It’s Been a Long Haul for ‘Momma Stud,’ the L.A. Quintet That Defies a Musical Label

Momma Stud was having problems with its name. First, the band was forced into an abbreviated Momma S. during some coveted opening gigs last year for soul-gospel singer Al Green. No one seemed quite sure how conservative audience members would respond.

More upsetting, perhaps, were the early band tapes returned in the mail, unopened for reasons band members suspect stem from a continuing misconception that a group called Momma Stud had to be just another heavy metal act. It’s been an unexpected price to pay for a name that has no meaning beyond band members’ wanting, for no particular reason, a name with the word momma in it.

“It’s been a long haul,” singer Ernest Carter said about the life of the band that formed in 1987 amid the Los Angeles club scene.

But if the name Momma Stud is without design, it is a likely result of the group’s own inability to categorize and label its mix of rock, blues, gospel, folk and key elements from the pumping urban rock-pop of Sly Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic. The group’s debut album, “Cockadoodledo,” is a varied, often-soulful collection that draws heavily from the music of the 1970s.

That influence has left the quintet open to the same sort of criticism leveled recently at musician Lenny Kravitz for his own, similar musical influences on the album “Mama Said.” One recent reviewer even called Momma Stud a group of five Lenny Kravitzes.

“You can hear different things in our music, but it’s definitely our own sound,” said Carter, wearing rings, earrings and blue leopard-skin pants at an interview with other band members at the Virgin Records meeting room.

“Every band comes along and just puts its brick on the wall of music history, and hopefully it means something to somebody else,” bassist Jimmie Snider added. “We’re starting from where someone else left off.”

Momma Stud emerged from the wreckage of the local club band Bad Kitchen, a heavily funk and ska-influenced act that Snider boasted was the first Red Hot Chili Peppers “rip-off band.” Despite a healthy and consistent supply of club gigs, Bad Kitchen members Snider and Krandal Crews, a guitarist, ultimately grew tired of their act’s thumping, bass-heavy sound.

“Krandal started writing songs that were more complicated and our singer couldn’t sing them,” Snider said of Bad Kitchen’s final days. “It was breaking the band apart because there was all this competition with different writers doing more of the silly funk songs.”

Soon after that group’s breakup, Crews and Snider found Carter through an advertisement in The Recycler. Drummer Gabriel Rowland, a former member of the Crotch Rockets (later renamed Liquid Jesus), was discovered playing a benefit at Raji’s. And Jason Yates replaced Momma Stud’s original keyboardist.

The new album was recorded in Hollywood over a three-month period last winter with former Parliament-Funkadelic member Bernie Worrell and longtime Neil Young engineer John Hanlon sharing credit as producers. “Cockadoodledo” required some intense work from the band, said Carter, who said he was often walking into the studio at 3 p.m. and not leaving until 4 the next morning.

Worrell, in particular, emphasized teamwork and smoothed out some of the rougher, unfinished edges in the band’s sound, he added.

“He was really good in bringing out the best in everybody,” Carter said. “He helped me along in stylizing my vocals, going for something a lot more than what I was doing before.”

The resulting sound offered a varied, more measured groove than anything Momma Stud had recorded before during occasional attempts at studio work. Said Crews: “I just felt like we grew up.”

Momma Stud performs at 11:30 p.m. Monday at the Club With No Name, 836 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. Tickets: $10. Call (213) 656-3226. COALITION CONGREGATION: A benefit tonight for the Black Rock Coalition at the Music Machine is being billed as “The Tunnelvision Crackdown” and will spotlight a small handful of local rock acts, including funk-rock pioneers Mother’s Finest.

This is the third annual local benefit for the BRC, a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization that was founded in 1985 to promote the music of black rock artists. Despite the historical importance of such earlier black rockers as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, BRC leaders say, the rock music genre has often been closed off to non-Caucasian musicians.

Along with Mother’s Finest, bands scheduled to perform include Follow for Now, Blakasaurus Mex, Jason Luckett and Frija?

“This is an opportunity for people to get together and see our best bands,” said Numui Rayfield Jarvis, founder of the BRC’s Los Angeles chapter and bassist for Massaded.

During the program, a lifetime achievement award is to be presented to Mother’s Finest, which began its career locally in the mid-1970s.