Great Gumbo : After nearly 40 years of paying dues, the Nevilles’ music just keeps on going and going.

The Neville Brothers are about the best live show you’ll ever see, and they should be rich. But people such as Mariah Carey and Guns N’ Roses have all their money. There just isn’t any justice in rock ‘n’ roll. But this has a positive side: The brothers will be at the Ventura Theatre on Friday night.

In the dictionary under “paying your dues,” you’ll see a picture of the four Neville Brothers. In a dizzying array of combinations, the brothers singly, with other groups and together have been playing their style of New Orleans gumbo since the ‘50s.

Who’s to blame for their relative lack of recognition? Them? Us? Fate? The declining rain forests worldwide? The Japanese? Saddam Hussein? Pollution? The cancellation of “Twin Peaks?”

There’s a far better explanation: radio.

It used to be you could hear Jimi Hendrix, the Temptations, Joe South and the Beatles back-to-back on the same station. But that was then, and this is now. Contemporary radio offers songs that are so brain-numbing, you’d rather crash your car than listen another five seconds. Radio is so bad that filling your ears with cement and then snapping them off to create some arty yet bizarre ashtrays may be healthier than listening to the music. Radio music all sounds the same. But none of it sounds like the Neville Brothers, because the radio doesn’t play them very much. The brothers aren’t exactly on welfare, but you won’t see them as the four coolest dudes in the Fortune 500, either. So why ain’t they rich?

“I don’t know. That’s the question we keep asking. Sometimes that seems to keep hanging on the horizon,” sax player Charles Neville said in a recent telephone interview.

“We get a lot of airplay in Europe, Japan, Australia-- everywhere but here. Radio is so structured these days that you have to have a certain kind of sound, and if that sound doesn’t sound right, you’re out. We do get some airplay on some college stations but nothing mainstream. Most radio stations don’t realize where we’re coming from.”

And they haven’t stopped rocking for nearly 40 years. Art Neville’s rendition of “Mardi Gras Gumbo,” released in the mid-’50s, is resurrected every year when it’s party time in New Orleans.

Later, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Art Neville led the Meters, who once toured with the Rolling Stones. And the Meters are back. Cyril Neville had his own band, the Soul Machine, before joining the Meters. He also fronts the New Orleans Uptown All-Stars, a reggae band.

Aaron Neville has one of the best voices in contemporary music-- part steel, part velvet, but mostly smoke. He had a huge hit in 1966 with “Tell It Like It Is.” It reached No. 2 on the charts. He’s still doing solo albums: He won a Grammy in 1989 for a duet with Linda Ronstadt, who also produced his 1991 release, “Warm Your Heart.” Charles Neville has toured with Bobby (Blue) Bland and B.B. King, and he recently released a jazz album.

“We got started in music just from being born in New Orleans,” Charles Neville said. “Music was the most prominent thing around us. It was like every kid in school had someone in their family that played music. Good music is happening every night.

“Our music is different from anything else. It’s a combination of all the musical influences in New Orleans. We have gospel, Latin, African, rhythm and blues, Mardi Gras funk music, doo-wop, New Orleans second-line music--and we put it all together to form a musical gumbo.”

No need paying for cable at the Neville household, they’re not home much. When not doing their solo projects, the brothers tour incessantly. They’ve been playing together as a group since 1977.

“The best thing about all this is traveling all over and meeting new people, then playing our music for those people,” Charles Neville said.

“But man, the worst part is getting there. For the last couple of years, we’re gone most of the year. We go out for a few months, come back for a few weeks, then hit the road again. This will be a short West Coast tour. Then we’ll be back for Mardi Gras; hit the road again, then head for Europe. Our next album is done. We’re hoping for a spring release.”

Maybe the Nevilles are unknowingly following the John Lee Hooker Scenario to Instant Success: play for a thousand years, then finally, they get hip to you. Hooker finally got a Grammy a few years back, as did the Nevilles, in 1989, for their album “Brother’s Keeper.”

“Since we got that Grammy, it seems like we play to more people all across the U.S.,” Charles Neville said. “We have a much wider audience now. We draw people older than us to kids that look like they’re still in junior high school.”

Opening for the Nevilles will be local blues guitar hero Randy Norris. It’ll be a lot more mellow than the time Charles Neville did some swamp rockin’ in Florida.

“Back in the ‘50s, I was in this band called Gene Franklin and His Houserockers, and we were playing this little town--Clewiston, Fla. It was way out in the middle of the swamps, sort of a little roadhouse. We were playing blues, and rhythm and blues, but none of the people spoke any English. I don’t know where they were from, the swamps or what. They liked us OK, but this big fight broke out, and at the height of the excitement, we had to split in a hurry. The drummer even left his drums.”

The Nevilles will just leave you wanting more.