O.C.’s First Family of Country

Sit a functional family down at its kitchen table, and a lot more than the potatoes is apt to get passed around.

Jokes, hopes, old stories, words of encouragement for a member in a rough streak--all flowed as the foremost family of Orange County country music took time to talk and reminisce this week.

They aren’t connected by blood or marriage, but Chris Gaffney, Jann Browne, Matt Barnes and Patty Booker, together with a circle of interlocking players who back them, constitute a family bound by talent, musical kinship and mutual affection.

This time they gathered in Gaffney’s kitchen in Costa Mesa, with its dark-stained, antique-looking wood furnishings and such modernity-defying technological throwbacks as a black dial telephone and a boxy old Admiral radio. These are musicians who don’t toss aside the old stuff that still works.

A mastery of sawdust-coated honky-tonk country music is their common thread, but all can ignite a spark by firing up a chugging Chuck Berry riff or soaring, heartland-rock sound.

Browne comes out of the bluegrass and gospel background of her Indiana upbringing; Barnes, her songwriting and harmony partner, is an earringed and tattooed John Mellencamp look-alike who came up a rocker before he moved in next door to Browne’s Laguna Hills condo and wound up in her band.

Browne and Gaffney didn’t become friends until the early ‘90s, when Browne had a brief fling with the country mainstream, scoring a couple of middling hits for Curb Records. They don’t remember exactly how acquaintance turned into tightknit friendship, but touring Europe together, starting in 1993, helped cement relations between peers who now greet each other as “Cupcake” (Browne’s endearment for Gaffney) and “Kitten” (vice-versa).

There’s grits and molasses in Booker’s singing, which is as authentically Southern and rural-sounding as a product of Southern California suburbia could ever be.

As for Gaffney, fans who have been following him on the local scene for the last 20 years know that he and his band, the Cold Hard Facts, are an encyclopedia to be read under barroom neon, playing sets that page through deep-rooted styles in virtually any genre, with a particular affinity for sprightly Tex-Mex accordion dances and laid-back soul sounds.

The kicker is songwriting. Though validation has come less from the marketplace than from critics, fellow artists and cult followings here and in Europe, recordings by Browne and Gaffney stand among the best song-based work produced in the ‘90s--full of memorable characters and tales, affecting, direct emotion, unshakable melodies and surprising, sometimes humorous points of view.

Now Booker is aiming to make a first impression outside the local scene, with an upcoming CD, “Ultracitybilly,” that features a duet with Gaffney and production and songwriting by Browne and Barnes.

The four friends will step out of the kitchen and onto a concert stage tonight at the Coach House. For all the informal sitting-in they have done during each other’s shows, this will be the first time these three have appeared formally billed together, each anchoring a separate set.

While their agendas are compatible, it was clear from their kitchen klatch on Monday that Browne, Barnes, Gaffney and Booker will come at the showcase night with different needs, different angles.

Gaffney Rolls Along

Gaffney, at 49, may be the Old Man River of Orange County roots music, rolling along perpetually and unperturbably, wearing stubble on his face and a squinty grin that registers the laconic humor with which he confronts life.

He had just gotten back from two weeks of touring with his buddy, Dave Alvin. The dean of Southern California roots-rock songwriting, Alvin sometimes collaborates with Gaffney on songs--both have recorded versions of “68,” a brilliant song based on the Vietnam War that may be Gaffney’s best. Alvin also produced Gaffney’s two most recent albums.

If Gaffney is getting antsy that nearly four years have passed since his last album, “Loser’s Paradise,” it’s well disguised. The plan, he says, is to wait until Alvin has some free time for production work, and crank out another album for Hightone Records, the respected, roots-oriented independent label that features Alvin as one of its flagship acts. Maybe it’ll arrive before 2000, maybe not.

Getting frustrated, Chris?

“Absolutely not. Because I’m self-contained. I was a working guy before [becoming an unheralded roots-music recording eminence] and I continue to do that. If they don’t want to put out an album, I’ll go and do my [day] job,” which in his case means boat-building and construction.

Meanwhile, he has lined up an engagement March 26-28 at the Swallow’s Inn in San Juan Capistrano, with plans to record the proceedings and use the live material to fill out a CD reissue of his self-financed 1987 debut EP, “Road to Indio.”

A Time of Turmoil

For Browne and Barnes, it’s hard these days to approach musical life as casually as Gaffney. Both have seen long-term marriages dissolve over the last year and a half, and Browne, after years of supporting herself through music with the help of her husband and ex-bandmate, Roger Stebner, is facing the economic as well as emotional consequences of the breakup.

A song-publishing deal that paid Browne a steady salary also ended last year; in addition to playing more often locally, she has started a pet-sitting service to augment her income.

