Chocolate-Covered Razor Blades And other treats from a fun funk band

By JAY COCKS

Was (Not Was). Outside the parentheses is a terrific dance band; inside is a real trailblazer. The group, out of Detroit by way of some dark but friendly musical star, gets hold of a brawny rhythm-and-blues foundation, overlays it with some up-to-the-second dance sounds and ladles up lyrics with strains of Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. After that's all done, the band gets down to its real mission: to shake the house down. Explains Was (Not Was) co-founder Don Was: "We would like to sound like the Motown revue on acid."

The band, which has two featured singers and seven rambunctious musicians besides Don and his compadre David Was, has a distinctive, daffy humor, a rhythmic sense that is honed until it gleams and a stiff spine about matters of conscience. Once badgered by market-wary Geffen Records, as Don puts it, to "get rid of the black guys," Was (Not Was) hung tough. Same as they did when told by another company there would be no band pictures, "because we don't want black radio to see they're white, and we don't want white radio to see they're black." Don says Geffen told the band to whiten up and lighten up "not because they were a racist record company. They were only reflecting a basic reality of the music business." But then, deflecting such realities, changing the perspectives and finding a soulful congeniality is the method behind the band's mad music.

Success helps too. The group's new album, What Up, Dog?, is currently cooking on Billboard's Top Pop Albums, and the first single, Spy in the House of Love, hit the No. 1 position on the dance chart. The band has been a smash in Europe, but until the release of What Up, Dog?, America seemed to resist its charms. "We had a hip cachet in Europe," says David, the band's co- founder and lyrics writer. "In America we were has-beens." David puts the band's long history together with its newfound fortune and reckons, "If we have a hit album this time, it will work out to a minimum wage over the last eight years." Adds Don: "We had to go outside of America, to a place where black music and older soul singers are revered. Remember, not only were these guys black in a supposedly white band; they didn't even sing in the modern black style. They were out of vogue."

The gentlemen in question represent the classic poles of soul. Sweet Pea Atkinson sports an open shirt and a pirate's booty of gold chains that make him look, according to a standing band joke, like "a killer pimp." He worked on a Chrysler assembly line for eleven years; when he sings, his voice is all rough edges, Wilson Pickett-style, that soar and spar. Sir Harry Bowens may still be unknown to Burke's Peerage (relax, guys: his knighthood is self- imposed), but fans of the O'Jays will recognize the cool, platinum elegance of his phrasing. He sang with the O'Jays for seven years, but no musical grounding adequately prepared him for his first meeting with the Was boys. "I thought," Sir Harry recalls, "that they were a couple of crackpots."

Well, of course. It is easy enough to get a solid fix on the R.-and-B. cornerstone of the band's music. It is the Was deviations on the form that require an off-road map. The CD and cassette versions of What Up, Dog? contain a nifty number called Wedding Vows in Vegas in which Frank Sinatra Jr. provides some very atmospheric vocalizing. Clearly, Was (Not Was) musical inspiration has deep roots in strange places. Nothing less should be expected from a couple of guys whose first taped effort was a Frank Zappa tune and who put on a show in high school titled You Have Just Wasted Your Money.

The band's name was an offshoot of a running dialogue in baby talk that Don carried on with his young son Anthony ("Anthony want pretzel?" "Not want."). According to Don, the name also "parallels the reaction to our music, which is 'What?' " No matter what its inspiration or explanation, Was (Not Was) is certainly an improvement on Fagenson (not Weiss), which, while never a consideration, would at least have been straightforward. Don Fagenson and David Weiss first met in eighth grade outside a gym teacher's office, where they awaited disciplining. Don's parents were both teachers. David's mother was an actress, and his father was a radio and TV actor who worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Soupy Sales and appeared for a decade as Santa in the Detroit Thanksgiving parade. "We started to worry about his health after there was a bomb threat on his sleigh," David remembers. "Only in Detroit would they want to kill Santa Claus."

That kind of black humor and street sass is carried over into Was songs, which David characterizes as "chocolate-covered razor blades." The Dog CD features a startling but ultimately respectful and impassioned reappraisal of the J.F.K. assassination, 11 MPH, set to a heavy funk beat, as well as a barn- burner reworking of Otis Redding's I Can't Turn You Loose. Both do memory proud. The group is working on a brand-new Was (Not Was) album for release this summer. The music will, naturally, be the same (only different). "It's a come-as-you-aren't party," says David. Be there or be square. And don't pass up the chocolates.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Dallas