POP MUSIC : Concrete Blonde Isn’t Set in Its Ways : After re-evaluation brought on by overwork and illness, Johnette Napolitano eases up. But the new album still has the edge of a city screaming.

Johnette Napolitano points to her living room window overlooking a raucous stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.

“That window there, at night on Fridays and Saturdays, it’s unbelievable,” says Napolitano, leader of the trio Concrete Blonde, the band that succeeded X as the premier rock chronicler of L.A.’s psychological terrain.

“It’s like, well, keep the lights off and stay low kind of thing. It’s a drag. From this window I can see a lot of stuff go down.

“I don’t get hassled, I like this neighborhood, I do my best to make it better, and so it’s not really a problem, but . . . you wish things could be better and it wasn’t that way.”

The singer’s account comes in response to a question about “City Screaming,” a searing urban audioscape on the new Concrete Blonde album, “Walking in London” (see review on Page 64). Punctuated by the sounds of helicopter, horns, siren and police radio, Napolitano alternately croons and wails, tightening and releasing the tension:

Home home home

Under the window, is that a shot or a car?

I don’t know , I don’t know , I don’t know . . .

The city hums and bores and cracks and eats away

Stir ‘em around, stick ‘em over a fire

No wonder everybody ‘ s strung up tighter

Than a goddamn piano wire

Though Concrete Blonde has moved away from that documentarian role since its early days, it’s inevitable that the theme will recur as long as Napolitano has a room with such a view.

“They’re all from direct experience. Even the ghost song is a true story,” says Napolitano of her compositions, including the uncharacteristically humorous new single “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man.”

Sipping wine on the sofa in her small, cluttered hillside house in the shadows of late afternoon, Napolitano seems somehow removed from the tumult of the nearby streets.

With her tattoos and bracelets, she looks like the punk-Gypsy queen familiar to her fans, but the sentiments she expresses--to take better care of herself, to change the pace--don’t sound like the tempestuous firebrand who’s led Concrete Blonde through a stormy career, from underground cult-hero status to the mainstream pop charts with the 1990 hit “Joey.”

She traces the change to a severe case of salmonella she contracted while traveling in Mexico late last year, after completing the “Walking in London” album.

“I got the backhand from God. ‘Lay down, stick these IVs in your arm and you think about your life for a long time.’ And I did. I had no control over my body. I couldn’t take out my own trash, I couldn’t wash my dishes, I had to have somebody do my grocery shopping, and I felt terrible. And I really learned. I’ve got to take better care of myself and slow down. . . .

“I was a major workaholic. It was ridiculous. If I wasn’t writing or touring or doing something, I’d feel like I was being lazy. I’m not that way anymore.

“I learned a lot of that from being in Italy, being in France as well. It’s OK to sit around and have a good conversation for four hours over a bottle of wine. That’s a valid way to spend your life, and I really like that.”

Napolitano is leaning against a Concrete Blonde tour--if nothing else, the arm and back pains caused by playing the bass are a deterrent (the band will, however, join X and Mary’s Danish at the Hollywood Palladium on April 17 in a benefit for U.S. Senate candidate Barbara Boxer).

Instead, she plans to work more painting and traveling into her life, and she even has some therapy available outside her door.

“I got this place about six months ago and I’ve got the tomatoes going up in back and I’ve got the herbs going and the cilantro’s going nicely and it’s really therapeutic to go out and get back to nature. I think people desperately need that more than they think they do.”

Napolitano, 34, grew up in the San Fernando Valley and met guitarist Jim Mankey when they were both hired hands at Leon Russell’s studio in North Hollywood. They began writing and recording together as Dream 6 and released an EP in 1983, then signed with I.R.S. Records.

Drummer Harry Rushakoff joined, and their debut album, “Concrete Blonde,” came out in 1987. In the 1989 follow-up, “Free,” a fourth member, Alan Bloch, took over Napolitano’s bass-playing role for his brief tenure in the group. “Bloodletting,” the 1990 album that included the hit “Joey,” found ex-Roxy Music member Paul Thompson in place of Rushakoff, who is back on drums on “Walking in London.”

