Spontaneous creativity

By Colin Devenish

June 30, 2005 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

The high-profile day jobs and their platinum pedigrees made it easy to write off the Transplants as a one-off side project three years ago.

Drummer Travis Barker was the timekeeper for the pop-punk juggernaut Blink-182. Guitarist Tim Armstrong is half the songwriting brain trust of the vaunted punk outfit Rancid. And singer Rob Aston was a mutual friend. It was 2002, and they released an album, “The Transplants,” that ended up selling 227,000 copies.

With the release of the follow-up, the wildly diverse “Haunted Cities,” Barker says it’s time to rethink the Transplants: “I think people are starting to realize we’re a bona-fide band now.”

The new album came out last week, just as the trio launched into two months on the road as one of the headliners on the Vans Warped Tour, which visits Long Beach on Friday, Ventura on Sunday and Pomona on Wednesday.

“Haunted Cities” careens from genre to genre, seemingly thumbing its nose at pigeonholing. “I think with the Transplants people knew from out of the gate that we would experiment with all styles of music, and we are influenced and inspired by all sorts of music,” Barker says. “I think we can pretty much do anything and it’s not too outlandish.”

Even, as it turns out, working in the dark.

“It was rad times sitting in Tim’s basement recording drums with no lights in the room at all,” says Barker, who spent much of last year in the limelight being filmed for the MTV reality show “Meet the Barkers.” “There’s just not a light bulb in the house. It was so rad we recorded three drum parts there.”

That kicked-back vibe spilled over into the record. Barreling out of the blocks with the punk opener “Not Today,” which features Armstrong, Aston and Sen Dog from Cypress Hill trading verses, the Transplants segue smoothly through the drum-and-bass beats of “Gangsters & Thugs,” the ‘70s soul of “What I Can’t Describe,” the hip-hop “Killerfornia” and the salsa-flavored album closer “Crash and Burn.”

Much of the album was made in fits and starts, a day here, a week there, beginning with “Hit the Fence,” which was recorded on the bus during a tour with the Foo Fighters three years ago. Songwriting for the Transplants is a collaborative affair, with songs just as likely to begin with a drum beat or a vocal melody as a guitar part. Typical of that approach was the summery “What I Can’t Describe,” which Aston once pegged for possible inclusion on a solo album he’d been writing.

“I wanted to do an oldies-style song,” Aston says. “Seventies soul is one of the types of music I grew up on, groups like the Intruders and the Dramatics. I listen to all that stuff. I went over to Tim’s house and took a stack of my favorite oldies over there, and he grabbed a guitar and within an hour he played me basically the rhythm and the riffs for that song. Then we called our homies from the Boo-Yaa Tribe to come and sing on it because they have these amazing voices. This record’s got a lot of stuff like that. We do what we want and we don’t worry if someone’s going to be confused by that.”

As recording in a dark basement and writing in tour buses might suggest, the Transplants aren’t precious about their work.

“We’re more spontaneous with the Transplants. We’re not so concerned with sounds. We are, but we’re not,” Barker says. “On a Blink record I’ve sat around and taken three days for drum sounds, waiting for the producer to go, ‘OK, I’m stoked on drum sounds.’ Tim and I and Rob will go in there and get drum sounds in five minutes and a regular fan of music, no one’s going to tell.

“We’re not too anal about anything. If anything, we just want to have a good time and play music.”

Although Barker’s profile has been raised in the last year with his home life -- as husband of actress and former Miss USA Shanna Moakler and father of two young children -- beamed into living rooms nationwide, the drummer hasn’t kept pace with the series.

“I’ve never watched an episode on TV,” Barker says. “I approved of them a year ago when they came to me, but I don’t watch TV. I know what my life entailed last year, so I don’t need to watch it on TV. I know exactly what happened. I just move forward.”

And this summer, that meant touring.

“In the past it’s been difficult for us to go out and tour as much as we’d like to because of Tim with Rancid and Travis with Blink,” Aston says. “But now we have time to just focus on the Transplants, and we’re fortunate enough to be able to do the whole Warped Tour and the English festivals like Reading and Leeds.

“This band has always been a full-time gig for everybody involved, but we haven’t been able to devote the time to it. We’re definitely excited.

“This is too much fun not to be out.”

Colin Devenish can be reached at [email protected].

Vans Warped Tour

On the Web: warpedtour.com

When: Gates open at 11 a.m.

Price: $30 day of show. Long Beach date is sold out.

Friday

Where: Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd.

Main stages include: Transplants, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, the Offspring, Thrice, MxPx, Avenged Sevenfold, Atreyu

Side-stage picks: Mike Watt and Peter DiStefano, the Valley Arena, Bleed the Dream, Over It

Sunday