David Yazbek is trying to undo decades of damage.
Yazbek, who wrote the scores for the musical comedies “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “The Full Monty,” wants to heal the great wound Andrew Lloyd Webber inflicted on Broadway fans’ psyche. It’s a Sisyphean task - two decades later fans still suffer from a “Phantom of the Opera” hangover - but a worthy one.
“There’s a reason an entire generation, maybe two generations of us, hates musicals,” Yazbek said while traveling from New York City to his home near Nyack, N.Y. “And the reason is that most of them are crap. The bar has been set pretty low on Broadway during the last few decades.
“When I’m doing a master class for people interested in musical theater, my big advice is to get musical theater off their iPods,” said Yazbek, who plays with his rock band Warmest Regards on Saturday at Cafe 939. “Then write some shows and I’ll listen to what you’ve been doing. Otherwise it’s the same old dumb (stuff).”
Yazbek likes to take his own advice. When writing “Scoundrels,” he listened to freak-rocker Captain Beefheart almost exclusively. He says it helped balance his mind between edgy art and the Cole Porter-ish stuff he was penning for the play.
It also kept him interested in writing strange pop songs that don’t fit the Broadway template, many of which show up on his new album, “Evil Monkey Man.”
Writing hit musicals is Yazbek’s day job. It’s a time-consuming one - right now he’s scoring “Bruce Lee: Journey to the West”; he’s also in discussions to put lyrics to Danny Elfman’s music for the forthcoming musical “Houdini” - but it was never his career plan. Instead Broadway producers attracted to his pop albums found him.
“My first reaction when I was asked to do the ‘The Full Monty’ was, ‘Oh, Christ, I don’t want to do ‘Footloose the Musical,’ ” he said. “I didn’t want to help someone make a little more money off their title. But then I realized I could write real songs for these characters and have it be really fun.”
Before Broadway called, Yazbek was making idiosyncratic records (he’s a big XTC fan) and writing for TV (he won an Emmy in the ’80s as part of David Letterman’s team). He eventually dropped TV, but he never gave up on pop.
“Writing a show for me is fun, but making my albums has to happen,” he said. “If I was a clerk in a store or office I’d be doing this music. It’s just what I have to do.”
Those expecting “Evil Monkey Man” to be a chip off the Great White Way will be seriously disappointed (or maybe pleasantly surprised). Musically, the album is a mix of Joe Jackson/Elvis Costello/Warren Zevon chord changes with Yazbek’s jumpy piano and madman guitar work by Erik Della Penna. Lyrically, it’s funny and dark with lines such as, “You can eat your beets/You can drink your piss/But you’ll never get out of this,” and songs about cruel experiments on monkeys: think Tom Waits rewritten by They Might Be Giants.
Not really what you’d expect from the next Andrew Lloyd Webber, but neither is a musical about the world’s greatest Kung Fu master.
David Yazbek and his Warmest Regards, at Cafe 939, Saturday. Tickets: $20; 617-358-7000.
