Come on, Let's Get Banglesized!

By JAY COCKS

Let's put the guy in the aisle-seat wise. There he is, just a businessman flying to Daytona Beach, Fla., straining to keep his deals in place, and next to him is this . . . this gorgeous girl. Long hair, four-alarm wardrobe, sleepy smile that turns surprisingly cordial when he strikes up a conversation. "Spring break, right?"

"No," she says, a little more amused than he might have expected. "Not exactly." He tries again. "Working?" She gives him a small lead. "Sort of."

To forestall any further squirming, the man on the aisle should know that the young woman next to him is Susanna Hoffs from Los Angeles. Her father and mother met at Yale, where he was a med student and she was studying art. Now her father is a psychoanalyst, her mother a film director, and their daughter, who graduated from Berkeley, is . . . well, currently on tour. As one of the four members of a sensational rock outfit called the Bangles. Who have a new Columbia album called Different Light. Who have an ace single, Manic Monday, written pseudonymously by Prince and closing like an Exocet onto the top of the charts. Who will not have to introduce themselves to anyone by the time summer rolls around.

One more thing. The Bangles is a women's band. Hoffs, Bass Player Michael Steele, Lead Guitarist Vicki Peterson and her sister, Drummer Debbi Peterson, all in their mid-20s, have been compared to the Beatles, flatteringly but predictably. Anytime a band comes along that has an act full of fun, a songbook full of tunes with enough hooks to put in a tackle box and a sensual appeal that is insinuating and disarming at once, the Fab Four get trotted out like some handy musical yardstick for measuring progress and promise. No fair. The Bangles are a long way from Ticket to Ride, never mind In My Life. It is still early in the tour--their first as U.S. headliners--but the accomplishment of their guitar playing isn't fully matched by any assurance of stagecraft, and the vocals (shared by all four members of the band) risk being swamped in the amiable uncertainties of the show. The band is aware of such shortfalls of technique. "We pick up a guitar, and we may not be as good as the person next to you," says Vicki Peterson, "but we have spirit."

Indeed. The Bangles win over the audience as soon as they show up onstage for their 80-minute set. Being a women's band gives them an edge, and being attractive puts them even further ahead of the game. They do not play coy onstage, and their come-on is never as sexy as their pal Prince's, but those guys screaming in the crowd out there aren't just going bonkers for the guitar licks.

For the Bangles, all this just comes with the territory--sex appeal has been part of the rock superstar parcel ever since Elvis--and they have already learned how to play cunning games with songs that cut both ways chronicling the war between men and women. One of Different Light's standout cuts is If She Knew What She Wants, written by Jules Shear and turned by Hoffs' heart- riven vocal into a perfect cameo of a sexual standoff. "It's a challenge," says Hoffs, "to take someone else's material and turn it into a Bangles song." Adds Vicki Peterson: "When we approach a song we didn't write, we want to Banglesize it." That particularly means working out an arrangement ^ that rocks hard but falls short of a sonic mugging, then concentrating on a vocal sound that seems to have floated from a car radio lost somewhere in the '60s ozone.

When the Bangles sing, there are vapor traces of everyone from the Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys to Chad and Jeremy. This does not make them a band of sentimental traditionalists, however. Their best tunes, like the album's title track, have the flinty lyricism of writers such as Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. When Hoffs and the Petersons sing "I wanna make a movie/ I wanna put you on the silver screen/ Sit in a darkened room and look at you from a distance," the invitation is at once both seductive and forbidding.

California pop colors many of these tunes--inevitably, since the Bangles all grew up, as a Beach Boys song put it, in "the warmth of the sun." Steele hails from Newport Beach ("An embarrassing place to live. Everything there is named for John Wayne"), and the Petersons were certified Valley Girls. "We used to go cruising on Friday nights," recalls Vicki. "Mother wanted me to be a nurse," says Debbi. "I said, 'Mom, I want to play drums.' " Hoffs hooked up with the Petersons by answering a classified ad, and the Bangles, then called simply the Bangs, started gigging around in 1981. They released one mini-album on a now defunct record label and, replacing their original bassist with Steele, landed on Columbia, which released their major-label debut All Over the Place in 1984.

Different Light, the follow-up, gives up fecklessness for a truer aim at the mainstream. "I think our sound has evolved," Hoffs concedes. "We've learned how to use our voices now." "We have four people with strong ideas," says Vicki Peterson. "We have to give each other respect." "I don't think the four of us could be in a rock band if it was unequal," says Steele. "Our egos are too big."

"We are the sort of band," Hoffs concludes, "where there is a different sort of person for each sort of fan to like." That makes Steele laugh. "She means guys," she explains.

With reporting by B. Russell Leavitt/Daytona Beach