His Love Letter to Southern California : Music: Writer-composer Ian Whitcomb turns his novel 'Lotusland' into a musical. It premieres Sunday in Pasadena.

By CLAUDIA PUIG

Feb. 8, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Ian Whitcomb hasn’t changed much since he was a wisp of a lad growing up outside London.

“What I’m doing now is basically what I was doing at age 7 or 8,” Whitcomb said. “I’ve always wanted to create my little world based on American popular culture.”

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Feb. 12, 1992 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 12, 1992 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 2 Column 4 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 19 words Type of Material: Correction
Wrong call letters--Ian Whitcomb’s radio show is heard over KPCC-FM. The wrong call letters were given in a story in Saturday’s Calendar.

And so he has.

At 7 he created songs in the Tin Pan Alley style, and at 8 he wrote and illustrated comic books, which he distributed to his prep school classmates.

Now, in middle age, he hosts a radio program here on popular American music, leads a vaudeville dance band and has written six books about music history, from the days of Irving Berlin through rock ‘n’ roll.

Whitcomb’s most ambitious attempt at creating a world based on American popular culture, however, is “Lotusland: A Story of Southern California,” a novel that he wrote in 1979 and that he now has adapted as a ragtime-jazz musical.

The play will have its premiere before a live audience at 5 p.m. Sunday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. The production, which stars Whitcomb in the lead--and mildly autobiographical--role of a ragtime-crazed British expatriate, is being performed by members of the California Artists Radio Theatre and will be broadcast live on KPPC-FM (89.3).

Whitcomb, 50, also wrote the music and libretto of “Lotusland,” which he describes as “an Englishman’s love letter to Southern California.” It is only scheduled now for the one production Sunday, but he hopes to see it staged elsewhere and would like to adapt it for film.

Whitcomb wrote the novel--set in Southern California between 1918 and 1929 and focusing on a fictional crooner-turned-real estate dabbler named Rollo Danks--while holed up at his regular desk at the Huntington Library in San Marino. It was published in Great Britain but not in the United States.

He came up with the notion of adapting it as a play and approached Peggy Webber, head of the California Artists Radio Theater, who agreed to direct it. The KPCC production also stars Leslie Easterbrook, Joseph Marcell, Paul Keith and Kathleen Freeman.

“It’s sort of like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta,” Webber said. “The songs are very funny and the music is very hummable. It’s just a little farce of a show, but it has a message. It has to do with the melting pot of America being a good thing seen though the eyes of a British citizen, that there should be no prejudice, that you should be colorblind and look for what a person is made of.”

Whitcomb is the chatty and informative host of “The Ian Whitcomb Show,” which explores American popular music’s roots Monday through Thursday from 10 p.m. to midnight on KPPC-FM. His intention with the show, and with “Lotusland,” is simple, he says: to inspire others to share in his fascination with American pop culture.

“I suppose I’m a closet educator,” he said in an interview at his comfortable Altadena home of 12 years. “I have a sort of mission. I want people to get enthused about what I get enthused about.”

Whitcomb got enthused early on about vaudeville and music hall tunes, as sung to him by his grandfather. (He currently sings many of those songs with his band, the Bungalow Boys, in which he also plays piano, accordion and ukulele.)

“I loved those songs. They seemed to fit my personality and background,” he said.

Whitcomb began his musical career while attending Trinity College in Dublin, forming a group called Bluesville Mfg. One publication about Irish rock dubbed him “the father of Irish rock,” a distinction he laughs about but is clearly proud of.

Shortly thereafter he got a record contract and enjoyed a brief sojourn as a pop star in the mid- and late ‘60s, thanks to a Top 10 hit with the novelty song “You Turn Me On.”

But he said that the wild and drug-hazed world of rock ‘n’ roll did not appeal to him, nor did his subsequent songs create much of a stir, resulting in his inclusion in compilations about “one-hit wonders.”

“My heart wasn’t in rock ‘n’ roll. It wasn’t my line,” he said. “I didn’t like the drug scene and the attitude. . . . I wanted to write books and do theatrical things.”

Shortly after he arrived in Southern California, Whitcomb found that the America he had been so drawn to in his youth had changed. He found himself longing for the innocence of an earlier era.

“I’d always had this image of America as positive, as a country full of ideals,” he explained. “It was always looking forward to a better world. I’ve always liked it when people looked to the future, and it seemed to me that, in the late ‘60s, this had faded. It seemed the whole fabric of the country was being questioned. . . .

Soon, he began turning out newspaper articles attacking the “growing pretentiousness of popular music and the glorification of drug-taking,” and his writing career was born. Around the same time, he returned to the music he’d loved as a boy.

“It wasn’t a great change for me to go from rock ‘n’ roll to the old songs because I grew up on them,” he said.

Whitcomb objects to the suggestion that he might be musically mired in the past.

“I’m not re-creating the past,” he said. “I’m reinterpreting it and also adding to it. I don’t think that’s invalid. . . . It’s a style. Nobody says to a blues musician, ‘Why are you playing this old style?’ It’s accepted as a legitimate form of music.”