seeing them play made me think, ‘I want to play.’ They had so much life. They were so positive, when so much of the hard-core scene at the time was so negative. The Minutemen’s music just made me feel alive.”

Without being slavish about it, Don’t Mean Maybe’s recently released debut record pays the band’s respects to the Minutemen, the innovative rock trio from San Pedro that had its career cut short with front man D. Boone’s death in a car accident 3 1/2 years ago.

From the Minutemen (whose surviving members, regrouped as Firehose, continue to carry on as effective, hard-hitting alternative rockers), Don’t Mean Maybe has absorbed the idea that a bass-drums-guitar trio shouldn’t travel a predictable path. Like the Minutemen, and Firehose, Don’t Mean Maybe often takes unexpected detours with tempo shifts and skittering instrumental patterns. Andrea’s singing, like Boone’s, is controlled hollering that won’t ever be mistaken for pop warbling, and the words he hollers tend to form cryptic codes and impressionistic images. In a recent interview at their favorite breakfast spot in Santa Ana, Andrea, drummer Jeff Fairbanks and bassist John Hawthorne also displayed the unpretentious and approachable band personality that was a hallmark of the Minutemen.

Despite these similarities, Don’t Mean Maybe, which plays Friday at Night Moves in Huntington Beach, is more than Minutemania. Andrea’s guitar playing--catchy, muscular and riff-oriented--borrows as much from ‘60s hard-rock psychedelia as it does from Boone’s twisting, hyperkinetic style. At least in the six songs on its EP, Don’t Mean Maybe shows no affinity for the political broadsides for which the Minutemen were noted. Instead, the songs deal with the pitfalls and limitations of communication and human understanding (“Big Day for Blimps” and “Live With It”), the pain of growing up (“Home”) and the hot air and cliche that infects so much of rock music (the inscrutably titled “Gayle Responds to Horn.”)

With its idiosyncratic approach, Don’t Mean Maybe doesn’t have anything in common with the would-be video stars that that last song lampoons.

“When I first started writing songs, I couldn’t write a traditional song for the life of me,” Andrea said in a low, gravelly speaking voice. “It was more appealing to write a song that was fragmented, that had the feeling I got from Minutemen or Captain Beefheart.”

Fairbanks, who has a degree in music composition from Cal State Fullerton, also has an affinity for a disjointed, tightly wound style of playing. “That kind of music is packed with energy,” he said. “It’s fortified. It has so many ideas in a short period of time.”

Bassist Hawthorne may know best what it means to try to function musically within tight time strictures. He had never played bass when the current lineup of Don’t Mean Maybe formed a year ago. With a big show warming up for Firehose at the Coach House already booked when he joined the band, there was little time for Hawthorne--who previously had dabbled on the harmonica--to master a new instrument.

“It was, ‘Learn the bass lines to these songs and we’re going to play in front of 350 people with Firehose within a month,’ ” Andrea recalled. “For John to do that was commendable.”

“John has had the most pressure put on him of anybody in any group I’ve ever been in, and he’s the most rock-solid person,” said Fairbanks, who also plays with D.O.M.E.S., an avant-garde ensemble.

Hawthorne, 24, and Andrea, 25, had gone to high school together in Tustin and had kept the friendship going at UC Santa Cruz. Fairbanks, 24, from Villa Park, was another old friend. The three had long talked about forming a band together. When Don’t Mean Maybe’s original drummer and bassist left the band last summer, and Hawthorne returned to the area after a year of graduate study that led to a teaching degree, the three friends had their chance.

“It’s only in the last few months that I’ve been able to loosen up and be confident” on stage, said Hawthorne. But learning to fit in as a rock bassist was hardly his biggest challenge of the past year. Hawthorne also took on his first full-time teaching assignment. A white suburbanite, he found himself in charge of a fourth-grade class made up entirely of blacks and Latinos at an inner-city school in Lynwood.

“I was trying to be Mr. Nice Guy a lot of times,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘If I go in there and treat them nice, I’ll be really popular.’ After three months I discovered it wasn’t working. Kids take advantage of you. Once I realized I had to tell them what to do, they got into it.”

As for his double life as a rocker, Hawthorne decided that was a bit of information his fourth-graders didn’t need to know.

