By George Chen

I HALF EXPECT psychedelic multi-instrumentalist Greg Ashley to look like the kid in The Sixth Sense, with a shock of gray hair and an aura of doom clouding a baby face wise beyond his years. I'd seen him perform in a dark warehouse, sitting with his head buried behind a microphone, but my memory is subsumed by the eeriness of the performance.

Answering his door, the 23-year-old Ashley is youthful-looking, inviting, and casual. His is a far cry from the loner-genius persona that one might expect of someone from his corner of the music world. Fellow Texan Roky Erickson immediately springs to mind when listening to the desolate wail of Ashley's 2003 solo record, Medicine Fuck Dream, or his rock band the Gris Gris's self-titled debut (both on Birdman), which comes out Aug. 9.

It's the first of many impressions that are swiftly deflated. I interrupt Ashley in the middle of a video game. He regales me with a story about helping a possibly insane lady who turned up in his carport and demanded a ride to Alameda. He complied.

But that's not so unusual. The stretch of MacArthur he lives on rubs shoulders with residential hotels and lodgings that have hourly rates. Ashley's apartment fits into the landscape: it's much like those occupied by the many rocker kids in Oakland. It's filled with records, musical instruments, and an autographed photo of Greg Luganis.

OK, so the last item belongs to his girlfriend, as does the yapping dog stuck in the backyard. He also has three reel-to-reel machines and an upright piano that had to be moved after he was evicted from his studio, and he's excited about living in Oakland after moving from the suburbs of Houston in 2002.

"The suburbs of Houston, especially now, more and more, they're starting to look like the suburbs of L.A.," Ashley says. "There's not shit to do – pretty much just hung out with the same 5 or 10 friends all the time. Half my friends moved away after high school – people went to college."

Doing his homework

What is unusual is the Gris Gris's music; though true enough, it's hard to pin down, and overanalysis usually misses the basics. There's a naïveté to Ashley's songs, which are often, as on Medicine Fuck Dream, bluntly sincere. But even considering the Gris Gris's penchant for noise experiments, the X factor may be their preference of primary-source material rather than fifth-generation carbon copies of garage rock.

Ashley notes being into the early Radio X records like those by Supercharger and the Mummies as a high school student, ahead of the curve of many in his generation. "More people my age started doing garage music after listening to those records, and it seemed like a really bad copy of a copy of music," he says. "Those records were, like, those guys listening to '50s and '60s music, and they couldn't really play, so they just made a punk version of it.... I just got into more '60s psychedelic stuff."

In a world of facsimile, Ashley's generally done better homework than his peers have. The Gris Gris, for instance, are named after an early Dr. John record. "I read the liner notes, and, I guess, for Cajun people in New Orleans, gris gris is slang for voodoo, or for some people, it's slang for drugs," he says.

While everyone playing depressing indie rock claims the Velvet Underground as an influence, it seems real coming from the Gris Gris. The rave-up psychedelia of "Raygun" includes a choppy guitar solo that sounds like a blast apart from any recognizable decade, and Ashley's somewhat nasal tone is thoroughly human, cracking in spots and coated in a warm room tone. In the end, the key might be that the band treat the past 30 years of music like a bad dream and therefore have the freedom to rewrite history like a trio of Marty McFlys.

Mirror, mirror

When he was 19, Ashley started playing in a rock band called the Mirrors. They released a vinyl-only 2001 LP and then caught the interest of a friend at the local Sound Exchange record store. He released their second full-length, 2003's 13 Patient Flowers (Fleece Records), which starts with the sort of rock fire that you might expect from any band of hotheaded young retro-studs. It gets weirder by the second track: the tinny xylophone lead on "Patient Flowers" enters groovy ballad territory before its pitch bends out of shape. Ashley even revisits the effect on the intro to the Gris Gris's "Everytime." Feng shui recitation and Orientalist chimes add confusion to the Sun City Girls-esque "The Stars in Their Orbits."

While in the Mirrors, Ashley worked on the solo material that would eventually be released under his own name. This was mostly recorded in Texas in a shed in the back of his parents' house. Named after his onetime band, Medicine Fuck Dream makes use of idiosyncratic low-budget effects like singing through a box fan or using water bottles as maracas.

The opening vocal squeals on the first track, "Karen Loves Candy," almost sound like dog barks, but they have a mischievous origin: Ashley schemed with a bandmate to ambush his roommate (who was also his cohort's girlfriend). "I called him and said, 'When you bring her into the house, I need you to hold her down and tickle her, and I'll have the recording equipment set up so we can get this track,'" he says. "She couldn't stop laughing though."

That mixture of creepiness and intimacy is a good example of what it feels like to listen to Ashley's solo work, even when he's simply covering Hank Williams's "Lost Highway." At points he sounds like Daniel Johnston or the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano, his voice cracking and wavering like those archetypal man-children's.

Kids' playtime

It's comforting then to see that Ashley can play well with others. It was while touring with the Mirrors that he met future Gris Gris bassist Oscar Michel. At the time, Michel's other group, the Rock and Roll Adventure Kids, were the house band at UC Berkeley's infamous Cloyne Court co-op.

Once they formed the Gris Gris, the duo did a "crappy" tour that allowed Ashley to play the local boy made good, at least superficially. "We went back to Houston, and this girl from the college radio was like, 'You guys are awesome. Where are you from? I heard you were from California.' I was like, 'Well, actually I'm from here, but I just moved there,' and she was like, 'Oh, really?' It was like, 'Never mind.' "

When they returned from that tour, the duo added drummer Joe Haener of Battleship and formerly of Rock and Roll Adventure Kids, and the Gris Gris solidified as a band, with Ashley remaining the main songwriter. "Pretty much, we were doing the solo-record stuff, but then we wrote some new songs, 'cause all that stuff's kind of depressing," Ashley says. "Nobody wants to watch that in a bar."

Around this time, the Gris Gris's friend Garret Godard of the Cuts gave a copy of the band's demo to Birdman's Dave Katznelson, who had released records for the Boredoms on his label and signed the Flaming Lips and Shane MacGowan to Warner Bros. Katznelson ended up releasing both the solo record and the Gris Gris's debut and plans to put out an unreleased Mirrors album and get behind a possible reunion tour.

The association with local Birdman acts such as the Cuts makes for a marketable stable of young 'uns fiddling with their parents' favorite genres and wardrobes. But Ashley isn't necessarily going along with it quietly. "There's definitely that whole '70s rock thing going on in Oakland, which I'm not that into," he confesses. He relays his discomfort with the promotional process, comparing his experience of "being completely and utterly ignored for three years of doing music in Houston" with "moving here and finally somebody picks up the record.

"Why can't they also pay someone else to do this [interview] for me?" Ashley continues. "Someone who could do a much better job of representing myself."

Gris Gris open for Bart Davenport July 31, 9 p.m., Mile High Club, 3629 MLK Jr. Way, Oakl. $6. (510) 654-4549. They play a CD-release show Aug. 7, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, S.F. $6. (415) 923-0923.