Revitalized Del Fuegos on Comeback Trail : Pop: Band has some new members and new numbers to show off tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

When last heard from in 1987, the Del Fuegos were not a happy band.

The East Coast rock group’s third album, “Stand Up,” was an uninspired, diffuse-sounding departure from its previous work. After two well-received earlier albums of gritty, catchy and unpretentious rock that drew upon such sources as Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, “Stand Up” didn’t impress many fans or critics.

To push the album, the Del Fuegos went on tour with two like-minded bands, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and the Georgia Satellites. But by singer Dan Zanes’ own admission, the Del Fuegos’ performances on that high-profile tour were lackluster.

A flop album and unimpressive live shows weren’t the Del Fuegos’ only problems. There was Zanes’ falling out with his younger brother, Warren, the band’s lead guitarist. The younger Zanes left the band, and when drummer Woody Giessmann checked out as well, Dan Zanes and bassist Tom Lloyd were forced to step back and regroup. The Del Fuegos faced other changes as well: Mutual disillusionment between the band and its record company, Slash, led to a switch of labels to RCA.

“I don’t want to sound whiny or anything, but it was the worst two years of my life,” Dan Zanes said over the phone recently from his home in New York City. As he spoke, the thin, craggy-faced singer plinked out unamplified guitar licks on a new Fender Stratocaster that he plans to break in on the tour that will bring the Del Fuegos to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight (Zanes’ 28th birthday). Opening is James McMurtry, the son of novelist Larry McMurtry who has received critical praise for his finely etched story songs.

The Del Fuegos’ period of failure, turmoil and rebuilding served a purpose. As Zanes put it, “Two years of pain does wonders for your writing.”

The Del Fuegos’ strong, new comeback album, “Smoking in the Fields,” isn’t just a return to form, but a substantial step forward. The raw rock attack of the band’s early days is back, with the new members, lead guitarist Adam Roth and drummer Joe Donnelly, helping to put it across with new muscle and assurance. After getting poor results in their experiments with strings and R&B; horn sections on “Stand Up,” the Del Fuegos tried again, with fine results that help make “Smoking in the Fields” their richest and most varied album. The biggest difference is in the songwriting: under adversity, Zanes came up with songs that were far more personal and emotionally resonant than his previous work.

“I felt I had to be more vulnerable with the lyrics,” said Zanes, owner of one of the most gravelly, unpolished singing voices in rock. “I don’t think I’m that good as a clever songwriter. There’s a lot of other guys who can turn a phrase better than I can. I had to get back to ground level and rethink songwriting.” Zanes said he learned to stop second-guessing himself and let the songs flow as he wove them from the emotional currents of his own life.

“I’ve gone through moments of paralyzing myself, sitting with a notebook looking at a line and wondering what people will think,” he said. “You can’t get that far with that attitude.”

Zanes said the breakthrough came with “Friends Again,” the last song on the album, but one of the first ones he wrote for it. The song, an elegiac rocker along the lines of Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean,” tells about two close friends who start out as small-town rock musicians, only to have their relationship sundered as they reach for success.

The song’s refrain is an unanswered question freighted with both pain and hope: “But do you think two people can hurt so much and be friends again? / Friends again in the end.”

Not wanting to go too deeply into the private matters underlying his songs, Zanes wouldn’t say whether “Friends Again” is addressed to his brother, Warren. “I’d rather just leave it up to the listener,” he said. “But if people want to get that out if it, that’s fair enough. It’s a song people can relate to and not have any picture of the particulars of my life. It’s not my autobiography, or the autobiography of the band. But it is grounded in things that are real to us.”

Elsewhere, Zanes explores depths of frustration and helplessness on songs like “Part of This Earth” and “Lost Weekend,” a searing, gutsy blues-rocker in which the singer tries to blot out sources of anguish that he can’t even name. The theme of commitment keeps cropping up, too: in the taut, Petty-style rocker “Breakaway,” a man castigates himself for his inability to commit to a deserving lover. Its thematic bookend is “Stand by You,” a simple country tune in which Zanes adopts the direct emotionalism of a Hank Williams song to pledge an unshakable, lifelong commitment.

“I was trying to deal with things that were real to me, and (commitment) was a big theme over the past couple of years,” Zanes said. “As things crumble in front of your eyes, you wonder how much effort it’s going to take to pull things together again.”

While three of the four Del Fuegos are based in New York now, Zanes says the band still makes its spiritual home in Boston. The original Del Fuegos started out there in 1981 after Lloyd and the Zanes brothers decided that their hometown of Hopkinton, N.H., was no place to feed a rocker’s aspirations.

“Smoking in the Fields” certainly is steeped in Bostonia. The album’s lead-off track, “Move With Me Sister,” returns the Del Fuegos sonically to the hard-kicking, sweatily sexual bar rock of their origins (the song owes a lot to the J. Geils Band, and it contains fiery performances by J. Geils alumni Seth Justman and Magic Dick on organ and harmonica). At the same time, the lyrics pay tribute to other Boston bands like the Neighborhoods and the Lyres, worthy fixtures on the same Hub scene that spawned the Del Fuegos.

Elsewhere on the album, the Del Fuegos consciously or subconsciously toss in stylistic snippets that recall such other Boston rock icons as the Cars, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and Aerosmith.

“No matter what, we are a Boston band and we don’t want anybody to think we’ve forgotten,” said Zanes, who credits a series of club dates and rehearsals in Boston over the past year with giving the new Del Fuegos lineup its spark.

After those recent rebuilding years that he calls the worst of his life, Zanes is sounding upbeat again.

“Things have been working out lately so good that I can’t wait to get out there and let people know we’re a force to be reckoned with,” he said on the eve of the band’s first U.S. tour since 1987. “We have a lot to make up for, some of the lame shows people might have seen. I just feel I wasn’t putting that much into it (on the tour with Petty). It was a little lackluster on my part.”

As personal as some of his new material might be, Zanes said, “I don’t want to come off as a singer-songwriter type. We’re just guys in a band. The songs are just a vehicle for us to get up on stage with leather pants on in front of the ladies and shake our tails. If someone can pull some meaning out of it, so much the better.”

The Del Fuegos and James McMurtry play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets cost $13.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.