“It’s been a tough year in a lot of ways,” Browne said. “It affects everything you do. I’m a little rough around the edges. I’ve had a lot of friends come to my rescue and a lot of support. I’ve learned that it’s good to have your friends surround you at hard times.”

Browne and Barnes, both 44, seemed to be rolling in 1997 when Lee Ann Womack’s self-titled album became that rarity: a tradition-steeped, artistically ambitious work that broke through as a mainstream country hit. Among its songs was “Trouble’s Here,” a rollicking, Buck Owens-style number by Browne and Barnes that first appeared on Browne’s sublime 1994 album, “Count Me In.”

Due to the vagaries of publishing deals and payment policies, Barnes says he won’t reap any financial reward from that success, and Browne says she is still waiting for her share.

Payday or not, Barnes noted, “That was a highly respected record in Nashville. Anybody who had a song on it is looked at as legitimate.”

Now two of country’s heavy hitters, Dixie Chicks and Patty Loveless, have reserved rights to record a couple of Browne compositions--one written with Max D. Barnes, a veteran Nashville songwriter who is no relation to Matt, the other with Matt Barnes and Duane Jarvis, an excellent guitarist-songwriter who was expected to fly in from Nashville to play with Browne tonight.

Of most pressing concern to Browne is rekindling the songwriting streak that, starting in ‘94, produced “Count Me In” and another two albums’ worth of equally fine originals that exist only in demo form, on a five-song EP that Barnes released in 1996, and on a 1998 European-only live acoustic release compiling performances in Switzerland by Browne and Barnes along with their friends Pat Gallagher and Joy Lynn White.

As Browne’s personal troubles mounted last year, her muse withdrew. “About two weeks ago, I sat down at the piano and wrote my first song in about nine months,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing it at the Coach House. . . . It’s just a very emotional time, so you try to think of all the right things that would be fitting to put in a song. Right now it feels like one great big song inside me.”

Getting a Midlife Start

While Gaffney rolls along, and Browne and Barnes seek to rekindle a songwriting spark, Patty Booker looks toward a beginning at age 42.

She has been on the local country circuit since New Year’s Eve, 1984, the night she played her first gig. It was at the Tartan Room in Garden Grove, a last-minute booking in which she was thrown together on the spot with a band of strangers led by Chris Gaffney.

Browne started hearing about the new female singer on the scene, and in 1985 she invited Booker onto the bandstand to sing a couple of songs at a barbecue in Silverado Canyon.

“I remember saying to you, over a hot dog, ‘Man, you’re country.’ ”

But it was small-time country for Booker, who was raising three children primarily as a single mom while she tried to forge a career. Now her kids are grown and Booker has a CD that Browne and Barnes aim to shop to their music-business contacts.

The album’s backing lineup is a who’s who of the circle of distinctive players that has formed around Browne and Gaffney, including past and present Cold Hard Facts members Rick Shea, Gary Brandin, Wyman Reese, Tucker Fleming and Danny Ott, and Browne associates Jay Dee Maness, Larry Mitchell and Keith Rosier.

For now, Booker arranges her shows around a working-woman’s job-juggling, including massage-therapy work for chiropractors, housecleaning and sewing. Her first booked tour is next fall, when she will join Browne and Barnes on one of their twice- or thrice-annual jaunts to Europe, sponsored by a Swiss promoter who loves outside-the-mainstream country music and over the last five years has championed their work and Gaffney’s.

So now Browne, Barnes, Gaffney and Booker move on together, friends in the middle of life, and in a career middle ground where day jobs remain a necessity and artistic merit and the respect of critics and peers hasn’t quite translated into just dues from the paying public.

“You get a certain age, and you cross a bridge,” Booker said. “You think, ‘They just want the younger people.’ So you cross it slowly and carefully, and you just keep going.”

Maintaining Standards

Said Browne: “Here’s Lucinda Williams, she’s 46 [and just coming into her own with recognition, growing sales and a recent Grammy]. It’s a good representation for all of us who have musical taste buds and refuse to budge.

“Here we are, in our 40s,” she added, “with midlife crises and businesses”--Barnes has his own carpet-laying concern--”and we’re focused on something we love best, which is music. We find new challenges and adventures, and keep going.”

“My dream,” said Barnes, “would be to have a song that actually had world recognition, universal acceptance and was done by a major, mega-band. My reality is that it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility. I’m lucky that reality is not a zillion miles from my dreams. To be my age and that optimistic is fairly incredible.”

As Gaffney and his wife, Julie, stood behind their table full of guests, he said: “It’s the music, and I love the people. You surround yourself with good friends, and you’re good to go. You pick your friends, so I picked y’all.”

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* Jann Browne, Patty Booker and Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $12.50-$14.50. (949) 496-8930.