If Don’t Mean Maybe’s EP leads to the band’s objectives--an independent label recording deal and a chance to tour--all three members say they are ready to put other career interests on hold. Andrea is studying to become a paralegal, and Fairbanks, committed to a career in music, has been working at a building supply store while trying to break into scoring scenes for theatrical productions.

Even without label interest during their first year together, the members of Don’t Mean Maybe say their progress as an ensemble, and their compatibility as friends, has kept the band’s enthusiasm high. The EP was recorded a few months after they began playing together, and all songs were written and sung by Andrea. Now all three members write songs, and Fairbanks, who once thought of becoming an opera singer, is sharing the vocals with Andrea.

“I had never sung before, so I wasn’t confident that I could sing,” Andrea said of his hollering approach on the EP. “I could shout things and be forceful and have what I had to say come across.” More subtlety and melody has entered into Don’t Mean Maybe’s approach since then, he said.

“Nowadays we can do stuff we couldn’t have done in a million years when we started,” said Fairbanks. “That alone is enough to keep interest in it for me.”

Andrea agrees that it’s best to keep emphasizing musical progress, rather than looking at recording deals and touring opportunities as the true trappings of success. “A lot of bands are just waiting to make it,” he said. “If you preoccupy yourself with making it that way, you lose track of the fun involved, a lot of the sincere feelings of making music. If you start worrying about what people are thinking, you lose sight of the whole reason for doing it. It’s a way of getting your life out there, of not living in isolation.”

Don’t Mean Maybe, Eggplant and Lost Dog play Friday at Night Moves, 5902 Warner Ave., Huntington Beach. Tickets: $5. Information: (714) 840-6118.

THAT’S-WHAT-FRIENDS-ARE-FOR DEPARTMENT: A marriage of necessity turned out to be a marriage made in heaven last Thursday night when Dave Pedroza of the Scarecrows fronted Burning Tree for a set at Club Lingerie in Hollywood. Pedroza’s band had been crippled a week before the gig when the Scarecrows’ bassist, drummer and lead guitarist quit simultaneously. But Pedroza and the three members of Burning Tree have longstanding musical ties, having been in and out of each other’s groups over the years. That made it logical for Burning Tree to back up Pedroza and the remaining Scarecrows, saxophonist Jerry King and keyboards player Joe Simon. Despite just an hour’s rehearsal, the results were excellent--a sterling set of chunky, Rolling Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll that featured some good new songs in the Stones/Lou Reed mold that Pedroza favors.

Having shown their mastery of one exemplary hard-rock tradition as deputized Scarecrows, Burning Tree’s own set was a thrilling exhibition of another great tradition--high-impact, blues-based power rock a la Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. The band, based now in Los Angeles but with roots in the Orange County rock scene, is preparing to record its debut album for Epic Records. Judging from its Club Lingerie set, this will be a debut album worth awaiting with eagerness: The material was strong, the ensemble playing was excellent, and, in Marc Ford, Burning Tree has a true guitar hero in the making--a player blessed with extraordinary technique, laudable taste, and the natural charisma that descends upon musicians who feel their music rather than simply playing it for flashy effect.

While Pedroza might well wish his Burning Tree buddies were free to join forces with him full time, he says he is going to try to form a new Scarecrows lineup from a new base in Hollywood. “I decided to come up here and look for new musicians because there are a lot more musicians here than in Orange County,” he said after his show last week. “But I’m still a patriot of Orange County.”

ALSO MAKING THE MOVE to Los Angeles is Nick Pyzow, who says it will be easier to maintain music business contacts there than in his old base, Anaheim. Pyzow will continue to keep a strong Orange County presence with regular shows at the Blue Beet Cafe in Newport Beach, where he is playing solo dates every Monday and Tuesday through the end of July. The Nick Pyzow Band also plays the Blue Beet on July 28. Pyzow’s new release with his band is a single on his own AsFab label. The A-side, “Victim’s Blues,” is a comical story-song about the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident, with the music and vocal delivery recalling Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61.”

LIVE ACTION: Mick’s, the nightclub attached to McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant in Irvine, is beginning to present occasional shows by original rock bands, in addition to its usual Top Forty dance fare. The Bus Boys, a rhythm and blues-oriented rock group from Los Angeles, plays Sunday at 8 p.m. at the club, at 2000 Main St. Admission: $12.50. Information: (714) 756-0505