Crashers’ Course : Dance Hall’s Path Furthers Young America’s Education in a Hybrid of Ska-Pop-Punk

Ska is a hardy and infectious musical strain, and by her mid-teens, Elyse Rogers, lead singer of the Dance Hall Crashers, was so bitten by the bug that she was climbing out the window of her Anaheim home to sneak off to concerts.

“I got hold of a couple of Madness tapes and Specials and English Beat, and I fell in love with it,” Rogers said, recalling her first encounter with English ska-revival bands of the early 1980s, the “bad influences” that she blames for sending her AWOL as a teenager.

More than a decade later, Rogers is trying to pull a new generation of young fans through their windows, or at least out their doors, to hear the Berkeley-based Dance Hall Crashers.

The Crashers, who headline Sunday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, are part of a recent trend in which a hybridized American form of ska mixed with punk and New Wave rock has begun to make an impression on mainstream audiences.

Ska was a Jamaican creation of the early 1960s, its light, skipping rhythms predating the slower, more trenchant and hypnotic reggae style that would emerge by 1970. The English ska revival that began in 1979 was the music’s second flowering.

Now young America is getting into the act. The Offspring included a catchy, ska-flavored punk tune, “What Happened to You?” on their hit album, “Smash.” Bay Area punk band Rancid scored last year with a ska-punk hit, “Time Bomb.” Sublime, a stylistically diverse punk-reggae band from Long Beach, got a big break in 1995 with “Date Rape,” one of its few songs built on ska rhythms.

Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a ska/hard rock hybrid from Boston, had a main-stage slot on the Lollapalooza ’95 tour. And now No Doubt, the Anaheim band that was one of the ska-revival acts Rogers used to sneak out her house to see during the late 1980s, is getting some radio and MTV exposure for one of its songs, “Just a Girl.”

Rogers, 24, downplays these signs of ska turning into something massive and trendy.

“I think there’s a chance it could happen, but I don’t think it’s a large chance,” she said. “People expect it to happen because that’s what happened in England. When punk died out [in the late ‘70s], Two-Tone [the name for the British ska movement] started happening.”

Instead, she said, individual bands or particular songs are catching the public’s fancy, with ska content as part of the flavor, perhaps, but not the chief attraction.

Rogers was a fan, not a participant, in the Southern California ska outbreak that occurred during her high-school years in Orange County.

It wasn’t until she landed at UC Berkeley in 1989 that her own musical career began. But Rogers says her love of ska had a lot to do with her being in the right place at the right time to hook up with Dance Hall Crashers: Part of the reason she enrolled at Berkeley was to be close to a Bay Area ska and punk scene that had caught her attention.

“My favorite band at the time was Operation Ivy, a Berkeley band, and I wanted to see them,” she said. “I was really excited to go see them, and they broke up about two weeks before I got there.”

Instead, Rogers soon found herself singing in Dance Hall Crashers, a band that had sprung from Operation Ivy’s ska-punk vine a few months before her arrival. The Crashers began as a side project for guitarist Tim Armstrong and bassist Matt Freeman, Operation Ivy members who went on to launch Rancid.

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They had left the Crashers by the time Rogers came on the scene--part of a pattern of frequent personnel changes during the band’s early years. By 1990, the Dance Hall Crashers had stabilized enough to record an album, but the band broke up as it was released.

“We just weren’t having fun, and the only reason you should be in a band is to have fun,” Rogers said. Even without a band to promote it, the Crashers’ first album became a word-of-mouth favorite in the ska underground.

“Over the next year and a half, we were inundated by mail, kids who had never gotten to see us” wondering if the band would reunite. “We just decided to do one show, just for the hell of it.”

That 1991 performance, at the San Francisco rock club Slim’s, was a sellout; the band members enjoyed themselves; and some of the old problems, which Rogers said stemmed partly from business pressures surrounding the debut album, were no longer an issue.

“We were more careful the second time and waited for the perfect deal to come along,” said Rogers, who doubles as band manager. “We waited a long time. We were very wary and very careful and got very lucky.”

The Crashers became the first band signed by 510 Records, a Berkeley label affiliated with MCA Records, and they released their new album, “Lockjaw,” last fall.

“We’ve got a special situation, working with people we trust and like,” Rogers said.

Harmony singer Karina Denike, guitarist Jason Hammon and his brother, drummer Gavin Hammon, are the other holdovers from the Crashers’ 1990 album lineup. Guitarist Scott Goodell and bassist Mikey Weiss joined about 2 1/2 years ago.

“Queen for a Day,” the Crashers’ next single, reflects Rogers’ jaundiced view of the business side of music--a side that this bachelor’s degree holder in political science has gotten a taste of working as a manager and booking agent for other bands.

“It was [inspired by] watching my friends’ bands and seeing what [the music business] puts musicians through emotionally,” she said. “It’s pretty horrible and evil, and we’ve got a good perspective on what it’s really about.

“We keep ourselves firmly planted and turn the other way when industry people tell us how big and huge we’re going to be. If you allow yourself to believe you’re as wonderful as they tell you, you’re in for a sad surprise.”

The sound that Dance Hall Crashers have been carrying across the country with heavy touring since “Lockjaw” emerged represents a move away from pure ska, toward a hybrid of clean, crunchy punk-guitar riffing, catchy New Wave vocal harmonies (Blondie, Elastica and the Go-Gos all come to mind at various points) and ska rhythmic flavoring that keeps the mood overwhelmingly lively and bright.

At the same time, the lyrics carry a series of rueful reflections, including glimpses of friendships coming unraveled, romances that don’t work out and a true tale of a friend’s fatal flight into drug dependence.

“There’s a lot of [songs about] conflict, just because they’re fun to write,” said Rogers, who wrote most of the lyrics. “It would be boring to have 14 happy songs.”

Dance Hall Crashers’ evolution from a more traditional ska sound to a punk-pop blend “is an issue for some people, but not for us,” Rogers said.

“There are certainly some people in the ska scene who are very traditional and angry with us for not having horns any more, and for putting in some heavy guitar stuff,” she said. “They hate our guts now, and that’s OK.

“We’re writing the music we like, and we have a much larger following than ever,” she said. “There’s a lot of great kids out there we’re meeting, and I think this band is going to be around for a while.”

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Dance Hall Crashers, Stretch Armstrong, Waterdog and MXPX play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. $10. (714) 957-0600.