Beatles Sound Is a Ticket to Ride for S.F.'s Jellyfish : Pop music: The group, playing for free today at Cal State Fullerton, serves a useful role in keeping alive the past.

By MIKE BOEHM

Oct. 24, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Virtually all pop music is theft. What separates the dullards from the smart guys in this year’s rookie class is how well they’ve learned to steal.

Clumsy burglars like the Black Crowes and London Quireboys have tried to raid the grit-stained sonic wardrobe of early-’70s Rolling Stones and Faces, swiping it right off the rack and donning it without adding any accessories of their own.

It takes charm and wit and lyrical ingenuity to pull off a stylish heist. For a crafty thief, the Rolling Stones legacy ought to be like Ft. Knox with the doors unbarred. But the Crowes and the Quireboys’ albums sound more like the work of small-timers knocking off the neighborhood 7-Eleven.

Jellyfish, the San Francisco band responsible for one of the year’s zestiest pure-pop debut albums, appears to have the knack of a master safecracker. A good deal of the legal tender that Jellyfish grabs from the vault of pop-music past carries the likeness of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

In a recent phone interview, the band’s songwriting team, singer-drummer Andy Sturmer and keyboards player Roger Manning, recalled how they got their introduction to the Beatles from ‘70s bands that stole from the Beatles--proving that pop thievery, in addition to its purely exploitative angles, can serve a useful role in keeping alive the past.

“I remember hearing a Beatles song and going, ‘So that’s where ELO’s first few albums came from!’ ” said Sturmer, 25, who will front Jellyfish in a free outdoor concert at noon today at Cal State Fullerton. “When you’re a kid and you’re listening to the radio and ELO comes on, you think, ‘What an original sound.’ You don’t know where it’s coming from.”

Manning, 24, said it would be “the ultimate form of flattery” if some uninitiated young fan were to conclude that Jellyfish’s first album, “Bellybutton,” were a work of great originality.

With Beatles quotations spread hither and yon, that’s not quite so.

Take “The King Is Half-Undressed,” a song that is getting lots of play on MTV. It features Beatlesque harpsichord, lush vocal harmonies straight out of Side 2 of “Abbey Road,” plus a rhythmic intro nicked from “Ticket to Ride.”

In addition to the demonstration of craft involved in pulling off a sure-handed Beatles heist, Jellyfish comes up with some vibrant touches of its own that separate it from lesser pop thieves. There is always something fresh about a good, catchy melody, and the choruses of songs such as “The King Is Half-Undressed,” “The Man I Used to Be” and “All I Want Is Everything” are eminently catchy.

Jellyfish also uses its borrowed musical styles to outfit some imaginative lyrical ideas. “The King Is Half-Undressed” evokes the void of human feeling in a prostitute’s encounter with a client. “The Man I Used to Be” is a lament sung by the ghost of a dead sailor who watches over his son, fearing that the boy will follow his footsteps into the military.

And “All I Want Is Everything” contains a pop thief’s wry confession, while reveling in some cheeky, absurdist commentary about pop-star attitudes.

I think I’d like to play guitar and

be a Beatle, That’d be so swell. And every show I would just

dedicate this song to you. And I would envy all my fans While I bitch about the price of

fame To my French maid, Lou-Ann. She looks so sincere, but she don’t

understand.

Sturmer said: “I think anyone writing music in 1990 owes a huge debt to (the Beatles). There are definitely quotes (from them on the album), but there are also quotes from elsewhere. Reading it totally (as a Beatles homage) would be missing the point.”

It isn’t just the music that points back to the ‘60s, though. Jellyfish has wrapped itself in fab, far-out imagery. On the album, and in publicity pictures, the four members are decked out like denizens of Haight-Ashbury or Carnaby Street, circa 1967, sporting top hats, bell-bottoms, platform shoes and effusive, clashing colors. The album cover casts the band members as psychedelic Lilliputians, clambering about a prone nude who has been liberally decorated with swirls of what looks like blue gel toothpaste.

“This band has always enjoyed presenting itself colorfully,” Manning said. “A lot of that stuff we wear day in and day out. We just raided a lot of thrift stores.”

Rather than copying the image of the Beatles or of their own San Franciscan forebears from the Summer of Love, what Jellyfish had in mind was to recall figures from children’s lore, such as Willy Wonka and Doctor Doolittle.

Still, the image gives the band a definite ‘60s-rock association. With a look like that, Jellyfish members surely could get a seat on the Magical Mystery Tour bus without paying the fare.

Fittingly enough, Jellyfish played its first tour as the opening act for World Party, whose leader, Karl Wallinger, is one of pop’s expert thieves--a confirmed purloiner of Beatles, Stones, Dylan and Prince. World Party’s computer-aided, note-for-note live replication of the Beatles’ epic, “A Day in the Life,” demonstrated that if fate would have allowed it, the Fab Four could have returned to the concert stage they shunned after 1966 because their music had grown too elaborate to re-create live.

With elaborate orchestrations of its own--full of strings, horns, breezy harmonica melodies and multilayered voices--Jellyfish has a choice to make: How much machine-aided replication should the band permit itself on stage?

“Some of the songs,” Manning said, “we strip down from the album (version) and make them more raw. Others are just like the record. We definitely have a few sampling things going in the keyboard department. But we try to steer clear of that as much as possible. Bashing out horn parts on the keyboard is not natural or convincing to me.”

The band doesn’t rely on electronic boosting to fill out its layered harmonies, Sturmer said: “People come up to our sound man all the time and look for a tape, or to see if we’re sampling things (to aid the voices). But we’re big Beach Boys fanatics, and we can blend and harmonize.”

To carry out his unusual role as both the drummer and lead singer, Sturmer plays his stripped-down drum kit from a stand-up position at the front of the stage.

Sturmer and Manning said they have known each other since they were high school students in Pleasanton, in Alameda County. They were recruited into Beatnik Beatch, a San Francisco band that played a spare, Bohemian brand of pop and released one album in 1988. Sturmer and Manning left to pursue their own more rock-oriented direction, along with guitarist Jason Falkner. After the album was recorded, Manning’s brother, Chris, joined as the bassist.

Helping Jellyfish forge the detailed sound of “Bellybutton” was producer Albhy Galaten, who was part of the Bee Gees’ production team during their string of disco hits in the mid-’70s.

According to Manning, the parts on the album that seem like Beatles’ quotes weren’t conscious references. “We don’t say, ‘You know what this song needs? It needs backing vocals that sound like “She’s Leaving Home.” ’ If we’ve all been listening to something that week, the sounds are rattling around in your head. You open your mouth and that comes out.”

What if the members of Jellyfish stopped listening to their favorite pop music, as some songwriters say they do to avoid too much outside influence?

No way, Sturmer said. “It’s food to me.”