INTERSTATE RECORDS Barbara Manning and the Go-Luckys! Weird is good What: Barbara Manning and the Go-Luckys!, with Pengo and Hinkley. When: 9 p.m. Monday. Where: Monty's Korner, 355 East Ave. Admission: Free. Call: 263-7650. Web: www.barbaramanning.com.

By Jeff Spevak
Democrat and Chronicle

(Aug. 9, 2001) -- Barbara Manning became a Meat Loaf fan when she heard that Loaf once bought a hundred copies of her Baseball Trilogy and gave them away as gifts to his friends.

That kind of news lifts the spirits of a struggling musician. Considering Meat Loaf's staggering sales history and the fact that Manning worked at a record store and could hear it for free, she didn't even have to respond in kind by buying a single copy of Bat Out of Hell.

Since the late 1980s, Manning has been creating inspired songs that define the indie scene. The music rides on guitar melodies that shift in intensity, as though Manning -- who performs Monday with her band the Go-Luckys! at Monty's Korner -- were driving a sports car through the hills outside her native San Francisco. And she has a pretty, almost innocent voice.

Yet trouble stalks Manning's characters. ''The Arsonist Story,'' from the 1997 album 1212, is an amazingly disturbing set of songs chronicling abuse and bleak retribution. And ''Dock Ellis,'' from Baseball Trilogy (she's an ardent baseball fan), is a salute to the former Pittsburgh Pirate who pitched a no-hitter while tripping on acid.

Her new CD, You Should Know By Now, offers a troubled central character who seems to be Manning herself. She doesn't come off as an angst-ridden, antisocial loser. It's more a shrug of the shoulders at hard times.

''Is it right to cling to love, when you're not even thought of, love has dropped me like a stone,'' she sings on ''Time to B.'' On ''Rhombus,'' there's a sense that life is controlled by bigger things than we can grasp when she sings, ''while you were sleeping, clocks kept ticking.''

''I've had a hard time in the last few years,'' Manning confesses, ticking off a litany of 1998 misfortunes: record label dropped her, grandmother died, mother contracted Lyme disease, fiance broke off relationship, she broke her back, she was evicted.

''I was starting to crack a little,'' Manning admits, although those cracks allow her self-deprecating humor to shine through: ''Usually, when I lose my home, I start touring.''

So she escaped to Europe. She hooked up with a couple of effervescent twins in Germany -- Go-Luckys! Flavio and Fabrizio Steinbach -- who shared Europe's enthusiasm for American artists who are commercially overlooked in the Britney Spears-driven U.S. music economy.

''I was so depressed,'' Manning says. ''I felt like digging a hole and crawling in and waiting until I died, so no one would need to dig a hole for me. I really felt useless.

''My bandmates were like family. They took me in like a daughter. I was living the childhood I never had. They cooked meals, did my laundry. I was living the life of a 14-year-old adolescent.

''And . . . I'm not.''

She's 36. Time to grow up again. She's on the road with the Steinbachs now, having packed up her little trailer in the Sierra Nevada foothills a few weeks ago, perhaps creating that extra impetus to resume touring. On her last trip to the dump, driving down a road in the woods, she was hit head-on by a drunken driver. No one was hurt, including the hard-luck Manning, wrapped in the protective steel arms of Mom's big old pickup.

Farther down the figurative road, Manning's thinking about escaping to school at Chico State in California, studying environmental science. She confesses to a lifelong fascination with ''diseases of trees or the soil.''

''I want to have a job where people pay me lots of money. I don't know anyone who is poorer than me, except people who have filed for bankruptcy or own homes. I want to wear a lab coat and be extremely needed by someone. I want to be indispensable to somebody.''

But her music makes her indispensable; independent musicians produce the most vibrant songwriting today. And alongside the songs of lost love and powerlessness, You Should Know By Now does include one fine escape song.''Goof on the Roof'' was written for a children's album that was never released. ''I remember as a kid escaping to the roof a lot,'' Manning says. ''Growing up, I never had a lot of space to myself.

''Weird,'' she says, ''is sooooo good.''