New Tempo for a Bar Rocker : Johnny Lyon Left His Band Awhile to Record and Find New Musical Paths

Southside Johnny Lyon was always the quintessential bar rocker, the raspy singer from the Jersey shore who fronted a brassy, scruffy-looking band and sang night after night about romance and havin’ a party, and about how he didn’t want to go home.

It went on like that for years--first in a succession of bands that included such fellow aspiring Jersey rockers as Bruce Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt, then by more than a decade of touring and recording as the leader of Southside Johnny & the Jukes.

Then, a little more than a year ago, Lyon decided, contrary to the title of one of his signature songs, that he wanted to go home after all--or at least that he couldn’t go on belting it out in the clubs 150 to 200 nights a year.

“I didn’t want to be on stage anymore. I felt I was in a rut, and I had a big crisis,” Lyon said over the phone last week from his home in Montclair, N.J., taking time out from making pumpkin pies that he and his wife, Jill, would serve for Thanksgiving dinner the next day at a soup kitchen in Newark. “Right before I went on stage, I had this feeling of revulsion. It had never happened to me before.

“It wasn’t a mid-life crisis,” said Lyon, who will turn 40 Sunday. “It was a crisis of faith” in his career prospects and his chances for creative growth. Southside Johnny & the Jukes’ 1986 album, “At Least We Got Shoes,” had not left much of a commercial footprint. And Lyon found himself wondering whether he ever would be able to develop a musical direction beyond the horn-driven, roots-conscious R&B; that was the Jukes’ specialty.

His answer was to take 6 months away from the band to record his first album on his own, “Slow Dance.” Instead of the punchy, beer-and-sawdust party music associated with the Jukes, it is a low-key album, given mostly to ballads.

While Lyon remains the same throaty-sounding romantic with classic soul influences, the music is tailored to the late ‘80s, with programmed rhythms and smooth synthesizer textures. The album is on Cypress Records, the independent label whose roster leans toward such mellow folk-pop artists as Jennifer Warnes, Leonard Cohen and Jesse Colin Young.

Lyon, sounding upbeat and relaxed, said his break from the road and the musical detour he took on “Slow Dance” have given him renewed enthusiasm for his old calling as a touring bar rocker. He is back fronting the nine-piece Jukes and resuming a heavy performing schedule that includes shows tonight and Wednesday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, Thursday at the Roxy in West Hollywood, and Friday and Saturday at the Strand in Redondo Beach.

Socially conscious songwriting was one new direction that Lyon didn’t foresee as he began work on “Slow Dance.” But as he commuted in from New Jersey to work in a Manhattan studio with co-producer Steve Skinner, the scene that confronted him each day at the New York Port Authority bus terminal demanded commentary.

“Every time I got off the bus, there would be literally hundreds of people sleeping there and begging and nobody was taking care of them,” he said. “I went through months of that. I gave out money each day, and the song (‘Little Calcutta’) just got wrenched out of me by the experience.”

In the song, Lyon channels his anger over the city’s neglect of homeless people into sassy, edgy ironic humor that fits into an old blues tradition of laughing when it hurts too much to cry: “You pray to God, but he never seems to hear/You’re in the mayor’s prayers, ‘Lord, make them disappear,’ ” Lyon sings in a voice that is half biting, half bemused.

“It’s not my natural bent to write a socially committed song,” Lyon said. “I always feel self-conscious. Steven (Van Zandt) will go out and live with the people he’s going to write about and learn as much as he can. Bruce (Springsteen) has that good intuitive sense about what’s right and wrong.”

Van Zandt and Springsteen both figured heavily in the launching of Lyon’s career in the mid- to late-’70s. Each contributed songs to the band that was known then as Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, and Van Zandt, known nowadays as political rocker Little Steven, served as the band’s manager and producer.

“I haven’t seen either of them in years or spoken to them,” Lyon said. It’s not a case of feuding between old friends, he explained, but of being caught up in careers and personal lives that don’t often intersect. Nevertheless, the old links to Springsteen and Van Zandt are inescapable, given the mutual roots, and the fact that they wrote many of the Jukes’ most notable songs.

Lyon said it doesn’t bother him to remain tied to the Springsteen sphere of influence. “It’s a fact of life. We were in bands together. It’s not so bad to be lumped in with people of that caliber.”

The connection continues on “Slow Dance” with “Walking Through Midnight,” a fine ballad of inner turmoil and frustrated yearning that Lyon and Springsteen wrote 10 years ago. The song, with lyrics by Lyon and music by Springsteen, was intended for Southside Johnny’s 1978 album, “Hearts of Stone,” but hadn’t surfaced until now.

Lyon couldn’t be faulted for some frustrated yearning over his own career: After all, Huey Lewis & the News is an R&B-based; bar band in the same mold as the Southside Johnny & the Jukes. Lewis has hits and plays in arenas, while the Jukes still ply the barrooms and roadhouses.

“There are times when I feel, ‘What am I--chopped liver?’ ” Lyon acknowledged. “But those are fleeting times. I’ve had 20 years in this music business, and I’ll have 20 more. I’m not driving a truck. I’m doing what I like to do”--even if the surroundings continue to be earthy.

“Critics have called us the world’s greatest bar band,” Lyon said. “I always took that as a tremendous compliment because some of the best music I’ve heard has been in bars. And God knows I’ve been in enough of them.”

Southside Johnny & the Jukes play at 8 p.m. tonight and Wednesday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $19.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.