Fender’s Stormy Years Came Before Tornados : Pop music: The singer has weathered some rough times--including a prison stint--by being able to adapt. He performs in O.C. this weekend.

You can bet that 99 out of 100 pop stars would be singing some virulent blues were a broken-down touring bus to leave them stuck in Needles for the better part of a week. Michael Jackson and a few others possibly would not survive the experience.

But Freddy Fender, who happened to be stuck in Needles last week, sounded completely unruffled and affable as he spoke over the phone from the motel room that became his forced quarters for a few days while his nine-bunk, 1974-vintage touring bus underwent repairs.

“Had a freak accident in the desert,” the veteran Tex-Mex singer and country balladeer explained. A recapped tire tread had sheared apart, and the exploding rubber gummed up the engine works. “Broken-down bus. That’s part of the game,” Fender said.

At 55, he has no problem keeping his equanimity in the face of mechanical breakdowns. For one thing, the Texas-based singer--who will play shows in Orange County today and Sunday--was able to rent a van in order to keep playing gigs on what he had planned as a working vacation through California and Nevada.

For another, he had lots of company with him: his wife, two of their three children, a daughter-in-law and his two grandchildren. What’s more, Fender has been stuck for a lot longer in places a lot worse than a pool-equipped motel.

Cotton fields, for instance. And cherry orchards, and tomato patches. As Baldemar Huerta, his given name, Fender got to know those quite well, growing up as he did in a large family of migrant farm workers. They lived in the Texas border town of San Benito but traveled, depending on the season, to harvest crops in Arkansas, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.

He knows about tough bars too. When Fender, fresh from a hitch as an underage Marine, began his musical career in 1956, he had to work a bar circuit that wasn’t exactly cushy.

“When I’m on stage, I tell people that I used to play a place called the Squeeze Inn in Brownsville, Tex.,” Fender said. “It was so bad, they used to kill three or four people during the week, just to warm up for the weekend.”

Fender may have gotten to know some violent types in another not-so-hospitable setting during his early years: Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, where he landed in 1960 after being busted in Baton Rouge for possessing a small amount of marijuana. His arrest and three-year prison stay short-circuited a budding career as a ‘50s-style rock ‘n’ roll ballad singer.

He made a triumphant comeback in 1975 when “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” a country song he recorded for a regional label in Texas, turned into a No. 1 national pop hit. His hot streak lasted through the ‘70s as he racked up several more pop hits and numerous country chart successes.

But even after that, Fender paid return visits to some of life’s tougher places, including bankruptcy courts and the inside of a rehab center where he went in 1985 to shake off a long bout with drugs and alcohol.

Yes, this is one Fender that has suffered a few dents. But he says he always has been able to keep himself in forward gear despite setbacks.

At the time of his marijuana arrest, Fender had scored regional hits with “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” and “Oh Holy One,” which remain staples of his repertoire. Asked how he had coped with the disappointment of having his career cut off then, he said he adopted “a very ‘the-hell-with-it’ attitude. What I mean by ‘the hell with it’ is I don’t look back. I’m still like that. (If a setback occurs) I say, ‘It’s happened, (so) what’s next?’

“I’m very good at accepting my luck, adapting to good or bad luck. I’ve been good at not being bitter at things that would make other people miserable. For better or worse, look forward. You can survive being angry because you have to survive, or you can survive being happy because you’re able to survive. I’m the second one.”

Nowadays, Fender seems to be surviving quite nicely. While he never stopped touring--even in the ‘80s, when he had lost his record deal and was having the worst of his substance abuse problems--he has enjoyed renewed prominence the past two years as a member of the Texas Tornados. The lively all-star band has won acclaim, had respectable if not spectacular album sales, and won a 1990 Grammy award for Best Mexican-American Performance.

With the Tornados, Fender has helped bring the folk-R&B-rock-and-polka; hybrid known as Tex-Mex music back into the spotlight. His partners in the band are Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, who come from a ‘60s roots-rock and psychedelic background as alumni of the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Flaco Jimenez, a premier accordion player grounded in Mexican folk traditions. Fender’s distinctive, sweetly trembling, heart-on-sleeve tenor makes him the band’s designated singer of romantic ballads.

The first music Fender learned was the Mexican folk music played in his neighborhood when he was growing up. But like many of the Anglo rockabillies who came out of the South in the ‘50s, he drew crucial influences from close contacts with blacks.

“The real rhythm and blues hit me when I was a field worker in Arkansas” at the age of 10 or 11, Fender recalled. “I was exposed to my first black music working with black people, picking cotton, and from the jukeboxes at the company store. You’d buy RCs with pigs feet and crackers and listen to the jukebox while the older people got drunk on their ass.”

