BY JUD COST

It's a rare privilege to get a glimpse of what makes a potentially great rock band tick. Anyone in the vicinity of 47th and Telegraph Ave. tonight could have wandered into Smokey's Tangle, a tiny Oakland art gallery run by Brian Brooks and Emily Wick, for a free, low-watt performance by boatclub, a five-piece rock band that's already turned into something special. With a dazzling three-guitar front line that features Mark Hanley flanked by grizzled Rain Parade veterans Matt Piucci and John Thoman, bassist Tommy Carns and drummer Stephan Junca, the comparisons to fabled, talent-laden outfits of yore-like Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape-are almost inescapable.

It's a CD-release party for boatclub's self-titled debut disc, sort of. Nobody in the band mentions it, and to sell an album Piucci has to go fetch some from his car parked outside. This is no battened-down reaction to dire economic times, but rather an ingrained attitude, fostered over decades, to just play the music you love and let the record-biz chips fall where they may.

As the band begins to spin out a pair of sets chosen from a repertoire of about a hundred originals, half of the word "Prelude" flickers over Thoman's flannel shirt, as Wick projects a black and white film behind the band on a screen already set up for tomorrow night's showing of Buried Stories, a documentary she and Julie Kirkenslager recently shot.

To a full house numbering about a dozen, this must seem like sitting in on a barely amplified, hotel-room boatclub rehearsal with no PA. The band seems more at ease back on their East Bay home turf than they were last October for the going-out-of-business swan song of San Francisco's Castro district record shop, Outside Mind. Piucci's Crazy Horse bandmate, Billy Talbot, joined boatclub for a few tunes that night, and the between-songs chatter was kept to a minimum.

"Are you the same Boat Club from Sweden?" shouts out someone as a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon is passed around among the patrons. "Do you guys really own a boat?" asks another. "We're more like a boat hitting your windshield," mutters a deadpan Hanley. It's a scene right out of Kerouac's On The Road (or Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat).

Although boatclub has plenty of fretboard firepower, it's held in reserve tonight. Even Junca is using mallets and brushes, as Piucci bounces back and forth from a wheezing electric organ to bass guitar to drums to an acoustic 12-string (although he does break into the first few bars of the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" between numbers).

The restrained axe-work only highlights the stirring melodic quality of originals like the Carns/Piucci composition "I Used To Fly In My Dreams," making you wish these guys could have hooked-up with the late Jack Nitzsche to bathe in the warm glow of the genius who created the stunning arrangement for the Springfield's "Expecting To Fly." Effectively changing things up, Hanley's "My Bad Self" takes an angular, Tom Verlaine/Television stance, while Piucci's "Never Gonna Let You Down" deftly refries the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" riff in a Crazy Horse way, of course. The eerie falsetto/high tenor vocal blend by the band's songwriting core of Piucci, Hanley and Carns at times even gives off something of a cockeyed Brian Wilson/Smile vibe.

Boatclub came together gradually over the past five years. "I had no idea about Matt's long history in L.A. when I first met him," says Carns, who spent time a few years ago as ringmaster of a live-mic session at a downtown Oakland nightclub. "He actually auditioned for me over the phone." Junca sums up his joining the hyper-literate combo thusly: "It's like breathing, man." Thoman, the band's most recent addition who played with Chris Cacavas & Junkyard Love in the early '90s after Rain Parade folded, arrived in northern California from Kalamazoo, Mich. at Piucci's request. "Actually, my wife threw me out," says Thoman. "I re-examined my life and said, 'What do I do now?'" He's certain he's made an excellent choice, adding: "These guys are really good." It would have been a miracle if Piucci and Hanley hadn't met, since the latter owns Flashback Guitars on College Ave. in Oakland.

"By the way," chuckles Piucci while tuning the 12-string and slipping me a handful of CDs as I'm leaving, "the wrapper on the album is totally smokeable." To which I'd add a word of caution: Don't try this at home, kids. Leave it to the trained professionals, operating on a closed course.

[Photos Credit: Emily Wick and Brian Brooks]