Roger Manning

Manning is America's answer to Billy Bragg, a singer-songwriter who marries folk music's traditions of storytelling and left-wing rabble-rousing to rock 'n' roll's aggressive spirit. Manning, a New Yorker, is no match for Bragg, an Englishman, when it comes to crafting a graceful melody (Bragg qualifies as one of pop's better recent-vintage writers of romantic songs).

AS happens when households move and lives are packed and unpacked, Roger Manning unearthed some personal artifacts while boxing up his life to move into a new house a few years ago. They were songs -- or, rather, ideas for songs, sketches, collections of chords and melodies.

They call it anti-folk, a New York sub-genre in which solo acoustic singer-songwriters do something altogether more abrasive than the sounds and images usually associated with the term folk . The punk-inspired attitude doesn't supplant folk's idealism, but it does give it a twist, loosens it up, makes it squirm. It's not the kind of thing that gets you invited to events like the recent "Troubadours of Folk" festival, and apparently it's not even the kind of thing that's penetrated L.A.'

Manning is America's answer to Billy Bragg, a singer-songwriter who marries folk music's traditions of storytelling and left-wing rabble-rousing to rock 'n' roll's aggressive spirit. Manning, a New Yorker, is no match for Bragg, an Englishman, when it comes to crafting a graceful melody (Bragg qualifies as one of pop's better recent-vintage writers of romantic songs).

AS happens when households move and lives are packed and unpacked, Roger Manning unearthed some personal artifacts while boxing up his life to move into a new house a few years ago. They were songs -- or, rather, ideas for songs, sketches, collections of chords and melodies.

With Jellyfish, Roger Manning borrowed from Burt Bacharach and Badfinger to cook up a virtual acid trip to Candyland. Now Manning and fellow Jellyfish veteran Eric Dover let all their self-indulgent guitar choogling hang out with the mightier Imperial Drag. Heavy on baroque, Zeppelin-esque riffs, majestic Freddie Mercury vocals, steely psychedelia and arena-glam bonbons, this debut overcomes its unsteadiness to flat-out rock.

Fans of good hooks, lines and sinkers couldn't land better seafood than Jellyfish. Surely the generation that belatedly took "Bohemian Rhapsody" to No. 1 can find some similar use for this quartet, which plays an unapologetic retro-pop so splendid it makes you want to take back every bad thing you said about the '70s and start raving about the decade as a musical high-water mark. Fightin' words?

It started in 2000 as a goof -- three friends, Jason Falkner, Brian Reitzell and Roger Manning Jr., fashioning a soundtrack to "Logan's Sanctuary," an imagined sequel to "Logan's Run." Now the trio, doing business as TV Eyes, has a finished-though-untitled album being shopped to labels and a visuals-laden stage show that premieres Oct. 1 at the Troubadour. "It started out as an homage to a certain era," Falkner says. "It's the late '70s and '80s, very British and electronic and synthy."

Little darlings, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter. In short, early '91 has been a season in which we could all use a little Beatlesque cheer. Paul McCartney's tour has come and gone; George Harrison is still stage-shy. But here comes Jellyfish, a new San Francisco band whose Beatles-derived pop and lighthearted thrift-shop fashion sense figure to bring around a little sun.

The program for San Clemente Community Theatre's "Two by Twain" credits the adaptation to actor David Birney. Birney's version of Mark Twain's "Diaries of Adam & Eve," the larger portion of the evening, and the short "Noah and the Bureaucrat" are known entities. Before these two, however, there is a silly prelude in which a Master and Mistress of Ceremonies sprinkle Twain epigrams between hesitant vaudeville soft-shoe steps and self-conscious poses.

They call it anti-folk, a New York sub-genre in which solo acoustic singer-songwriters do something altogether more abrasive than the sounds and images usually associated with the term folk . The punk-inspired attitude doesn't supplant folk's idealism, but it does give it a twist, loosens it up, makes it squirm. It's not the kind of thing that gets you invited to events like the recent "Troubadours of Folk" festival, and apparently it's not even the kind of thing that's penetrated L.A.'

The best part of "Pure as the Driven Snow" at the Camino Real Playhouse in San Juan Capistrano is that it ends. The second best part is that the audience is given foam-rubber "rocks" to throw at the villain, Mortimer Frothingham (Tom Snooks). It's frustrating, however, because there are so many villains more worthy recipients of rock-throwing than Snooks, who gives this endless bore one of its few funny characterizations. For one, there's the playwright of this awful melodrama, Paul Loomis.

Listeners who tune in to the taped radio broadcast recorded on Sunday at Jellyfish's Coach House show will have a hard time believing there's been no post-production tampering. But those spot-on, four-part harmonies, the little refrains dashing through the songs like cartoon characters, the decorative vocal fills perfectly placed into churning rock arrangements--all were clearly and thrillingly live.