When he was 16, Fender decided he’d had enough of field work and joined the Marines, lying about his age. He said he was inspired to enlist by “John Wayne--’Sands of Iwo Jima.’ I was gonna go tear some ass in Korea, but when I got in, Korea had been over for six months.”

Fender didn’t play much music in the Marines, but he says the next Texas Tornados album will include an R&B; song called “Trying” that he learned from a buddy in boot camp. “He started singing that song while we were sitting on a locker” in the barracks at the San Diego Marine Corps Training Depot. “I never sang it after that, not even in the shower, but it stuck to me.”

After his discharge, Fender pursued a career as a rocker. He began recording in 1957, a year before Ritchie Valens became the first Mexican-American rocker to reach a national audience.

Like Valens, whose real surname was Valenzuela, Fender changed his name to disguise his ethnicity. The assumption was that the white American public of the 1950s would give no consideration to a singer with a name like Baldemar Huerta. So Fender took a catchy, alliterative name, after the Fender guitars and amplifiers he was using.

“I wanted to go into the gringo market or the Anglo market or the white American market, or whatever you want to call it,” he said. “With my real name, it would be an obstacle. I had to do as the Romans do, for commercial purposes. The president of Imperial Records told me to cut my sideburns off, that I looked too much like a Mexican. I thought he was right. That was the attitude we had back then. Now they’re telling you to look like a Mexican. Attitudes change.”

(Fender said he met his namesake, the late guitar-maker Leo Fender, at the Palomino club in North Hollywood in 1980. The singer said that Fender, whose companies were based in Fullerton, presented him with a guitar).

After his early rise and sudden detour to jail, Fender had a low-profile musical career in Texas and Louisiana. Then, in the mid-’70s, he hooked up with Houston producer Huey Meaux, who had produced Sahm’s early hits. “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” was the first in a succession of ‘70s country hits for Fender; four of them crossed over to the pop Top 40.

“Music-wise, and art-wise, it was the best years of my life,” he said. “But I didn’t get the money. I did a lot of drinking and drugging, I didn’t keep my eyes on the money, and like a lot of artists I got ripped off. I’m not bitter about it. I’ve got my life together and everything’s OK. What can you ask for in this world, except that you can work? As long as I got a way to make a living, what more do I want?”

Fender, who lives in Corpus Christi, said he has no problem with steady road work, so he continues to play solo dates in addition to touring with the Texas Tornados. He also has a major label recording deal of his own for the first time since the early 1980s. “The Freddy Fender Collection,” released last year on the Tornados label, Reprise, featured remakes of some of his biggest hits from the ‘70s, as well as other well-known ballads in the ‘50s R&B; style Fender favors.

In fact, he said, that style, which he picked up as an admirer of such R&B; stars as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Clyde McPhatter, is about all he favors.

Being part of the diverse Texas Tornados forces Fender to broaden himself a little. On the band’s second album, “Zone of Our Own,” there was a division of labor, with each member recording his own vocal numbers, often working apart from the others. “When we finished the album,” Fender said, “there were things I didn’t like that Augie and Doug did, and some stuff that Augie and Doug didn’t like that me and Flaco did. So I said, ‘Next time, we record it all together.’ We agreed we would all be musically involved, no matter who was singing or what the style was.” The album is due in October.

Fender said he can have fun with something like “She’s About a Mover,” the mid-’60s Sir Douglas Quintet rocker that is a staple of Tornados shows. “I can get into it, because I just play the guitar. They’re real good funky rock ‘n’ roll songs. ‘She’s About a Mover’ has a little polka thing, and I can really get down on it.”

But, left to his own devices--as he will be this weekend with a six-man, California-based band led by Charlie Rich’s son--Fender enjoys slipping back to an earlier decade.

“To me, the only good music is the (style) I sing, which is from the ‘50s. I don’t keep up. I couldn’t tell you who’s got a No. 1 song, and I couldn’t care less. Sometimes I say, ‘Maybe I should listen to what’s going on, I could make a hit.’ Then I listen and don’t like it.

“I never heard a song of Garth Brooks’ in my life. ‘Achy Breaky Heart,’ I heard a little bit of it and I don’t like it. I’m just a guy from another time, and I’m happy doing it. When it comes to music, I’m like the boy in the bubble--I’m in a bubble with my own music.”

Freddy Fender sings tonight at 10:30 at Duffers Irish Pub, 25571 Jeronimo Road, Mission Viejo, and Sunday at 6 p.m. (with Chanel Ferman and Krystal opening) at the Ice House, 112 E. Walnut Ave., Fullerton. Tickets: $25 at Duffers (includes a midnight buffet) and $20 at the Ice House. Duffers: (714) 768-8935; the Ice House: (714) 740-1108.