The Last Set Is Always the Hardest : NIGHT TIME LOSING TIME <i> by Michael Ventura (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 368 pp.) </i>

Michael Ventura is a literary gambler, always raising the stakes, always betting against the odds, always ready with a sneaky deadpan bluff. His collection of essays, “Shadow Dancing in the USA” (1985), which gathered many of the columns he gleefully overwrote for the L.A. Weekly, were frequently pretentious, often revelatory meditations on rock ‘n’ roll, movies, and--a rarity among Los Angeles writers--class consciousness.

“Night Time Losing Time” is the novelistic version of Ventura’s gambler mentality, and by the time it reaches its complex conclusion, there’s little doubt that the author has hit the jackpot he intended.

In “Night Time,” Ventura tackles that most problematic of all pop-lit genres, the rock novel. His plot is a fairly straightforward one--the story of Jesse Wales, a rock musician who describes himself as “a different kind of middle-aged,” a pensive adult who plays wild, hammering rhythm & blues piano and who leads a rock band named Long Distance Call.

Ventura does a good job of evoking the everyday life of a band that hasn’t hit the big time and probably never will, a group of musicians who are in it not for the money but for a series of evanescent emotions: the exhilarating feeling of being at one with an audience that’s enjoying your music as much as you are enjoying playing it; the despair of playing the same songs the next night and being hooted off the stage.

There’s scant precedent for this sort of realistic rock ‘n’ roll novel, a genre that has consisted largely of cheap tragedies, tales of the high brought low. The best of these include Harlan Ellison’s “Spider Kiss” (1961), a shrewd speculation on what might have happened had Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin brother lived; Nik Cohn’s “King Death” (1975)--Elvis as Satan; Elaine Jesmer’s “Number One With a Bullet” (1974), the only interesting novel about ‘60s soul music; and Stephen Holden’s “Triple Platinum” (1979), which buried the self-indulgence and hollowness of ‘70s rock and made Jackie Collins’ “Rock Star” irrelevant by a full decade.

All of these books were obsessed with superstardom and its dreadful price. “Night Time” stands outside this tradition of rock novels in its focus on the non-star, the Rocker Who Would Be King. Ventura writes as if punk rock never took place--this outlaw Jesse Wales and his colleagues plow through a world in which the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Lynyrd Skynyrd are still the reigning deities.

Instead of seeming out-of-date in its litany of rockers past their prime, however, “Night Time” conveys a truth too rarely noted in a media concerned with the next big trend: There is a huge audience spread across this country trapped in the same time-warp as Jesse Wales, people who are as frozen in the music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as those a generation before them became transfixed by the big bands.

I said before that “Night Time” was a realistic rock novel, but Ventura’s elaborate description of Jesse’s music lends “Night Time” a surreal edge as well. “I hit that piano like a truck,” Jesse says, describing his keyboard style in a manner suggesting Jerry Lee Lewis with the literary sensibility of Tom McGuane, “down in the deep notes first, forehead pouring sweat so I couldn’t see, dripping on the keys till they felt greasy wet. . . . I’d get delicate, sprinkling high notes that would hang there, while Lee’s guitar would trickle like stream, so tenderly, both of us, and it was like we were painting a picture in the hanging smoke of the club, a picture of some impossible woman who seemed to live behind the veils of sound.” This is writing that is simultaneously too much--egregiously florid--and just right, a vivid way of bringing to life a character who romanticizes his existence extravagantly.

This method is not without its flaws and annoyances. There’s a lot of tiresome hard-boiled goop (“I was heading to Los Angeles. Which is my way of saying nowhere. ‘Nowhere’ seemed the only place that was far enough away. . . .”) There’s also a lot of hollow portentousness. Here, for example, is one entire chapter: “I used to think that I didn’t ask to know any of this. Now I know that I let Danny ask for me. He asked for all of us. He called that loving us. And the letting him ask, we called that loving him. And it was.” And Michael? Put a sock in it.

Jesse is an irresponsible wastrel, a talented man who’s also a macho jerk possessed of sense enough to realize that that’s exactly what he is. He dies the classic rock & roll death--in a flaming car crash--but Ventura keeps him around to tell the end of his story. But to paraphrase the Talking Heads: This ain’t no “Topper.” This ain’t no “Heaven Can Wait.” This ain’t no foolin’ around. Jesse’s voice from the grave carries emotional weight, and it invests “Night Time Losing Time” with a sense of melancholy, regret and rue that are rare in a “mere” rock novel.