Stability has not been the hallmark of Concrete Blonde.

“It’s all part of Johnette,” says one former associate who requested anonymity. “She’s very headstrong and very mercurial, and she’s a great artist. It’s all part of the same chemistry. I’ve seen her bond with people and I’ve seen her storm out of meetings. But I think the underlying thread is that she’s very passionate about what she does. She’s got some spine and a lot of spunk and an agenda that’s all her own.”

Napolitano’s path has been marked by run-ins with everyone from her band members to record company heads, from other musicians to her own managers. Even Mankey has had his share of conflicts during their 10-year partnership.

“You can’t work with Johnette without butting heads occasionally,” says the low-key guitarist in a separate interview at his apartment in a more serene section of Silver Lake. “You’ve got to expect that and not take it personally when she starts yelling or something. . . . It’s just the way she talks, basically. She’s not a diplomat.

“Whenever someone new is hired, you can expect that it’ll get to that point where there’s a disagreement, and that’s the critical point. You can either work with the situation as it is and make something good, or not. So far we’ve managed.”

After periods of re-evaluation brought on first by the pressures of overwork, and then her illness, Napolitano feels that her perspective is improved. She points to the new album as proof.

“I know it’s not as dismal a record as the last one,” says Napolitano, whose emotions rise as close to the surface in her conversation as they do in Concrete Blonde’s soul-baring music. “The last one was really depressing. I was really depressed. It’s been hard. . . . I never really stopped (working). It’s been one thing after another, and it hasn’t been easy.”

Napolitano’s aren’t petty complaints. Among the problems that have plagued her: a protracted legal battle with I.R.S. Records, her back and arm ailments, a series of management changes and Rushakoff’s temporary dismissal.

Then came a confidence-testing conflict with I.R.S. chief Miles Copeland, who ordered her to come up with six different songs for “Bloodletting” before he’d release it. She refused, and the success of “Joey” helped it become the band’s biggest seller.

“It had been a long time of working and I really felt very hemmed in by the situation,” summarizes Napolitano, whose 1991 schedule included an opening slot on Sting’s arena tour. “I felt like I was in prison. . . . It was just getting out of control.

“While we were on tour with Sting, I learned a lot about why I do this and what I don’t want to do. I have tremendous respect for him, but I couldn’t live his life. I couldn’t play in a 70,000-seat venue that is not even meant to have music at all. I couldn’t sit down in a locker room for five hours.

“I like to walk around, I like to meet people and see things in different places I go. When you’re playing at the Enormodome in the bad part of town, where the hell do you walk around? And if I do, I can’t get back in on time to get to the gig. So I pace around for four hours around this arena. I think it started with my head after a while. I really kind of got batty.”

After the tour, Napolitano eased the pressure by traveling in Italy and France. Then she and Mankey reconciled with Rushakoff, and the original Concrete Blonde lineup made an album together for the first time since its debut.

With “Walking in London” out and her illness behind her, Napolitano is determined to recapture the loyalty of her original supporters. “Joey” might have done wonders for her confidence and finances, but it left Concrete Blonde feeling a little uncertain about its position.

“We got a lot of complaints from people who had known us from further back,” says Mankey. “I have this theory that music’s function for many people is just to be a backing track for their social group. No offense in that--it’s fine, I guess. But once we were on mainstream stations, we didn’t serve that function for a lot of people anymore. So I suppose we probably lost some people, but not everybody.”

Says Napolitano: “I wanted to start the album off with ‘Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man’ because I was aware there was a whole new audience we had attracted with the last record, ‘Joey’ and all that, and it was really important for me to come back with a little bit of an edge first off.”

As she talks, Napolitano becomes increasingly agitated, and those early fans would be happy to hear the fiery old spitfire surface as she thinks about them.

“I know who I’m playing to,” she continues, her voice rising. “I’m the one out there touring. I know the people that are gonna show up every city I pull into, and they’ve been there for years. . . . You can’t tell me that they’re not important because this new generation of people hears ‘Joey’ on the damn radio.”