PUBLIC PERSONA : Traditional Gig Kicks Off Shift in General Direction

The newly re-formed General Public will spend the month of June trying to reclaim and expand its public by playing alternative-rock festivals in big amphitheaters, along with a stadium gig in Washington, D.C., and high-profile club engagements in Hollywood and Manhattan.

First, though, there is a tradition to uphold.

Since 1979, when they began fronting bands together, partners Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger have made a habit of launching new endeavors in small, neighborhood pubs. So the new edition of General Public will convene Monday and again the following Sunday at the Harbor Lights Brewing Co., fondly known as “the guzzler” to regular denizen Wakeling, who lives, as he puts it, within “staggering distance” of the Dana Point barroom.

The shows will be the first full-band, electric concerts of General Public’s new era (a different lineup played at the KROQ “Acoustic Christmas” show in 1993, and two months ago the current band played an impromptu acoustic gig at Harbor Lights--or, the Heritage Brewing Co., as it was known before its recent renaming.

General Public’s sold-out shows (tickets are available to a June 8 concert at the Palace in Hollywood) will create a sort of historic link between the bar in tony, coastal Dana Point and two others in the gritty industrial city of Birmingham, England. Wakeling’s first well-known band, the Beat, first gigged at a pub called the Yorkshire Grey.

“It was just a place we drank at, but we found it had a room upstairs,” Wakeling, a bright and chipper conversationalist, recalled over the phone last week from the hilltop condo in Dana Point where he lives with his wife and two children. “They let us rehearse there, and we slowly turned rehearsals into gigs by inviting more and more friends.”

After leaving the highly regarded Beat in 1983 to start General Public, Wakeling and Ranking Roger (real name, Roger Charlery) launched their new band with another hometown pub gig at the Crompton Arms.

Playing where one tipples has the advantage of giving a band an audience of “sympathetic ears,” Wakeling said.

“You hope to have your drinking buddies say, ‘That was pretty good.’ ”

General Public’s comeback album, “Rub It Better,” should fare well even with listeners who haven’t hoisted a mug with either of the band’s principals. It’s a tuneful collection that deftly combines an assortment of reggae, rock and dance-pop colors--the trademark of the Beat and the first edition of General Public.

The split between Wakeling and Roger occurred in 1987, when their changing musical approaches made it impossible to achieve the goal of drawing together a unified effort from diverse material. Roger had fallen for the then-new musical possibilities of computer technology, while Wakeling preferred an organic approach.

They both began solo careers--Roger staying in Birmingham, Wakeling moving to Southern California. Wakeling’s progress, however, was slowed by a contractual dispute with his label, I.R.S. By the early ‘90s, he had taken a full-time job coordinating benefit concerts and albums for Greenpeace. He kept in shape musically by plying the Southern California bar circuit with a band dubbed Dave Wakeling and the Free Radicals.

Whenever Ranking Roger passed through on tour, Wakeling would get up and sing with him. The friendship rekindled over a series of visits, Wakeling said, and in autumn, 1993, they sat down at a friend’s house in Los Angeles and tried working up a new song (“Hold It Deep,” which is on the new album).

“It was only a few hours into the writing of it that people were coming in and saying, ‘That’s a hit,’ ” Wakeling recalled. “We were [saying], ‘Oh, it does sound kind of good. Let’s do another.’ ”

Consequently, he said, the reunion “was kind of organic, rather than orchestrated. That allowed us to develop a trust in each other again.”

Wakeling said that advances in computer technology also helped. Roger can deploy his beloved machines, but the results now sound human enough to satisfy Wakeling. Joining them in the reconstituted General Public are two transplanted Englishmen, keyboards player Michael Railton and bassist Wayne Lothian, and Dan Chase, a Los Angeles drummer recommended by the album’s producer, former Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison. The guitarist is Chris Karn, familiar to fans of the grass-roots Orange County rock scene for his playing in Standing Hawthorn. Wakeling got to know Karn after seeing him play with Standing Hawthorn at Harbor Lights.

The album art on “Rub It Better” features impressionistic, close-up photographs of flesh-on-flesh encounters between interracial lovers--a concept that Wakeling says is part social comment, part sex-sells commercialism.

“It’s hard to believe that the politics of race hate have any legs at all to stand on in America in the ‘90s, but it seems something people are turning to in desperation again,” said Wakeling, whose marriage, a well as his band, is racially diverse. “[The album art] had a political point to make, and, on the other side, it was pure smut,” he said wryly. “I guess that’s a fair reflection of life.”

As his rock career accelerates once more, Wakeling, 39, is contemplating how to keep it from intruding on his family life.

“I have a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old and a wife. We’re coming up to our fifth anniversary, and we’re still best friends. From my own past experience, being on the road six months a year puts an undue strain on a relationship. I’m not willing to let myself get in that [position] again.”

The answer will be a bring-the-family approach, using a tour bus outfitted for domestic living.

Wakeling also anticipates that, “although I’m in heaven in Dana Point,” a move to Los Angeles is likely in the coming months, so that his wife, Damessa, can resume her acting and modeling career.

While that would put Wakeling at a bit more than “staggering distance” from his favorite pub, he expects to remain a regular, and he wants Harbor Lights to reserve him a spot Saturday nights. Or, as he puts it: “Put a little brass plaque on my seat at the guzzler.”

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What:

General Public.

When:

Monday and May 28 at 8 p.m.

Where:

Harbor Lights Brewing Co., 24921 Dana Point Harbor Drive.

Whereabouts:

From Interstate 5, take the Pacific Coast Highway exit into Dana Point. Go left on Dana Point Harbor Drive. After the second signal, Golden Lantern, turn right into the Pavilion shopping center.

Wherewithal:

$10.

Where to call:

(714) 240-2060.