Perry is a singer-songwriter-composer. The band is his vision, and people pay good money to see and hear it.

"Ferociously Stoned" was recorded at Gung Ho Studios in Eugene. Mike McAdams, owner of the Record Garden, says he had 58 advance copies for the album--more than he's ever had for any musicians except R.E.M. The Daddies March 2 record release party at the WOW Hall was sold to overflowing. Looking like refugees from a Mardi Gras parade, the eight men on stage pumped out upbeat pop-swing-rock-punk-jazz-kitchen-sink melodies coupled with Perry's ribald, often despairing lyrics. Sweaty teenagers danced alongside wrinkled bald men while children played in back under the risers. A man who appeared to be about 40 was overheard saying, "They're a phenomenon."

In a quieter moment, Perry sits with his dark eyes shaded by cigarette smoke, a coffee cup in his bony fingers. He looks like he could use a good meal. He means it when he says he never believed anyone would pay attention to him or his band.

"We didn't expect to have a wide following; we were underground," he says. "This is what I do. I'm in the underground. I smoke, I drink, I didn't expect people to pay attention to me."

But they do. Perry is a master showman with a sense of humor and the ability to get an audience so jazzed that every single person is moving at least some part of his or her body. His music inspires some otherwise healthy young men to stage dive from great heights onto the heads of a dancing crowd.

A true believer in the notion that all the world's a stage, Perry likes to think up gonzo theater for the band's concerts. One bit that he uses regularly is a shadow dance with a giant plastic pickle to the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Another idea he had was for the whole band to do a gig as a McDonald's Happy Meal. One guy would be french fries, another a hamburger, and he was going to be a soft drink. The rest of the band didn't go for it, but on "Ferociously Stoned" Perry uses the nom de disque MC Large Drink.

The other musicians let him get away with a lot, but then they aren't exactly wilting flowers. Besides Perry, the lineup includes John Fohl on guitar, Dan Schmid on bass, Brian West on drums, Chris Azorr on keyboards, Brooks Brown on alto sax, James Phillips on tenor sax and Dana Hiteman [sic] on trumpet.

Perry himself is an escapee from a David Lynch movie. He says he knows guys like Frank Booth, the psycho-sadistic murderous villain of "Blue Velvet."

Most people see normal little towns in normal little parts of the world. Not Steve Perry. In his world, "Drunk Daddy" lives on one corner, smashing the lives of his innocent stepchildren. Down the street lives a lunatic pervert "Teenage Brain Surgeon." On another corner is sexy, whip-cracking Tammy from "Dirty Mutha Fuzz."

Perry believes his songs mirror the society in which we live.

"Art isn't politics; art is art. Art's where you get the overall theme," he says. "I'm trying to reflect the country I live in. This is a gawdy, pretty irresponsible culture, so I don't think I'm missing the mark all that much. But in this kind of 'Blue Velvet' Elvis landscape, there is a striving, and I try to show that."

Perry's music probes the underbelly of society, stabbing at oppressors such as abusive alcoholic stepfathers and bullies or, more broadly, at the pressure to conform.

Like other artists who show society its dirty underwear, Perry's work has been swaddled in controversy from the start.

Last summer--when witch hunters put 2 Live Crew, Judas Priest and the works of Robert Mapplethorpe on trial--anger erupted locally over the name Cherry Poppin' Daddies, over Perry's red-white-and-blue hair (which is now his natural brown and cut short), over his wild, often overtly sexual stage antics.

Letters to The Register-Guard, What's Happening and college newspapers charged Perry with promoting his talents at the expense of others, with "thoughtless and sheer machismo bravado," and with being a "hirsute hooligan."

The band's name has always been the focal point of the controversy here, Perry says, because some people in Eugene interpret the name as glorifying fathers who molest their daughters. Perry says that's not the point of the name at all; he just felt it captured the sort of 1920s pop jazz feel prevalent in the band's music. "If we were into that (fathers molesting their daughters) we'd be out doing it, and we wouldn't advertise," he says.

Besides, he liked Cherry Poppin' Daddies better than the band's former names, Mr. Wiggles and Big Yank, and he claims he never expected to get out of the underground music scene, where the name is mild in comparison to The Butthole Surfers or Love Battery.

But Perry's detractors wouldn't back down. Perry said the band's shows were picketed, that some were cancelled and that he was beaten up:

I almost chilled in my jammies when he said/Your hair is red, white and blue/Reached in my pocket and offered a peace pipe/This man would not oblige not listen to reason/Feet don't fail me now because it's freak hunting season/You better move/You better find something better to do.
--(From "You Better Move" by Steve Perry)

So Eugene audiences listen to the Bad Daddies or the Daddies while fans in Portland, Seattle, and other towns listen to the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, which is what the band is called on the album cover.

The band is scheduled to perform at the WOW Hall on March 26 and at the Good Times Cafe and Bar on April 5 and 6.

In liner notes for "Ferociously Stoned" Perry writes, "In a nutshell I guess what I would like to be understood is that these songs are meant to castigate predator/prey relationships, which is a primary theme, not celebrate them."

In person, he's more blunt.

"It's too easy to say we're the Hitlers of misogyny. There's irony in our songs and no small dose of satire, but it's not gratuitous," he said. "Like 'Blue Velvet,' it's the hidden part of our society. The world isn't like that. It doesn't conform. It's not simple and easy."

Perry's detractors disagree. His song "Drunk Daddy" has been criticized as promoting violence against women and children because of the line "Drunk daddy smash my sister..." But he said if people would just stop and think, they'd see more of the message:

Drunk daddy broke my fingers/Drunk daddy done kicked my head/Drunk daddy smashed my sister/Turned my whole world red (blood red).

Son of a physicist and a social worker, Perry grew up in a blue-collar Binghamton, N.Y. neighborhood where "Drunk Daddy" was often a reality. His mother, whose job it was to help the homeless find jobs, went to work more than one winter morning to find a homeless man frozen in the doorway of her office.

In 1981, Perry came to Eugene to study chemistry in the Honors College at the University of Oregon. He said he earned top grades. His junior year, he dropped out to make music.

He says he has never wanted flashy cars or a fancy home. He's perfectly content in his gritty little studio apartment, writing music and short stories all day, occasionally going out for coffee or a drink with friends, answering the telephone as a dispatcher for a bike messenger service. He likes Escher, the Marx Brothers and surrealistic literature.

Perry's working on an animated music video of "Teenage Brain Surgeon," a project that's been stalled for lack of funding.

Musically, Perry believes he has a long way to go. Right now, he says he's unhappy with his music because he wants to get to the point in his writing where he ends an album on a point grace.

"That grace at the end of the album is necessary to make people feel I'm trying to do that," he says.

"Writing an album's like walking down the street and looking through different people's windows and seeing different lives, and then you get to the end of the street and look up at the sky and see the universal picture. Hopefully, at the end, there's a grace to it."

Perry says that musically, Mozart achieves grace. "Music is the most fundamental of arts. It's the purest...Maybe pure music at the end of the album would achieve grace."

If tomorrow people stopped listening to his music, Perry doesn't know what he'd do. Maybe write screenplays. He really doesn't know and isn't going to worry about it.

A hard-core Marx Brothers fan, Perry said, "That's what I do, I go do the Marx Brothers of life." And if the music ends, "I'll just go be the Marx Brothers somewhere else."