Onstage, Ricky Lee Robinson cuts a bold figure. Dressed in a bright white tuxedo, he sits behind a modified drum set bashing away at his acoustic guitar while playing the drums with his feet—a one-man White Stripes, if you will. His voice is as arresting as his look, his raspy, booming tone perfectly suited for the ruckus he makes. But what’s most unusual about Robinson is his song selection. In addition to his original tunes—which run the gamut from David Bowie–esque ballads to Blue Öyster Cultish hard rock—he likes to pepper his set list with brutally inoffensive numbers like the Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic.” With Robinson’s skewed approach, the kind of lite, vintage fare normally heard on KOIT-FM sounds fresh and brand spanking new.

The surprising news is that Robinson isn’t alone.Being studio bred and hit focused, ’70s rock seems antithetical to the music that would attract rockers like Robinson, who thrive on gritty authenticity. But like other art forms, music is cyclical. The rock world has already undergone one ’70s resurgence (the pop-punk movement) and a couple of ’80s revivals (synth-pop and dancey rock), and all indications are that a ’90s resurrection is just around the corner (L.A. buzz band Silversun Pickups might as well be called Smashing Pumpkins Jr.). The difference is that when musicians appropriate a sound or style, they normally take one they consider cool. So dancey rock acts like Franz Ferdinand and Every Move a Picture borrow from ’80s post-punk, and electronic music producers like Miguel Migs rework ’80s electro and dancehall.

But the Carpenters?
Believe it. In the Bay Area, soft is the new hard, unhip has become hip, and people are dancing to some of the most mellow tunes ever committed to wax. This isn’t just a local phenomenon. Indie rockers from all over the continent, from Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie to New York’s Fountains of Wayne to Canadian-bred singer Feist, have all covered soft-rock tunes of late. Some of them even played on this year’s comeback album by America (remember “A Horse with No Name”?). And yet the trend seems to be proliferating at a greater rate in the Bay Area, where at least a dozen bands play soft-rocking ’70s and ’80s covers.

Some of the finest include Total B.S., a Bob Seger tribute band made up of members of cutting-edge hard rock outfits and swaggering soul acts; Cool Nights, musicians who otherwise play in arty ensembles like Neung Phak but together perform cheesy ballads such as Rupert Holmes’s “Escape (the Piña Colada Song)”; and This Union Standard, a quintet whose originals are as pretty and arid as their cover of the Doobie Brothers’ “It Keeps You Runnin’.” Then there’s Eric Shea, who played guitar for hard rockers Parchman Farm and is currently the lead singer with the rock band Hot Lunch; he put together a whole tribute album devoted to Bread, the group responsible for such mellow goo as “Make It with You.”

DJs also are wiping the dust off some long-forgotten LPs. At his hip monthly dance clubs Blow Up and Frisco Disco (which take place at San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop and the Transfer, respectively), DJ Jeffrodisiac often spins Wham and Whitney Houston alongside the latest raunchy techno tunes, while the deck jockeys at the monthly lesbian dance club Rebel Girl (also at Rickshaw Stop) mix Bon Jovi and the Outfield with Beyoncé. Several bars feature weekly events—among them Sailing, at the Attic, in San Francisco, and DJ Dudebro and Friends, at Oakland’s Ruby Room—where the DJs dig deeper into the ephemera of the Me Decade, filling the tiny dance floors by playing such sleepy groovers as Andrea True’s “More More More.” At the opposite end of the spectrum, after last year’s San Francisco Indie Film Fest, 550 people skated to KC & the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man” and other tracks spun by Black Rock Roller Disco organizer David “D” Miles while Xanadu was projected on the walls.

You can attribute the phenomenon to the two-headed beast of irony and nostalgia, perhaps even more to the latter. “For me, soft rock is the sound track to riding in the back seat of my parents’ car on the way to the grocery store or the pool,” says Justin Frahm of This Union Standard, who cohosts the Sailing event. “It evokes the same rush of memories as the round-cornered, thatched photo paper that Kodak Instamatic pics were printed on. I think that’s a big part of the appeal—the history it evokes in the listening.”

But many of the people playing and dancing to these tunes were barely conscious when the songs first came out. You can’t have nostalgia for something you didn’t experience. You can, however, envy something you missed. And as you get older, you can appreciate a more carefree time, when you could sing along with Bread’s “Baby I’m-a Want You” and not get laughed out of the coffee shop. What may have sounded saccharine at the time (Seals and Crofts, the Little River Band, Loggins and Messina, the Carpenters, the Captain and Tennille) sounds sweet and innocent now. “We age, our tastes broaden, and what had been so cheesy and loathsome in our youth reemerges rich with artistry and complexity that we weren’t able to appreciate when we were younger” is how Frahm puts it.

There’s a craftsmanship to the songwriting that many of us respond to. Certainly the string arrangements for the Association’s “Windy,” the three-part vocal harmonies on Player’s “Baby Come Back,” and the horn charts on any Earth, Wind & Fire hit kick the caboose of Clay Aiken’s latest confection. The vocalists of old could sing, too, unlike stars like Britney Spears who prove themselves incapable of carrying a tune when they go on tour. And experimentally minded rockers can appreciate the wonderfully bizarre nature of some of the soft-rock hits; think of ELO’s “Livin’ Thing,” which puts Arabic violin alongside space-age synthesizer buzzes and multitracked falsettos. (The one similar modern example would be rap producer Timbaland, whose otherworldly beats are as freaky as they are catchy.)

Since soft rock and disco have fallen well out of fashion, people in contrarian San Francisco were bound eventually to applaud them again. It may seem ironic that scroungy rockers, hipster DJs, and club kids are embracing the ultimate corporate-driven, establishment-stamped sounds. But one look at the crowd’s reaction to Robinson tearing through David Dundas’s “Jeans On” makes it obvious why these uncool songs are cool again. They’re just plain fun. •

EVENTS:

ERIC SHEA- July 9, Adobe Books, 3166 16th St., s.f., 415-864-3936

THIS UNION STANDARD- Aug. 30, Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk St., s.f., 415-923-0925

Dan Strachota is San Francisco’s pop music critic. He writes for SF Weekly and DJs at the Three Kinds of Stupid dance party, at the rickshaw stop, where he also books entertainment.