Husband-Wife Band Rocking in San Juan : Timbuk3 Leaves Tricks Home but Keeps Irony in Play

It’s standard practice in rock music for a new contender to come up with an identifying gimmick to separate the group from all the other fresh arrivals chirping for attention like a nest of hungry hatchlings.

Timbuk3 had one of the better gimmicks of recent years when it emerged from Austin, Tex., in 1986. This was a husband-and-wife team with a twist: a mechanical third “member,� a tape player that backed the couple’s live playing with pre-packaged rock rhythms.

The concept may have been born of necessity for Pat and Barbara K MacDonald, who wanted to produce a full rock sound while traveling cheap and light. But it was awfully clever nonetheless.

The group’s punning name was clever too. And so was its signature song, “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades,� a cheerfully ironic little rocker that mocked the acquisitive instincts of the Reagan era’s success-minded young. In a further irony, “The Future’s So Bright� turned into a quirky success in its own right, rising to No. 19 on the Billboard singles chart.

With the recent release of its third album, “Edge of Allegiance,� Timbuk3 shows that, while it still cannot resist a bit of punning word play, it is far more than a one-gimmick, novelty-hit band.

The clever ironies are still there, but a sense of perplexity about issues both political and personal keeps the album from being too glib. The basic, programmed beats of the first two albums have evolved into more supple and natural-sounding rhythms. And as the MacDonalds headed out on a tour that includes a show tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, the mechanical member was left on the shelf, leaving it up to the two people to make all the music with their own hands, feet and mouths.

“It’s real minimal,� Pat MacDonald said last week from a tour stop in Las Cruces, N.M. “We found that the songs on this record stood up with more of a stark approach. What we’re doing now is not so much a direction we’re heading in, but sort of a detour for a while. We’re exploring the possibilities of the two of us without the pre-recorded tracks.�

In any case, MacDonald, who does virtually all of Timbuk3’s songwriting, said his use of the “jambox� in previous performances was never just a gimmick: “It only became perceived that way in the press, and only from people who hadn’t seen us play. Once they saw us, the one thing they commented on was how organic it all felt, with the interplay between the tracks and ourselves.�

The juxtaposition of two harmony-singing musicians steeped in rootsy, folk-flavored rock and a prominently featured technological prop did make sense in an offbeat way. After all, most of Timbuk3’s songs reflect the MacDonalds’ uneasy confrontation with a modern world that to them seems dreadfully out of sync.

A sense of real dread sneaks into such new songs as “Waves of Grain,� about a murder conspiracy and cover-up, and “Standard White Jesus,� a desolate vision of humanity’s fate set to a Latin-blues rhythm.

But Timbuk3 still has its sense of humor. “Grand Old Party� can be viewed as a companion song to “The Future’s So Bright I’ve Gotta Wear Shades,� with the two numbers serving as bookends for the Reagan years. “The Future’s So Bright,� written in 1983, focused on the materialistic grab that was just gearing up in the early ‘80s. Without specifically mentioning such potentially ruinous consequences as bank bailouts and trade and budget deficits, “Grand Old Party� takes a humorous look at the big hangover that inevitably follows a binge.

“Edge of Allegiance� keeps a fairly even balance between Timbuk3’s liberal politics and its more personal concerns, as it examines contemporary strains on allegiances both public and private. Some of the songs hint at ways in which the two domains intersect. “Acid Rain,� for instance, is not about pollution, but takes a term from the headlines and transposes it to the bedroom in a song about romantic unhappiness that brings on acid-like tears.

“I can only write from either my perspective or a perspective not too far from my own,� said Pat MacDonald, who measures out his words slowly in a flat, Midwestern accent (he comes from Wisconsin, where he and Barbara first teamed up before moving to Austin).

“The details will change, but the emotional content will be coming from something pretty close to home. Sometimes the personal things I’m going through, a revelation will come out of it, a way of looking at things in general.�

“Daddy’s Down in the Mine,� for example, stems from innocent roots in the MacDonald living room, but it comes off as a spooky nursery song with fear creeping in at the edges.

“Sometimes I’m just completely lost in thought, and (the MacDonalds’ 6-year-old son) will come up to me and say ‘Daddy, Daddy.’ He’ll have to say it five times, and he’s frustrated because I’m oblivious. It’s kind of sad,� said MacDonald, who learned to tune out his surroundings “for mental survival� while growing up in a large family.

MacDonald turned that kernel of experience with his own son into something unsettling and far-reaching, a song hinting at the erosion of families and the broadening gulf between parents and children.

Another song that evolved fairly close to home for the MacDonalds is “B-Side of Life,� a heartland-style rock anthem in which the protagonist is a singer who has had a taste of fame with a hit song. Disillusioned by the shallowness of the pop star’s life, he renounces it in favor of a quiet, domestic existence of TV dinners and marital happiness: “I like my free time and I love my wife/We’re happy living on the B-side of life.�

MacDonald said he can recognize Timbuk3 in that song, but only in part. “That character is someone I can sympathize with and relate to, and I might have a similar philosophy,� he said. “But the difference between the couple in that song and Barbara and I is that we don’t want to cut ourselves off from the world.

“After a certain amount of time, we’ve got to get out and play our music. We’re a lot more ambitious than that character, although we’d like to think we have a similar kind of integrity. If we’ve got to sound like somebody else in order to have one of those hits, we can do without it. But if we can have hits and sound like ourselves, that’s just great.�

For now, MacDonald said, he is happy to have Timbuk3 as a forum for tossing out ideas--some of them no more than admissions of confusion, others with a clear point of view armed with a satiric barb.

“A guitar is like a can opener in the hands of a musician,� he said. “We’re trying to open the can of worms more than anything else, get a little closer to punching a hole in some kind of complacency. You’re free to do it because there’s no sponsor on the record album yet that you can offend--at least so far.�

Timbuk3 and the Swamp Zombies play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $16.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.