Flesh Prince of Feeling Talks From the Heart : Music: After the demise of his marriage and band, Chris Desjardins is back with the Flesh Eaters, and he says the rough times have reinvigorated him.

Romanticism is the common currency of pop music. Odes to deep feeling and the primacy of love circulate through songs as freely and cheaply as play money changes hands around a Monopoly board.

Big Romance figures prominently on “Dragstrip Riot,” the new double album by the reconstituted Flesh Eaters, a band with roots in the Los Angeles punk and alternative-rock explosion of the late ‘70s. But there is a sense that Chris D., the Flesh Eaters’ front man, founder and main creative force, has earned the right to make his grand romantic declarations. The singer, whose full name is Chris Desjardins, had his ideals about love severely challenged three years ago when both his marriage and his band fell apart.

The band, Divine Horsemen, centered on the duet vocals of Desjardins and his wife, Julie Christensen. It was romantic stuff, all right--cinematic songs with galloping Western rhythms and lyrical settings that often pictured James Dean-type rebels forming stormy, mystical unions to defy small-town conformity. It was the Bruce Springsteen “Born to Run” breakout myth, recast in a junkyard overgrown with sagebrush.

Speaking over the phone recently, Desjardins, who will lead the Flesh Eaters on Saturday at Night Moves, described the simultaneous musical and matrimonial collapse as “a massive upheaval in my life. I went into a dramatic seclusion and it took a long time to come back out of that whole thing and feel good about things again. I was basically in a hole in the ground for about a year.”

Those events were enough to shake anyone’s romantic outlook. But Desjardins said the vision of emotional and sexual fervor that had served as a foundation for his music also came under an intellectual challenge. It happened, he said, after he entered a self-help program to deal with drug and alcohol-abuse problems.

“There were people there who defined strength (as) denying emotions or extreme feelings, keeping everything on an even keel, not letting anything get out of control,” Desjardins said, noting that he was criticizing some individuals he met, rather than the broader tenets of the 12-step program he attended for a time. “There were a lot of people who felt my love with Julie was an obsession” and that he would be best off purging himself of romantic-obsessive ideas.

Desjardins wasn’t going for that. “There were so many people I was coming in contact with who had turned the burner down on their lives so they wouldn’t do drugs or drink again. I wanted to stop doing the self-destructive things, but I didn’t want to stop feeling the things that gave me the pain that made me want to do things to kill the pain. I’m a real romantic fool, and nobody’s going to destroy that in me. I like to feel things in an extreme way.”

Desjardins said he decided to take his own approach to recovery. Part of it included recording “Stone By Stone,” a dark, extremely raw album that he describes as “a real cathartic thing.”

Judging from the music on “Dragstrip Riot,” which will be released March 12, Desjardins has come through his funk without losing his deep romanticism. There are some deep, dark depression songs, notably “Bedfull of Knives,” which Desjardins said is an account of his emotional state after Christensen left him. But even that song ends with a marching surge as the gritty-voiced Chris D. half-croons, half-howls a wordless sigh of valediction--evoking a feeling that even though the wound is severe, it is not fatal.

The album, which is marked by brawny, slashing guitars and Chris D.’s vocal blend of Howlin’ Wolf blues growls and Jim Morrison’s slurred theatrics, does contain other songs that descend into an emotional black hole. But the darkest come from outside sources--Mott the Hoople’s “Moon Upstairs” and “Slow Death” by the Flamin’ Groovies (the latter available only on the cassette and LP versions of the album).

“Maybe unconsciously I felt I wasn’t expressing as much of that (despairing side) as I used to, and I wanted to still do it,” Desjardins said. “It’s a pretty well-rounded album in that respect.”

Several of Desjardins’ own new songs, including “Dragstrip Riot,” “Out of Nowhere” and “Fur Magnet,” spring from a new, year-old romance that he describes as stable and uplifting. They’re the ones that restate the grand romantic ideals of the Divine Horsemen days--the notion that love can redeem and transform. At the same time, Desjardins quoted a line from “Youngest Profession,” another love anthem, to illustrate his realization that love needs to be at least partly tempered: “We’ve got to untame our hearts, but steer clear of obsession.”

“When you have a successful relationship, it doesn’t stay on a fever pitch,” he said. “It becomes something else that’s just as intense, but more well-rounded.”

Desjardins could have been describing the difference between the new Flesh Eaters, who have been together about a year, and the original band. In its first run, from 1978 to 1983, the Flesh Eaters played fast, dense, punk-based music, with Desjardins backed by a changing array of musicians that at times included moonlighting members of the Blasters and X. Now the Flesh Eaters is a more tempered band with a blues and garage-rock sound that sometimes echoes such punk precursors as the Stooges, Television and the Patti Smith Group. Formerly a ranter and raver, Chris D. now can sing when he wants to (he credits the highly regarded Christensen for helping him raise his vocal technique a few notches).

Desjardins said he thought he was finished with the Flesh Eaters name when he formed Divine Horsemen in 1984. “I really used to hate the name and I really wanted to distance myself from the whole thing. It was, ‘How much crazier can you get?’ Everything was over-the-top, and I wanted to pull back from that and try more traditional structure and songwriting.”

When he recouped after Divine Horsemen broke up, Desjardins called his band Stone By Stone. But a 1989 album went little-noted, the lineup changed again, and he decided last year that the old Flesh Eaters name would help him take advantage of fans’ fond old associations without taking them on a punk nostalgia trip.

“We were going to be doing all this new stuff anyway, so it wasn’t this revival thing,” Desjardins said. The new lineup, which includes guitarist Stuart Lederer, bassist Glenn Hays and drummer Ray Torres, plays songs from all periods of Chris D.’s career--old and new Flesh Eaters material, Stone By Stone and Divine Horsemen.

Over the years, Desjardins has been the main creative spark behind more than a dozen independent label recordings. But the alternative rocker’s elusive goal--to support him or herself through music--continues to elude him.

“It has been real disappointing,” Desjardins said, breaking into an incongruous, quietly hawing laugh when the subject of material rewards came up. “You can hear me laughing to keep from crying. I really thought Divine Horsemen was going to have a major success. It didn’t happen, and I just don’t have a lot of illusions anymore. That was the end of my trying to push it.”

These days, Desjardins mainly supports himself with a clerical job at a Los Angeles law firm. But the underground rocker, like the eternal Cubs or Angels fan at the dawn of spring training, always harbors a dream: “I have a funny feeling that things might open up all of a sudden with this record,” Desjardins said. “If they don’t, I’m really prepared to go on the way I’m going.”

It sounds like a pretty hectic way to go. These days, besides working his day job and getting the Flesh Eaters in shape for a possible national tour after the album’s release, Desjardins has been busy finishing a long article synopsizing and critiquing some 100 Mexican horror films for a British anthology volume on horror films. He hopes to expand it into a book that will also deal with Spanish and Italian fright movies. Desjardins said he also has two novels in progress and two other manuscripts that are finished but unpublished. In 1989, a small publisher, Illiterati Press, issued a volume of his lyrics and poetry.

Desjardins, who has a film degree from Loyola Marymount, said he recently received a nibble about acting again (he played an assassin in the Kevin Costner thriller, “No Way Out,” and also had a leading role in the underground rock culture film, “Border Radio”).

“I don’t know what it’s going to come to,” he said. “I’m happy I can keep on doing as much as I can, as long as I can.”

Flesh Eaters, Scarecrows and Love Battery play Saturday at 10 p.m. at Night Moves, 5902 Warner Ave., Huntington Beach. Tickets: $6. Information: (714) 840-6118.