Sacramento Bee (Cover Story)

Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Gilbert won’t say who the anti-heroine of Toy Matinee’s first radio hit, “The Ballad of Jenny Ledge,” is in real life. But she is a familiar character nevertheless.

“Jenny Ledge experienced music on a pleasure level,” says Gilbert. “Sort of ‘Oh, that’s nice. I like that. I like ice cream. I like “Dallas.”’ It was just another pleasure.

“But to other people, music is responsible for their mood. To Jenny, music didn’t really matter, which is why she ran off with an Elvis impersonator. It didn’t matter to her that he didn’t write that music.”

It matters to Gilbert, whose group opens tonight’s Rembrandts’ show at the Crest in Sacramento. The tragicomic song, which was Toy Matinee’s debut video (featuring Gilbert’s friend Rosanna Arquette), reveals much about Gilbert’s attitude to record making. It also explains why “Toy Matinee” is one of the most exciting debut albums of last year.

With sophisticated arrangements, sharp harmonies and ambitious lyrics full of insight, passion and wit (“Turn It On Salvador,” an homage to Dali, has a refrain of “da-da, da-das”), it’s an album that leaps out from the pack for its intelligence and substance - and distance from the mainstream.

“The last decade has been the triumph of style over substance,” says Gilbert. “The album sounds different because the influences are 20 years old.”

Indeed, one of the remarkable things about the sophisticated music on “Toy Matinee” is that it sprang from the head and hands of a man only 24 years old.

“I was a closet progressive music fan,” he says. “When my peers were listening to the Dead Kennedys and the Cramps, I would go down to used record shops and discover things like Gentle Giant and Genesis. My friends would say, ‘Oh, Gilbert’s listening to that old junk.’”

Gilbert was also working with what he was hearing, and by 1988 the Bay Area native had written and recorded two albums, releasing them privately under the group name Giraffe. He also made ends meet by playing keyboards for Bay Area rock star Eddie Money, a formative experience.

“I discovered that making a lot of money and having girls go gaga wasn’t what I wanted,” says the earnest Gilbert. “What I wanted was to write songs and play them for people. Playing my songs for 20 people felt better than playing Eddie Money songs for 10,000 people at the Paris Monsterdome.”

But Toy Matinee isn’t Gilbert’s alone. It is a collaboration that was born at the Yamaha Soundcheck, a high-profile battle of the bands at which Giraffe performed. The group caught the ear of a celebrity judge, Patrick Leonard, best known as Madonna’s producer and co-songwriter.

“Pat was at his wit’s end with Madonna,” says Gilbert. “He was getting cast as this plastic pop producer, even though his heart is in stuff like ‘Oh, Father’ [one of the last, and uncharacteristic, Madonna tracks he wrote]. He came backstage and said, ‘I want to write songs with you and form a band.’ I was kinda skeptical, but we wrote ‘Last Plane Out,’ and I thought, ‘This is gonna work.’”

The album, recorded with analog (not digital) equipment , is crisp, clear and warm. “It’s an honest recording,” says Gilbert, whose enthusiasm for the project is infectious. “There’s no reverb on the vocals, no digital reverb on the drums. We did 30 takes on some songs, because we think there’s excitement in hearing a performance of a song all the way through, not just a collection of good takes spliced together. ‘Salvador’ took three days, but ‘There Was a Little Boy’ was recorded live in the studio in two takes.”

Born as a songwriting and recording duo, Toy Matinee didn’t really exist as a band when the album was finished. Patrick, 34, was on tour with Pink Floyd and was successful enough to be able to pass on climbing in a Winnebago for a club tour with a new band. In addition, drummer Brian MacLeod returned to his group, Wire Train.

“So I went out on acoustic guitar and just played scaled-down versions of the songs,” says Gilbert. “I found Marc Bonilla, an amazing guitarist and singer, and we did a tour of Japan. Then we added Spencer Campbell on bass to play a tour of about 30 radio stations. We played a few songs and took requests - we once played ‘Suite Judy Blue Eyes’ all the way through the whole time!

“After a while, there was a buzz, so we got a drummer [Toss Panos] and a keyboardist [Sheryl Crow] and we’re rehearsing now. Sacramento will be our third date as a full band.”

As for live performance, Gilbert doesn’t make any promises: “I don’t dance and I don’t have any cool moves,” he says. “I’m a goofball guy who writes songs, and I can sing them a good way, but people are used to a certain level of visual stimuli. There are a lot of people who are really taken by Mick Jagger jogging around stage, and Elvis hips and all that.”

“But,” he adds wryly, “I’m opposed to Elvis impersonators on principle.”