No More Dreams of Brass Rings, Just Pure Music : Rock ‘n’ roll: Havalinas guitarist and songwriter Tim McConnell, who performs locally tonight and Saturday, decided to focus less on the music business and more on the business of making music.

It is typical for rock contenders to start out with great expectations.

But as the Havalinas’ Tim McConnell tells it, he started the band after making peace with the idea that his own expectations in the music business had come to nothing. Instead of trying for the brass ring, McConnell figured that it was his lot just to try to have fun with music and eke out a living.

McConnell had been through a stint in the Rockats, a late ‘70s and early ‘80s rockabilly revival band that predated the Stray Cats but never heard the purr of wide commercial success. The singer-guitarist also had released two solo albums under the name Tim Scott that quickly found shelf space in oblivion.

About two years ago, Dennis (Smutty) Smith, an old playing partner from the Rockats, turned up in Los Angeles. He called McConnell, and they formed an acoustic duo, with McConnell on guitar and Smith on stand-up bass.

“I’d quit at that time,” McConnell, who plays with the Havalinas tonight at Bogart’s and Saturday at the Coach House, recalled over the phone this week from his home in Los Angeles. “I thought, ‘I’m not good at the music business, so I’ll just play and be a folkie or whatever it takes to pay the rent. I’m just gonna play my acoustic guitar and see if I can make a living.’ ”

Smith, an Englishman who managed a London nightclub after the Rockats broke up, came to L.A. by way of Arizona, where he worked for a few months as a cook on a ranch. He started telling McConnell about the javelinas, a breed of wild pig he had seen in the Arizona desert.

“I said, ‘I know them. That’s what I feel like right now, an old wild pig,’ ” McConnell recalled.

Christened the Havalinas, the duo began playing in an L.A. bar, Molly Malone’s. Then a funny thing happened: The Havalinas’ brand of acoustic music played with electric rawness and intensity began drawing crowds. Charlie Quintana, well-established as the drummer of the Cruzados, met McConnell, 32, and Smith, 30, at a party and liked their songs. Quintana, 27, was soon enlisted as the third Havalina. All of a sudden, record companies were interested, and McConnell had prospects again. A debut album, “The Havalinas,” appeared in February, and the trio launched its touring career on the high road, opening shows in England and France for Bob Dylan.

“We were doing a date at the Roxy, and (Dylan) came down and saw the show,” McConnell said. “He came backstage after the show and said hello--Charlie had played with him a few years ago. The next day, we got a call (from Dylan’s management) with an offer to tour.”

McConnell said he hasn’t had a chance to talk to Dylan about what he enjoys about the Havalinas (after a short tour with Melissa Etheridge, the Havalinas are scheduled to go out again with Dylan later this spring, as opening act on an extended U.S. tour). But McConnell himself points to that no-expectations attitude as a key to making the songs he wrote for the Havalinas less premeditated and more immediate than his earlier work.

Instead of fussing over songs, trying self-consciously to get them right, McConnell said he now imagines himself casually swapping stories with his audience. “Getting it out and talking about it, the same as you do getting drunk in a bar with your friends--that’s the perspective I write from. My favorite songwriters write the way they talk. They sing about what they know about, what’s around them.”

The song “The Havalinas” plays out as a sometimes-wild, sometimes-elegiac excursion through neighborhoods where people are struggling to cope with economic woes and the pressures they bring. “Jesus and Johnny” captures the desperate excitement of a drug rip-off and its violent pay back, implying that both the victim and the killer in this murder story are just creatures of environment, acting out the violence that follows naturally from a life on the social fringe. The well-observed “There Was This Mother” gives a sad but unsentimental portrait of a family living from generation to generation in a hopeless cycle of wearing poverty and crime.

“Mother” is based on a family that once lived near McConnell.

“I tried to write it pretty much without an opinion,” he said. “She’s setting up the next generation (to be trapped in poverty), and that’s the way she was set up. You don’t push any blame. You say, ‘There was this mother, and that’s what she did.’ I don’t know enough to drown the world in opinions.”

Actually, the album is least effective when McConnell gets on a soapbox and begins leveling opinions about the state of the world on songs like “Fill ‘Em Up,” “Sticks and Stones” and “Good for Nothin’ Rag.” His points about such issues as racism and environmental threats are well-taken, but the way in which they are expressed is uninvolving.

The band’s best protest music is subtler, and more personal. There is bristling irony in “High Hopes,” a taut rocker in which McConnell--a multi-instrumentalist whose array of stringed instruments includes banjo, mandolin and dobro, as well as acoustic guitar--pipes up on recorder. “Inexperienced” hits home with a bitter but funny, howl-along chorus. Both songs honor McConnell’s tell-it-in-a-bar ethic, keeping their accounts of malaise and frustration earthy rather than letting them become self-consciously important.

Now that the Havalinas are receiving some recognition, McConnell said he still resists getting carried away with a new set of career expectations.

“For years, I thought my job was (to do) anything I could get my fingers into” to promote a musical career. “Now I realize it’s doing good shows and writing good songs, playing my instrument right and communicating with the rest of the band. I know we get to work for the rest of the year, which is a nice novelty.”

The Havalinas, Jimmie Wood & the Immortals and Vic Chesnutt play tonight at 9:30 at Bogart’s in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $8. Information: (213) 594-8975. The Havalinas, Swamp Zombies and Don’t Mean Maybe play Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 496-8930.