Nash kowtow

Memo to Eddie Van Halen: If you still need a lead singer, consider Nash Kato. The former Urge Overkill guitarist and singer has the mop and the vocal chops to belt out “Panama” and party like it’s 1984. Plus, he’s a covers genius — from “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” the Neil Diamond song recorded by Urge Overkill and co-opted for Pulp Fiction, to “Dirty Work,” the reverent Steely Dan rip on Kato’s new solo disc. And like ol’ Diamond Dave, Kato is a savant when it comes to making all things dumbass seem cannily sharp.

That includes Debutante, the aforementioned solo disc. Two years through the pipeline, it sounds like it took about two hours to conceive and record. That raggedness serves some songs well, particularly “Blue Wallpaper,” with its anthemic “ba-ba-bahs” and epic drum sound.

“The first song I finished was ‘Blue Wallpaper,'” Kato (who was born Nathan Katruud) says from his Chicago home on the eve of his first full tour as a solo artist. “That’s the darker one on the record, or so I’m told. I’m also partial to ‘Black Satin Jacket,’ which is real open-ended. Not a lot of structure.”

“I was at the bottom of the hill,” he says of the genesis of Debutante. I just wanted to take a break from music after Exit the Dragon (the last UO album). I got as far away from the business and from music as possible. I wanted to immerse myself in a foreign surrounding and empty my head.”

That foreign land turned out to be Los Angeles, hardly the capital of Getting Away From Music. “Music was a lifestyle for us, but we just went our own ways in the end,” Kato says of his band. He hasn’t ruled out an eventual reunion, and UO drummer Blackie Onassis helped out with some of Debutante‘s lyrics, but Kato had, in 1996, reached a stopping place.

“I promised myself that when I heard the tunes in my head again, I’d take it as an indication to start,” Kato says. That didn’t happen for a while. But after “Blue Wallpaper,” other songs began filtering through his songwriting nerve center. “It’s like riding a bike. I did this for so long, and I was so well-rested at the end of my break that things began to pop up. A lot of them wrote themselves. It was great. Others were just a matter of transplanting some ideas, screwing different heads on some of the songs.”

The Steely Dan cover had been on Kato’s to-do list for some time. He and his band also recorded the Dan’s “Midnight Cruiser,” which will be on the all-Becker/Fagen soundtrack to the Farrelly brothers’ new comedy starring Jim Carrey, Me Myself & Irene. “It had been dormant for a while, but we pulled it out,” he says of the latter song.

It’s right to figure that someone who likens songwriting to the unforgettable act of riding a bike is probably an appropriately facile cover artist. “Dirty Work” is a high point of Debutante, both for the authentic throwback engineering and the way his voice, a grungy cross between David Lee Roth and Paul Carrack, fits around the lyric. That the song is an easy metaphor for someone emerging from semiretirement to do battle in the music industry slime pit is almost lost on him.

“If Kansas City wants it, Kansas City gets it,” is his dry response to a question about the song, its meaning, and its place in his tour. “I’ve been in write mode for so long, but live mode is what it’s all about. You have to be singing and playing,” Kato says. It’s another cliché, another moment in a short talk that gives away Kato’s game. Going back to the minors (the album is on Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard’s Will/Loosegroove Records) is the fate of lots of ’90s pretenders, and Kato’s brand-name recognition has ebbed during his downtime. His awareness of this isn’t conveyed overtly, but he’s not a big talker, doesn’t have the sense of humor his performances and lyrics muster. There’s a hint instead that Kato worries whether the best part is done.

“I’ve heard a lot more about Exit the Dragon lately,” he says. “We didn’t really hear that at the time. But it has its moments, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s like our White Album. And certainly I still hear about Saturation from people who come up to me. And we like to pull some things out of the Urge Overkill grab-bag in concert.”

As for the rest of his own disc, “Rain” and “Zooey Suicide” are to UO’s Saturation what Roth’s “Yankee Rose” was to Van Halen’s Diver Down — self-consciously cocky and insincere. That stance was UO’s stock in trade but might be a tougher sell for solo Kato. It helps that he has settled again in Chicago, a city with plenty of musical variety. (That said, Kato playfully kicked rival Windy City icon Billy Corgan in an online quiz this spring, expressing the desire for Cheap Trick to stop calling Corgan to the stage whenever the band’s in town.)

“L.A.’s not going anywhere. Neither is New York,” Kato explains. “There’s no point in pulling up the tent stakes to live out there. Chicago is plenty opportune.” He’s partial to the new Veruca Salt disc, and the work of another Chicago outfit, Cupcakes. “They have one of the best records anywhere. They’re a hot option.”

Seeing another group in A&R-man terms is a sign that Kato wasn’t too long in the wasteland. He sees himself that way, to some degree — as a product to be managed and sold. “Now that I have a band again, I’d like to make a band record, something with more of a blueprint next time,” he says. He doesn’t have much left over from Debutante, though. “I’ve always been able to spot the runt of the litter early on. They usually get drowned. None of them make it to the second or third stage.”

Even with an indistinct album at the center of his efforts, it’s hard not to root for Kato. Staying afloat in the slime pit is hard work, even with the best songs — something he knows from Urge Overkill. If Debutante drowns, it will have much less to do with whether Kato is the runt of the 2000 litter than the way rock’s audience seems to have forgotten how to ride a bike.

Nash Kato

Thursday, May 11at The Hurricane