POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Weird Power of Porno

Sunday night at the Cal State Dominguez Hills Velodrome, a cool, clear evening at the bicycle track, homemade fireworks erupting from the crowd gathered in the center. The large, grid-framed stage is surmounted by a painted carnival tent-top in approximately the position where the proscenium arch would be. A woman cries out: “Has anybody seen my boyfriend? . . . He has yellow dreadlocks, a nose ring and a black jacket.” Many people laugh; half the men in the crowd might fit that description.

It’s the first L.A.-area post-album performance by Porno for Pyros, the new group led by Perry Farrell, who once sang for Jane’s Addiction and who is the man behind the “Lollapalooza” festival tours. Farrell, whose pan-underground appeal was the first to span the worlds of “alternative rock” and metal, has been accused of a lot of things, from abstruse lyrics to polymorphous perversity, but he has always put on a good show.

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Here’s Farrell, a slim, beaky man brandishing a bottle of wine, hiding at the back of the stage while guitarist Peter DiStefano and bassist Martyn Le Noble lay down a loping tropical groove, lots of open spaces, underpinned by the percolating polyrhythms of former Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins. It’s nose-ring urban pastoralism, nostalgia for hot nights and cool times, more Jimmy Buffett than Jim Morrison. The band begins to rock.

Farrell croons, shyly at first, then with a bratty confidence, in a high, keening voice that often coincides with the sort of voices you might hear in your head when you are alone, but he seems oddly disconnected from his band, as if there is a glass wall separating him from the other musicians.

Farrell’s little-boy voice seems almost the physical incarnation of the cute inner imp that always seems to vanquish the inner angel in old Disney cartoons, inviting chaos, promising kinky sex, messing with racial taboos just for the heck of it. During Porno for Pyros’ self-named theme song, in which Farrell sings about masturbating while watching the riots on TV, a lithe fire-eater whirls with burning batons, exhales great gusts of flame, strips down to a G-string and pasties as bottle-rockets launch from the engineer’s booth in back of the crowd.

Later there will be a stripping hermaphrodite and mimed girl-girl love, which upstage both the bass-heavy sound of the band and the utter weirdness of the lyrics. If Farrell’s advanced visions for an enlightened humanity involve pretty girls dancing in their underwear, well, there’s a certain amount of precedent for that too.

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And yet Porno for Pyros doesn’t quite gel, not in the way Farrell and Perkins’ former band did: rambling, long-form song structures sound unnatural forced into three-minute straitjackets; DiStefano’s and Le Noble’s polished studio-guy professionalism seems profoundly at odds with Farrell’s slapdash charisma.

“This one’s about black (women),” Farrell says from the stage, and the couple of black guys in the audience giggle nervously. He launches into the song “Black Girlfriend,” which begins with the words “Ever since the riots / all I’ve ever wanted was a black girl.”

Two women--not noticeably black--come on stage, wearing spangled hot pants, sort of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders crop-tops and the kind of rainbow-colored Afro wigs the John 3:16 guy used to wear at World Series games. Even if the display makes you cringe, you can’t help but respect its weird power.

After the show, the entire Porno for Pyros troupe comes out, joins hands and bows. Leave it to Farrell to stage the decade’s first rock ‘n’ roll masque.