THIS BAND NEARLY HAS IT MADE

In beating nearly 200 Southern California performers to win the recent Marlboro Country Music Talent Roundup, the members of Orange County’s American Made Band are discovering that they won more than the opening slot at tonight’s Alabama-Merle Haggard concert at the Inglewood Forum. More even than the contest’s $5,000 grand prize.

The six musicians also find they’ve landed a spot that is smack dab in the middle of the Twilight Zone of country music.

“By necessity, a successful club band has to be eclectic so it can come into a place and play anything,” said guitarist and fiddler Nat Wyner, 35, during an interview earlier this week at a Huntington Beach health food restaurant, where he was joined by vocalist Sharon Lynne, who is also his wife and songwriting partner. “The paradox is that to be a recording band, you have to find a niche that’s totally you.”

They agreed, though, that it’s a dilemma in which they don’t mind being caught.

“I feel very fortunate to be doing what I love and making a living at it,” Wyner said, adding with a laugh: “It’s not a great living yet, but it is a living.”

This is the second consecutive year an Orange County group has captured the local country music talent crown. Last year’s contest was won by Anaheim-based Western Union. Along with Wyner and Lynne, the American Made Band consists of lead guitarist Bill Dwyer, steel guitarist and saxophonist David Zeigler, bassist Wayne Raymond and drummer Mark Scott.

The contest win has given the musicians incentive to develop the group’s identity, something that hasn’t always been possible in the workaday world of bar bands.

“Our aim is to achieve a synthesis in our writing and our performance so we’ll have virtuoso playing and singing in the same group,” said Wyner, who frequently enlivens the band’s performances by leaping out into the audience and racing through the crowd as he continues playing the fiddle.

Deciding on what approach to take is made more difficult by what Wyner called “a dichotomy” in country music. “The ones who are making it are either very pop-oriented or else real old-line acts,” he said. “We are trying to capture the spirit and honesty of roots music along with the excitement and intensity of contemporary music.”

Originally hailing from diverse regions of the country, the band members teamed up after moving to Orange County several years ago, where they crossed paths on the local country music circuit.

Ironically, the American Made Band, which has appeared regularly at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana as well as other Orange County and Los Angeles-area clubs, played its first job one year ago at the last Marlboro competition.

“We didn’t win,” Lynne, 32, said. “But we came real close so we said: ‘Let’s do it next year.’ ”

Perhaps surprisingly for performers who also are songwriters, “we’re not married to the idea of doing our own material,” Wyner said. “We just want to do good material and try to expand our audience.”

“Ideally,” added Lynne, who is also the band’s keyboard player, “we’d like to be the ones doing our material. We’ve been very fortunate to have fans who are receptive to our original tunes. We have to cater first to what they want, so we play their requests, but I think we’ve written songs commercial enough to be crowd-pleasers. People even request them because they know that we are the only ones who play those songs.”

Said Wyner: “That’s one of the reasons we put out the record (a self-produced, four-song EP). We were going to wait to get the backing of a label, but it became apparent that if we didn’t do it, no one would.”

Wyner and Lynne are also working toward getting their songs recorded by other artists as another way of getting a foot in the country music establishment’s door.

“It seems like the whole music industry is just a series of networks,” Lynne said. “So any way we can slide in, that’s the way to go. If it’s as songwriters, fine; if it’s as performers, that’s even better.

“But a lot of artists started off as writers,” she continued. “Like Willie Nelson and Earl Thomas Conley. (Writing songs) is one more thing we can do to become known. We believe in working real hard. Personally, I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘the big break.’ I think it’s a lot of little breaks that starts the word buzzing, and hopefully all those things will tie together.”

Both Wyner and Lynne said they were trained as classical musicians, which explains Wyner’s penchant for injecting his solos with well-known snippets from the classical repertoire, such as the “William Tell Overture.” They wound up playing country music while working the Washington-area bar scene in the mid-1970s.

“I was always adapting songs to the violin, trying to play guitar-type solos,” Wyner said, “which was good and helped me broaden my technique. But to play country, which already had a natural place for the fiddle, was quite a thrill.”

Following tonight’s performance at the Forum, the American Made Band returns to the more familiar surroundings of the Crazy Horse for shows Wednesday, next Friday and Saturday and Dec. 4 through 7.

“The Crazy Horse is our favorite place to play,” Lynne said.

“I don’t know,” Wyner countered with a smile. “We haven’t played the Forum yet--I might like that. Who knows? Maybe we could be the house band at the Forum.”

LIVE ACTION: The Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana has added a second Gary Morris date for Dec. 3. . . . The Righteous Brothers will perform at the Hop in Fountain Valley on Dec. 11. . . . Jodie Foster’s Army will play Spatz in Huntington Harbour on Nov. 29. . . . The Fabulous Thunderbirds return to the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach on Dec. 3. . . . Veteran country-western singer Rose Maddox will perform at the San Juan Creek Saloon in San Juan Capistrano on Nov. 30.