Rockin’ Richman Rides the Tide of Life--With a Passion : Pop: The leader of the Modern Lovers has turned his remarkable enthusiasm to surf music, but that won’t be the only kind of music he plays tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, where he shares the bill with Dick Dale.

Guitarist Brennan Totten, who toured for a few years with Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers, can recall an occasion when he was pulled over by a state trooper while driving the band through Texas.

What began as a routine traffic citation wound up with the officer giving them the third degree, having been discomfited by the sight of Richman, star of the international stage and recording world, perched barefoot and birdlike on the rear seat, all-but heedless of the police presence as he shoveled down a quart of Haagen-Dazs with an unnerving abandon.

Richman really likes to eat. Driving to Orange County from his Northern California home, he will pick up a Harris Ranch pie and eat it by the handful , along with yogurt, Cornnuts, malteds and the standard road food cornucopia. At 2 a.m. in a coffee shop, he’ll have the chili, the banana pancakes and the onion rings.

His current “Jonathan Richman” album contains a bit of oratory that addresses this subject, “I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet.” And therein lies one of the constants of Richman’s work: He sings about the things he has a passion for.

That he--given his caloric intake--doesn’t possess the approximate bulk of a water bed says something about the nature of Richman’s passions: He tends to do most things with gusto, so energetically tackling every moment that one suspects he even slumbers with a taxing enthusiasm. If a phone conversation with him sounds just a bit disjointed, it’s probably because he’s simultaneously flipping on his backyard trampoline.

In 1973, when he was a self-described “brooding Angst -ridden adolescent,” Richman recorded “The Modern Lovers,” an album sufficiently dark and uptight to influence the Sex Pistols and a host of other glum chums, and to be regarded more recently by Rolling Stone magazine as No. 52 in its list of the “100 Best Albums of the Last 20 Years.”

Since that time, though, Richman’s songs instead have evoked a world that’s loose and limber, where, when “your friends are dancing on the lawn, no one acts like something’s wrong”; where love and romance win out over fear; and where one can be snared passionately by the life reaching out from Van Gogh paintings, a sleeping wife, old corner stores, a hot summer night, or even discarded chewing gum wrappers.

One of the 38-year-old’s present enthusiasms is surf music; a desire to play some twang-oriented bills led to his shows with “King of the Surf Guitar” Dick Dale tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and Saturday at Bogart’s in Long Beach.

Visiting Orange County two weeks ago, Richman claimed: “The fixation with surf guitar isn’t recent. It’s something people were comparing my guitar style to even when I was starting out. It’s part of my guitar playing.

“The new fixation is wanting to be part of the Southern California music scene because I’m lonely up there in Northern Cal right now. The closest music scene I can think of to what I’m doing is surf music, at least of the music that’s still being played now in California.”

Richman won’t be particularly more surf-bent at these shows than he’s ever been--indeed, he’s recently taken to accompanying himself with only a nylon-stringed classical guitar. But he sees several connections between the two types of music.

“For one thing, there’s a strong love of nature in both styles--it’s physical. And second, there’s also a kind of dreaminess in surf music that is also in mine. The way they describe a scene with guitars, I tend to describe it more with words, but with both you’re supposed to feel it rather than understand it.

“Another reason why I like playing with surf acts is both styles are party music, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want it to be a concert. I want it to be like a party, which to me is where you feel loose enough to dance, without anybody making a big deal out of it, and where you have a lot of fun. I think once rock ‘n’ roll got taken seriously, it ruined everything.”

Although Richman rhapsodizes about the surf scene and wanting to take part in the sort of 12-act rock-and-roll cavalcades that rumbled through the states in the ‘50s, he insists he’s not living in the past but rather hoping for a future when our pop culture may get back that early warmth and innocence.

“I want to be part of something new,” he said. “I’ve been lonely for stuff before, but now is the time when I sense something different could happen. And I also think that these ‘80s were lonely enough where I just want to reach out more.

“That’s also why I’m doing my country record (due out on Rounder later this year). I want to be a part of there being more communication between different kinds of musicians.” (Victor Borge is Richman’s favorite stage performer. He also has a warm regard for the early Iggy Pop.)

And what makes him think the ‘90s can be different from the ‘80s?

“I don’t even have a clue. I just want it to be. I’m ready for the ‘90s. I didn’t like the ‘80s. It was just so distant. Great things happened to me personally in the ‘80s, but overall it was just a decade where more people drove by, and less where they got out of the car and shook hands.”

Although some of his harsher critics seem to presume that Richman gets his hopeful view of the world from the Care Bears, he is distressingly well-read on the sorry ecological, political and cultural state of things. But he chooses to think some good eventually may come from our overstressed times.

“For example,” he said, “I think L.A. may be one of the first cities to get a really terrific public transportation system because the pollution is getting so bad, I think it’s going to push it in that good direction. And overall, I think when things get isolated so much, like they did in the ‘80s, people will get tired of it and want to get closer.”

While the song “Closer” on the “Jonathan Richman” album is about his wife, Gail, closer also describes Richman’s professional direction. The ideal performance to him is one where the audience shows “lots of emotion: I want to see lots of gnashing of teeth and beating on chests, weeping and wailing. I want to see crying and dancing in the streets.”

To that end he employs the nylon-string guitar and performs solo because the nakedness of thesound makes for a more intimate show--”I was pretty spontaneous anyway with a band; now I’m unstoppable.” He thinks volume has its place in teen-age music but likens his over-amped contemporaries to “seeing your dad at the intersection revving the engine of his sports car. It’s embarrassing.” In a bio sent to fans last year, he described high-volume as “not a necessity but a hindrance to communication and intimacy.”

He’s not one to go for technological blockades on his records either. Most of the “Jonathan Richman” album was first-take material, with only his stamping feet accompanying his guitar and vocals on several tracks. (Two instrumentals, “Blue Moon” and “Sleepwalk,” feature longtime bass associate Curly Keranen and the late Ron Wilson, creator of what is undoubtedly the world’s most copied drum solo, the original “Wipeout.”)

The record not only contains mistakes, but also has a song extolling them, “A Mistake Today for Me.” There is the French-language “Que Reste-T-ll de Nos Amours?” from French balladeer Charles Trenet, while “Fender Stratocaster” paints a rocking, shimmering impressionistic vision of that O.C.-born electric guitar:

Like the wind in your hair when the top is down,

Like taillights headed for another town,

Fender Stratocaster, there’s something about that sound.

“Before I started playing music when I was 17, I wanted to be a painter,” Richman recalls. “Then I realized I could make stuff happen right in front of people, not just do it at home and have them see it later. Once I saw that, I said, ‘Whooa! That’s what I want to do.’ ”

That’s still the case. “I promised myself then that I’d quit if it ever became work instead of fun. It would really take some searching to find something I’d enjoy nearly as much as this.”

Jonathan Richman and the Dick Dale Power Trio play tonight at 9 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $15. Information: (714) 496-8930.