At a Mostly Sublime Time, the Girls Replace the Grrrls

As she surveyed the crowd Saturday at the Hollywood Palladium, Gwen Stefani might have thought that she was in the house of mirrors scene from “The Lady From Shanghai.” Everywhere she looked, her own image was looking back.

With No Doubt, Stefani’s band from Anaheim, headlining a roster of Southern California ska and punk-based bands in a benefit concert to honor the memory of Sublime singer Bradley Nowell, who died in May of a heroin overdose, the building was swarming with girls and young women who have copied Stefani’s style: blond hair in ponytails, tight, midriff-baring pants and tops that evoke the singer’s tomboy-coquette mix.

That goes with the territory of being pop phenom of the moment, which No Doubt emphatically is. Its “Tragic Kingdom” album has sold some 5 million copies and has topped the pop charts for five weeks.

More tellingly, though: No one was looking like Courtney Love. These are girls, not grrrls, and there was, um, no doubt that the torch of the female youth-culture icon has been passed.

It wasn’t the only torch changing hands Saturday. Simply by topping this benefit (proceeds went to a scholarship fund for Nowell’s 1-year-old son and to the drug treatment and awareness Musicians Assistance Program), No Doubt placed itself in the noble tradition of Southern California acts from Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne through X, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and L7 that have stood up for charities and issues.

With the bill also featuring the surviving members of Sublime, punkers Pennywise and the Vandals and the speed-ska Voodoo Glow Skulls, among others, this also marked the maturation of a community of young rockers ready to step forward.

What was left unclear from the show was how long these figures will be able to run with the torches, and how brightly their flames are burning. The message of No Doubt’s success is perhaps that today’s teens want to be entertained, rather than witness a psychodrama of the sort associated with Love, Eddie Vedder or Alanis Morissette.

No Doubt is happy to oblige. Stefani is a born entertainer, bounding around the stage like Tori Spelling with a personality, and the band’s spunky rhythms are infectious. But the pleasures are largely surface, and there is little of the depth one wants from a true cultural leader. Even the neo-feminism of “Just a Girl,” the band’s strongest message, is fairly facile.

Several of the other acts offered a little more meat. Pennywise’s best songs conveyed struggles for integrity and meaning in the mold of the band’s mentor, Bad Religion, while post-adolescent frustration burned behind the Voodoo Glow Skulls’ frantic, cathartic ska fury. And there was spirited punk-pop wit evident in a short set by the Ziggens, a band from Huntington Beach.

The person most capable of bringing depth to the scene, though, was the one who couldn’t be there: Nowell. His songs on the band’s posthumous major-label debut, “Sublime,” bespeak a singular talent with a highly personal yet populist vision.

Several of these songs were offered lovingly Saturday by the Long Beach Dub All-Stars, featuring Sublime bassist Eric Wilson and drummer Floyd “Bud” Gaugh, with Opie Ortiz handling most of the vocals effectively. Presented in the dub reggae style, the songs (followed by a short film about the band) added a haunting element to the evening.

But this evening wasn’t about regrets and loss. It was about the future, about saving others from Nowell’s fate. As the cast sang together in a finale of the Beatles’ “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da,” life goes on.