If Alfredo’s Pays Like Alice’s, Well, All’s Well Who Eats Well

Maybe there is something to the notion that the ‘60s are repeating themselves. After all, we now have a punker’s equivalent of “Alice’s Restaurant.”

The song is called “Alfredo’s.” It is a frisky, funny tribute to a Mexican restaurant in Lomita that serves as the main source of nutrition for the song’s creators, a band called All, living just around the corner.

“ ‘Alfredo’s’ is a love song,” All’s founder, Bill Stevenson, said at lunchtime earlier this week as he and his three band mates sat at a booth in their beloved eatery, attacking an assortment of house specialties.

Like the folksy, small-town Massachusetts diner immortalized in Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” epic, Alfredo’s is an unpretentious place that has found comically minded troubadours to sing its praises. All, which makes its Orange County debut Saturday night at Night Moves in Huntington Beach, mixes backhanded jokes with heartfelt gratitude in a rapid-fire song that folds a bit of Latin salsa and rap rhyming into a tasty punk-pop burrito.

Even the Russians go to Alfredo’s/Even the Martians go to Alfredo’s/My heart yearns for you Alfredo/My heart burns for you Alfredo / . . . It’s just a hole in the wall, But it’s good enough for All.”

The tune, released in March on an album called “Allroy Sez,” gives Alfredo’s address and phone number while confessing a mercenary motive: “Well listen up Alfredo, this is for you/The reason why we wrote this is to get some free food.”

“The free food part of the deal hasn’t really gone into effect yet,” Stevenson said. Then again, he hasn’t yet gotten up the nerve to present a copy of the record to proprietor Alfredo Carrillo, who is curious to hear it.

“A man from Maryland came about two weeks ago,” Carrillo said. “He said, ‘I promised my son to stop here and get a menu.’ ” Carrillo obliged with an autographed bill of fare.

All is a relatively new entity, but it has a long pedigree in Southern California punk. Stevenson founded All’s precursor, the Descendents, 10 years ago, when he was 14. During the mid-’80s, he served a seven-album stint as drummer for Black Flag, one of the area’s leading hard-core exponents.

Last summer, when singer Milo Aukerman left the Descendents to pursue a graduate degree in microbiology, Stevenson, bassist Karl Alvarez and guitarist Stephen Egerton decided to change the name while introducing their new front man, Bostonian Dave Smalley.

What set the Descendents--and now All--apart from most punk-influenced bands that play at blitzing speeds is a knack for pop hooks and a penchant for lyrics that avoid politics. While “Alice’s Restaurant” used food as a taking-off point for a rambling, absurdist commentary on the Vietnam-era draft, “Alfredo’s” is about food, and that’s all.

Most political songs merely restate the obvious to the already-converted, Stevenson said. In its serious moments, All focuses on the traumas of post-adolescent love and rejection or comments on benighted personality types.

In between, the band tosses out joking tunes, often scatological oriented or devoted to the band’s offbeat, mystical philosophy, which is also known as All.

While the songs about this “All” concept are couched in some of the band’s daffiest music, Stevenson says it is serious.

“All is the result of living with real extreme passion,” Stevenson said. “It’s a three-letter word with the biggest possible meaning of any word anywhere. At 18 I became obsessed with it. There was all and there was none, and there was no middle ground. Everything I did was obsessed with this thought: ‘Am I questing for All, or wallowing in None.’ ”

Among the credo’s tenets, as expressed in one Descendents/All song, is “Thou shalt not commit adulthood.”

With its sharp production, newly prominent harmonies and catchy melodies, mostly in the service of love songs, “Allroy Sez” is probably the kind of album most Descendents/All fans want, Stevenson said, and it is the best-selling record the band has done.

All, Big Drill Car and UTI will play Saturday at 9 p.m. at Night Moves, 5902 Warner Ave., Huntington Beach. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 840-0208.

SCRATCH THAT: Run-DMC’s manager, Lyor Cohen, sounded tougher than leather early Tuesday afternoon, shortly after word came down that the rap group’s July 1 show at the Pacific Amphitheatre had been canceled.

“I’m taking legal action,” he said from his office in New York City. “I don’t want to discuss who I’m taking legal action against.”

But it was clear that Cohen wasn’t feeling too kindly toward the Nederlander Organization, which runs the amphitheater. The advance sale “wasn’t OK” because “there was no effort put in” to promoting the show, Cohen said.

“Everyone knows the Nederlanders didn’t want us in that venue,” he said, “even though they had a perfect date (there) with the Beastie Boys last year.”

Cohen didn’t come right out and say so, but one could infer a suggestion from the Run-DMC camp that Nederlander, already in court over a noise dispute with amphitheater neighbors, was dropping the show rather than bring in an act that two years ago was making headlines for crowd control problems at a few of its concerts, including a gang riot in Long Beach (subsequent Run-DMC tours have been calm).

But later Tuesday, after some back-and-forth consultation between Nederlander officials and Run-DMC’s representatives, the leathery tone had softened. Cohen called back his angry words. Run-DMC’s booking agent, Cara Lewis, said the problem was that the show needed more lead time than the 2 1/2 to three weeks that originally had been alloted for the July 1 date.

“It’s not that it’s not enough promotion; it’s not enough time,” she said. Consequently, Lewis and Nederlander’s spokeswoman said, a new date would be scheduled, by agreement of both Run-DMC and the amphitheater management. Run-DMC will play June 27 at the Greek Theatre, in a show promoted by Nederlander.