POP MUSIC REVIEW : Spring’s Trip Is Just Down Irony Lane

FULLERTON —  One of the local rock scene’s chief exponents of earnest,hippie-days sincerity went on stage Friday night and played a set fraught with ironies.

An April Fools’ joke? Not quite. The irony was unintended as Trip the Spring was forced to dig up older, folk-oriented material at the Fullerton Hofbrau for a semi-unplugged set quite at odds with the new, more aggressive tack that the band from Fullerton says it wants to pursue.

The change in style resulted, a few months back, in the departure of Liana Dutton, whose flute playing and harmony singing were large parts of Trip the Spring’s appeal. In a recent interview, she professed no hard feelings for her old band, which includes her cousins Kevin and David Dutton. She has started a new, folk-oriented band, Frogneck, with Gary Williams, former singer-guitarist with Wood and Smoke.

Meanwhile, singer Kevin, drummer David and Trip guitarist John Kraus came to the Hofbrau aiming to rock ahead in their new direction, but wound up playing it Liana’s folkie way after their capable bassist, Mark Yorst, unaccountably went AWOL before the show.

The 40-minute set mustered by the bass-less Trip the Spring proved that it never hurts to have a good grounding in the folkie stuff, even if a band’s collective heart is set on rocking (see the illustrious careers of Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Richard Thompson). If Trip was flustered, it didn’t show during an enjoyable performance that generally was well-played.

One key question facing the band is how well Kevin Dutton can carry on without his cousin’s harmony support. In the past, his reedy, declamatory vocal style, which falls somewhere between Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and Rush’s Geddy Lee, has been an acquired taste at best, at least when left to its own devices. Paired with Liana, something would click and Kevin would join in an alluring harmony blend of sweet and rough ingredients.

At the Hofbrau, his theatrical style seemed less brittle and took on a warmer cast as he sang songs steeped in nature imagery and a plaintive romanticism. “I’m Lonely” was a highlight, a wistful, bittersweet lament that called to mind some of Cat Stevens’ work circa the 1970 album “Mona Bone Jakon.” A new song, “Long Yellow Weeds,” is a sunny, relaxed evocation of an escape into the pleasures of nature and good ale.

Kraus, a versatile guitarist, struck heraldic, Tull-like chords during the dramatic “Mowgli” (after the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”) and put a country twang into some of the more easygoing numbers. David Dutton had more trouble making the adjustment to mellow; although he played with brushes rather than sticks, the beat was harder and stiffer than the musical setting warranted.

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Trip the Spring got outside help from Shon Sullivan, a member of Moonwash Symphony who stepped up as a last-minute volunteer to fill out the rhythm on an upright piano that happened to be at hand. The piano, a fixture on the Hofbrau’s stage, wasn’t amplified well enough to make a large impact but Sullivan, who plays guitar in Moonwash, fit in with good musical intuition.

Sullivan’s assist underscored the collegial nature of the evening. Trip the Spring, Moonwash Symphony and the other band on the bill, Room to Roam, are part of a five-band cooperative called Homespun that is preparing a compilation CD showcasing three songs by each band (also involved are Plato’s Stepchildren and Moe’s Art). The concert was the last in a series by the participating bands to raise money for the project. Steven Lamprinos, Homespun’s point man, said the $500 raised Friday completes the budget and makes it possible to proceed with final mastering and production. He expects a late-May release of the album, “Homespun: A Compilation of Fullerton Artists.”

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In their own sets, Room to Roam and Moonwash Symphony seemed like two bands holding a missing piece of each other’s puzzle.

Room to Roam gave a heartily rambunctious performance replete with ‘60s hard-rock influences. Jimi Hendrix loomed especially large as the band’s two singer-guitarists, brothers Paul and Pat Gallagher, wailed away freely on their instruments and let fly with vocals from the bark-it-out school of rock singing.

The sound isn’t exactly distinctive, but Room to Roam does cover a lot of ground with its combination of good influences and solid songwriting instincts. Among the highlights were “Police,” an urgent, bluesy brew of ingredients from Hendrix and Cream, and “Jane Rides,” a spooky evocation of mysterious, bump-in-the-night doings. “Sun” introduced a dense, swirling space-rock sound out of the early Pink Floyd archive.

While Room to Roam has a good handle on how to write a song, its chief flaw Friday was a rhythm section that frequently lost the handle on the beat. Drummer Joel McDaniel’s busy, circling patterns called to mind the swarming styles of Ginger Baker and Mitch Mitchell. But those hall-of-fame British bashers both made sure that they kept time along with everything else; McDaniel’s pulse was as skittish and fluttery as the heartbeat of a frightened squirrel. *

Also, Baker and Mitchell played in trios (Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, respectively), which left room for their activist rhythms. As a foursome with two interlocking lead guitars, Room to Roam hardly needs such rampant drumming. What it does need is a more sure and solid underpinning for its sound.

Room to Roam could use some of the precision and attention to detail that Moonwash Symphony brought to bear. On the other hand, Moonwash’s approach was far too careful and introverted. This band could use a shot of Room to Roam’s go-for-it spirit.

Usually a foursome, Moonwash played as a drums-bass-guitar trio in the absence of its percussionist. Maybe that accounted for the thinness of some of the arrangements, which sounded unfinished at times. Or maybe it was just the inability of front man Sullivan or bassist Karen Middlebrook to invest the performance with the spark and drama that might get their music across.

The band’s diverse material was uneven, but some of it is strong enough to be worth an effort to shed inhibitions and magnify the passions in the music. “Silver Motown Blues” is winsome and airy, conveying rambling motion along with a parade of feelings that flickers in quick succession through the pretty chorus. “White Horse,” its polar opposite, is a dark, threatening piece hammered out with a two-bass attack. A concluding pass at Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright?” drew dancers onto the floor, but this attempt at R&B; was an ill-advised washout. Moonwash Symphony just didn’t project enough personality to be convincingly funky.