SAN FRANCISCO -- Sometimes, you get what you pay for.

For the fans who showed up early for the chance to see Cornershop play a free

show at San Francisco's Slim's club on a rainy Monday night, refunds weren't

an option.

The band, who recently released another excellent collection of their signature

East-meets-West sitar/guitar rock, When I Was Born For the Seventh

Time, moped onto the stage to the strains of the album's funky instrumental

"Chocolat," and moped back off less than an hour later, never once addressing

the audience or even breaking a smile during the Live 105 (105.3) radio-

sponsored show.

Looking dour and straight-mouthed, leader Tjinder Singh strung on his acoustic

guitar and leaned into the shambling "Sleep on the Left Side" from the new

album while a psychedelic liquid light show bubbled on a white sheet behind

him. For all the syncopated drum jamming and bright computerized samples

that gurgled out of the mix on that song and the sitar-soloing "We're in Yr

Corner," the five-piece band never seemed to snap out of their sour mood. Their

radio hit, "Brimful of Asha," brought a warm wave of recognition from the crowd,

who, despite not seeming to know much else in the band's oeuvre, cheered

lustily for Anthony Saffery's sitar solo during "We're in Yr Corner" as if he was

ripping off a Van Halenesque run on an Ernie Ball Musicman guitar.

Frustrated fans left out in the cold spanned both sides of the Cornershop

spectrum. Dominica, who did not give her last name, and her flight attendant

friends had to wait outside through the opening act Track Star and until after Cornershop had finished "Brimful of

Asha," before the early birds split and they could get in. For every Dominica, who owns

the album and professes to have been "in a Cornershop kind of groove lately,"

there was a Jim Balzac with no knowledge of the band, an acute awareness of

the ticket price and a noticeable lean toward the bar.

Balzac, a 20-something with a healthy head of hair, declared loudly and

somewhat proudly as the club turned him away, "I didn't even know any of their

songs."

The biggest question of the night was what happened to Singh's chief

collaborator, Tamboura player Ben Ayres, who was nowhere to be found on the

club's low stage. It wasn't until you crept to the lip of the stage that his bobbing

head appeared somewhere around Singh's knees, as he was cross-legged on

the stage, manipulating effects, shakers and a long-necked geetar.

Seated to Singh's left, roughly half-way between a pair of mirror balls that cast a

psychedelic disco light glow on the stage's backdrop, Ayres was the missing

link in the full sonic attack of the band, which sounded as if it relied fairly heavily

on the computerized loops and effects that give their recordings such varied

textures.

The highlight of the soggy evening came during a nearly 25-minute rendition of

"Julandar Shere," the trancey song that opens and closes the band's previous

album, Woman's Gotta Have It. With a "Where the Wild Things Are"-like

pastoral space cartoon whizzing by on the backdrop, the band locked into a

droning groove that built higher and higher over the first 10 minutes, to the point

where Singh was standing practically stock-still at the mike, eyes fixed on some

invisible middle-distance point, repeating the hypnotic chorus over and over,

until he seemed to have been transported to the Heironymous Bosch-esque

Garden of Un-Earthly Eden scrolling behind him.

Singh and Ayres walked silently off the stage 20 minutes into the jam, leaving

the drummer, percussionist and sitar player/loop guru, to take the song out on a

syncopated, frantic groove.

Despite its wooden stage presence, the band did managed to treat the

audience to something other than standard indie rock fare, even if it didn't

exactly live up to the song title "Funky Days Are Back Again."

(ATN's Colin Devenish contributed to this report.)

[Wed., Nov. 12, 1997, 9 a.m. PDT]