Back to Folkways for Steve Gillette : After coming full circle musically, the singer-songwriter can look back from his Orange County homecoming, ‘rememberin’ ’ without undue sadness.

I’m back on the street again,

Gotta stand on my own two feet again,

I’m walkin’ that lonely beat again,

Rememberin’ when.

Few folk troubadours have waxed more wistful and melancholic than Steve Gillette did when he thought up those lyrics in the shower one day, almost 25 years ago.

At the time Gillette was a young contender on the Greenwich Village folk scene, a recent arrival in New York who had moved East to make his mark after paying his early dues working the Orange County club and coffeehouse circuit.

“Back on the Street Again,” a lyrically chastened but musically brisk tune that Gillette wrote after a girlfriend had dumped him, was a Top 40 song in 1967 for a one-hit wonder band called the Sunshine Company. That early score launched Gillette on a long, ultimately fruitless quest to establish himself in the pop mainstream.

Nowadays, Gillette--who plays an Orange County homecoming show Saturday night at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments in Laguna Niguel--can look back, “rememberin’ when,” without undue sadness for never having repeated his initial success.

Gillette didn’t exactly come up empty with his attempts to write marketable material--he has written or collaborated on songs recorded by Linda Ronstadt, Waylon Jennings, John Denver, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Anne Murray, among others. But he says the notion of becoming a hot songwriter that drove him for most of his career has been replaced over the past six years by a different ideal--the expressive ideal that he says inspired him to write and sing songs in the first place.

Speaking recently from a pay phone in Texas as he made his way West on a tour with his wife and performing partner, Cindy Mangsen, Gillette said he has found happiness playing the homespun folk circuit, the network of clubs, coffeehouses, even private living rooms, where small gatherings of fans support touring folk musicians who have no designs on the pop charts.

Gillette, 48, said he always had been torn between the desire to make it commercially and a yearning to write songs for the sake of pure personal expression. He says a trip in 1984 to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas made him realize for the first time that he could turn his back on the pop world and still find an audience.

“I wanted to reconnect with very deep, mythological and primal issues,” he said in a firm, grainy voice. “After all the years I knocked my head against the brick wall of the music industry, folk music offered me a way to participate in that world.”

Traditional folk music hadn’t been so divorced from the mainstream when Gillette was starting out. He had grown up in Whittier, attended college for a few years, then headed to Europe with his guitar in 1963. His time busking in Paris marked “the first chance I had to be on my own and make my way in the world with music.”

On his return he settled in Balboa and began establishing himself on the local folk scene. He became a regular at the original Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, opening for many of the touring acts who passed through the club, and also played frequently at the Prison of Socrates, a club near the Balboa pier.

Gillette also recalls playing a high school date in which his opening act was a very young Jackson Browne--at the time still a high school student in Fullerton. “He was painfully shy,” Gillette said. “His songs were very slow and Dylan-esque.”

Ian and Sylvia, a Canadian folk duo, gave Gillette his own first taste of touring, inviting him to join them on the road after he had opened a show for them at the Golden Bear. But it was the helping hand Gillette extended to another struggling folkie that led to his first big opportunity.

“There was,” Gillette recalled, “a little club in Seal Beach known as the Cosmos” where he not only performed but helped run the concerts. One night, a singer named John Deutschendorf, just arrived from Texas, showed up looking for a gig.

“He came on stage and asked if he could sing some songs, and I was glad to have him do that,” Gillette said. Gillette also gave the newcomer advice about gig prospects in Los Angeles, pointing him to a club where he soon became one of the house favorites. There, Deutschendorf changed his name to John Denver.

When Denver moved to New York to join his first nationally known group, the Chad Mitchell Trio, he put in a good word for Gillette with Milt Okun, a New York producer and song publisher. Okun, who also worked with Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen and other folk boom performers, helped Gillette place his songs, and eventually helped sign him to a recording deal with Vanguard Records.

Gillette released his debut album in 1967, toured for a while, got that taste of success when “Back on the Street Again” made the charts, then returned to Newport Beach aiming to move up in the world. “I got married and bought a house and was enjoying the fruits of having had a hit,” he said. The hit opened new paths of opportunity, Gillette said, but they led him away from the pure folk idiom he’d been pursuing.

“I was a solo acoustic performer, doing a lot of very traditional things. I did a setting of ‘The Earl King,’ a Goethe poem. I was very artsy-craftsy. The opportunity (that followed “Back on the Street Again”) put me in a world where the only relevance was making the charts.

“I felt what I needed to do was get more into the mainstream of the music business and be successful on its terms. To me it was an ego-extension, living out the fantasies or the expectations of specialness or stardom. I’m embarrassed to say it--I was pretty immature about a lot of that stuff.

“If I’d been traveling on the folk circuit, that validation would have been enough.” But instead, he was at home in the Hollywood Hills, where he’d bought a house after several years in Newport Beach, trying to write hits and growing “more and more frustrated.”

In the mid-’70s, his prospects improved when Graham Nash heard a tape of his music and agreed to help produce an album. But the album, “A Little Warmth,” suffered long delays as Nash had to take time away for other commitments. “That album took about three years to make. We lost a lot of momentum,” Gillette said. The album was released in 1979 on a small, independent label, Flying Fish, instead of the major label Gillette and Nash had sought.

By then, to help pay his mortgage, Gillette had gone back on the local club circuit, which included a regular gig at the Cork ‘n’ Cleaver in Orange. “Most of the places I played were bars,” he recalls. “There’s something about playing for people who are smoking and drinking and waiting for their dinners. I was very grateful to have a steady paycheck, but there was always something demoralizing about it. Singing other people’s hits, it was awkward. For a singer-songwriter, it’s pretty destructive.”

All the while, he was still trying to write another pop hit, “still trying to ring the bell or make the magic stroke. I was trying to write the song that would turn it all around.”

In 1984, at the behest of one of his songwriting partners, poet Charles John Quarto, Gillette tried something different. He went to the Kerrville festival to help judge a competition for new singer-songwriters.

“I had not maintained a connection with the old folk circuit. I came to believe that was over with, that it was all part of the ‘60s. But it was really going on all the time; I spent time singing around the campfires (at Kerrville) and I was amazed to find it was really still there. From then on I was resolved to leave the other world behind and get out and travel and play, and I’ve done that ever since.”

Gillette’s 15-year marriage had broken up, so he was free to ramble. He bought a van with a used engine rescued from a junkyard, outfitted the vehicle with a desk and a bunk, and began several years of living on the road, performing at festivals and smaller folk gatherings. Along the way he met Mangsen, a folk singer based in northern New England, and he settled down with her in a Burlington, Vt., apartment.

The couple play extensively in the northeast and take longer national tours twice a year, usually stopping in Orange County where Gillette still has family. Aside from the large folk festivals, they typically play for audiences of no more than 60, 75 or 100 and earn a few hundred dollars for each concert. “There’s plenty of work, actually,” Gillette said. “We’re doing fine.”

Gillette said he hasn’t cut off entirely from the world of commercial music. Working with Quarto and another songwriting partner, Santa Ana-based Rex Benson, Gillette does write some material geared for the country market. “I’ve kind of accepted the idea of writing certain songs that could be done by a major artist,” he said. But he draws a distinction between those and his primary work.

“When you’re writing for the industry, for the charts and radio, it’s a narrow (expressive) bandwidth.” Among folk audiences, Gillette said, “there’s a willingness to explore ideas and issues that may take some thought. You don’t have to play off people’s expectations or validate their fantasies. What attracted me to folk music in the first place is it seemed to have this component of mythic truth. A good song can bring you to a moment with these deep and real issues that are often very frightening.”