NRBQ Getting Back on Track After 6-Year Record Lockout : Jazz: Two years after the legal wrangling finally ended, the band is touring with R.E.M. and will be in Costa Mesa Wednesday.

“Sometimes we look at each other and have to laugh,” keyboardist Terry Adams says of his band mates in NRBQ, “and think that it’s great that we’re getting away with what we’re doing, and even getting paid for it.”

Adams and bassist Joey Spampinato founded the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet 21 years ago, with guitarist Al Anderson and drummer Tom Ardolino rounding out the lineup for the last 16 years.

In that time the band has pursued a gleeful, border-less mix of American musical styles--they call it “omni-pop”--that ranges from free jazz to straight-ahead rock to country, bouncing off all points in between, with Adams’ keyboard style often described as a cross between Thelonious Monk and Jerry Lee Lewis.

That facility has found them equally at home at the Berlin Jazz Festival, on the Grand Ole Opry stage, on Hal Wilner’s eclectic collections of Monk and Disney tunes, on “The Care Bears Movie” sound track, and, as they are presently engaged, opening for R.E.M. on its current tour. (The two bands perform Wednesday at Costa Mesa’s Pacific Amphitheatre, after NRBQ squeezes in a club gig tonight at the Strand in Redondo Beach.)

The R.E.M. tour and a new album “Wild Weekend” on Virgin Records are hopeful signs of change of fortune, but NRBQ’s commercial career hasn’t been a thing that would cause many musicians to smile.

The band’s fans include R.E.M., Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards (who used Spampinato on his solo album and in his dream band for the “Chuck Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll” film), Pat Metheny, Elvis Costello and others.

But outside the music community, NRBQ has remained very much a cult quantity. That status was reinforced by a legal wrangle with a former label that prevented the group from recording for six years.

Though Adams is well-versed in budget dining--a vegetarian, he recommends Taco Bell’s 40-cent lard-free refried beans--he remains unguardedly optimistic about the band’s fortunes.

Of the six-year lockout, he only says, “We saved up a lot of good songs that way.” Once their legal problems were resolved two years ago, within days the band had recorded a pair of live albums. Now, with Virgin behind the band, he thinks that the “Wild Weekend” studio album will find new fans.

“People have never really rejected the music; they just have never heard it. I really think that’s the reason why it hasn’t taken off or been as huge as we may think it should be. And with a major label now and the R.E.M. tour, we’re getting heard more all the time.”

“Wild Weekend” may well be the finest of the group’s 17 albums, bristling with some of the best pop hooks since Brian Wilson’s heyday, performed with a playground zeal coupled with a musicianship so good they make it seem effortless. Their lyrical topics range from ideal romantic love, to car love (Adams’ “Little Floater,” with the line “I love you, zoom, zoom, zoom”) to a loopy tribute to zydeco accordionist Boozoo Chavis.

“I wouldn’t want lyric sheets in our records,” Adams said, “It always bothers me when people start reading along to a record instead of listening.”

While it has caused the band to be dismissed by some critics, the lack of heavy-handed messages in the NRBQ’s lyrics serves to focus on the music, where, like the best of ululant early rock, a sense of commitment to life is more than implicit.

“I don’t really think music should be anything other than what can make people feel good,” Adams said. “I like to get a good feeling from anything, whether it’s listening to jazz or country or what. If you don’t watch it, you can come in with lyrics that are depressing and come up with songs where you wonder what you’re listening to it for.”

Active in Greenpeace and animal rights for years, Adams is encouraged to see those and sundry movements gaining momentum. “It’s great to see the response Greenpeace is getting on this tour (the organization has representatives at the shows). When we and R.E.M. are off stage, we’ve got lots to talk about because some of us are vegetarians and we’ve been Greenpeace supporters for years. We’re getting to be pretty good friends now.”

The group also has been making friends while on stage, if the several encore calls they’ve gotten so far on the tour are an indication. Adams prefers that reaction to some of the band’s experiences in years past opening for other acts, which have included an ill-fated slot with Deep Purple and a stint with Charlie Daniels and the Outlaws, where the band was booed off after responding to the cowboy-hat fever of the day by wearing Indian headbands on stage.

Adams said the current tour shows are more organized than the average NRBQ appearance, where the group is legend for flying without a set list and sometime tackling songs by the Chipmunks or the Carpenters.

“We have the same amount we want to say, but in a shorter space, so it’s a little bit more structured than usual. But we still haven’t played the same show twice on the tour.”

That level of musical confidence and trust stems in part from the friendship shared by the band members. “We wouldn’t have been able to stay together this long without that. I know if you were to try to replace any one guy in the band it would mess everything up.

“I think each guy is in his own world, but those worlds collide in the right way. I think maybe when we were growing up we all had open minds, and now are able to express ourselves together in a way that no one else can, in any way that we want to. I’ve been free, fortunate and gifted enough that I’ve been able to do this and never had to do anything else, and never had anyone tell me how to do it or what to do with it.”

Now 42, Adams doesn’t expect that commercial success, or a continued lack of it, will change the band.

“We’ve already done 20 years; we might as well keep going. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend that 20 any other way. I really feel lucky to have been able to do this, so I owe something back to that. A lot of times you feel off of (some) music that somebody’s only concerned with their own success and not with anything relating to life itself.

“Musicians owe it to life, to get that life into their music. I know I’ve got that from others, from (iconoclastic jazzman) Sun Ra and the Beatles.

“You know, Piano Red used to say, ‘Music is medicine, and if you don’t leave this place feeling better than you came in, you can have your money back.’ I don’t really feel that I have the ability to express what we try to get across with anything other than music. There’s no putting it in words.”

NRBQ plays tonight at 8 at the Strand, 1700 Pacific Coast Highway, Redondo Beach. Tickets: $15. Information: (213) 594-8975. NRBQ and R.E.M. play Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $17.50 to $20. Information: (714) 634-1300.