CHRIS GAFFNEY’S MEMORIES, VISIONS AND DREAMS : ‘The kids were asking, “How do you write songs?” I said, “I’m sitting in front of the TV having a beer, and something comes to my mind, and I go ‘what the hell’ and write it down.” ’

Since he was a kid, Chris Gaffney has had a recurring dream about running the 100-yard dash against a jaguar.

In it, Gaffney has a certain advantage over the cat: a 99-yard head start.

“But I cannot win in the dream,” says the country singer and roots-rocker from Costa Mesa. “I’m frozen, a yard from the finish.”

The dream stems from Gaffney’s days running track at Western High School in Anaheim, where he used to worry about his finishing kick in the 400-meter race. Now, at 41, he is running a different race as he bids for national recognition as a musician.

This time, he has no head start. On the other hand, in this race he is making progress--slow and incremental, perhaps, but it’s forward movement without a doubt. The latest evidence is “Mi Vida Loca,” the strong, just-released follow-up to the 1990 album that established Gaffney and his band, the Cold Hard Facts, as perhaps the most distinctive all-around recording ensemble on the Orange County pop scene.

Much as movie moguls tend not to make pictures if the plot can’t be summed up in a sentence, record bigwigs shy away from musicians whose style doesn’t fit tidily and automatically into a slot on the narrowly formatted radio dial. Gaffney’s music sounds sort of the way a pizza with the works tastes: the combination of flavors changes all the time, depending on where you bite in.

There’s Chuck Berry-based rock ‘n’ roll, heartland anthems with a countrified tinge, traditional honky-tonk music, some Louisiana zydeco and, on the new album, a large helping of Tex-Mex music fueled by Gaffney’s sprightly accordion playing. The whole object of this approach is to be fresh and unpredictable, to avoid fitting tidily into any slot whatsoever.

The way Gaffney sees things, being forced to follow established music-biz recipes would be the real nightmare.

As much as he admires George Jones, for example, Gaffney refrains, in honky-tonk ballads obviously stamped with a Jones influence, from going for the high, sliding, catch-in-the-voice cries that are as much Jones’ signature as home runs were Babe Ruth’s.

“I could do that, but I don’t want to,” Gaffney says as he sits at a table in the shady, walled-in back yard of his Costa Mesa tract home. The yard is a slice of suburban blue-collar paradise with figurines of chickens and pink flamingos stalking the flower beds.

Recreational adornments include the punching bag that Gaffney, a former Golden Gloves amateur boxer, has hanging in his garage, and the portable kiddie pool that he set up for a recent visit by his 13-year-old daughter, Erika, who lives with Gaffney’s ex-wife in Louisiana. Gaffney and his second wife, Julie, share the place with his younger brother, Greg, who plays bass in the Cold Hard Facts.

A fan of Jones, Gaffney admits that it’s tempting to copy every nuance in the master’s style. And given country music’s substantial roster of successful Jones imitators, it can be profitable. When Gaffney performs those sad ballads, “I’m thinking, ‘This would be a good place to do a George Jones thing.’ But then I say, ‘no, don’t do it, because you’ll end up sounding like Alan Jackson.’ ”

Jackson’s album, “Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” happens to have sold a million-odd copies, which is a million-odd more than Gaffney racked up with his first two releases, “Road to Indio,” an EP he put out on a custom label in 1987, and his full-length “Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts,” which the tiny independent ROM label issued 2 1/2 years ago.

Gaffney says he has heard plenty of advice from people in the music business that, if he wants to escape obscurity, he’d better narrow his focus and straighten out a few of the lyrical curveballs he loves to throw.

It’s advice he casually dismisses. “I think music’s too much fun for that.”

In any case, with his leathery face, thick, arching, quizzical eyebrows and a bohemian tuft of under-the-lip hair, Gaffney looks more like a refugee from one of Captain Beefheart’s off-kilter, avant-rock bands than the latest contestant in mainstream country’s singing-Adonis sweepstakes.

With “Mi Vida Loca” (Spanish for “My Crazy Life”), Gaffney nevertheless figures to take a career step forward, if not a great leap to mass stardom. The album (review, Page 5) is on HighTone Records, a respected independent label known for giving a home to roots-oriented performers who don’t fit conveniently into established niches.

Robert Cray recorded for HighTone before blues became lucrative, and Texas country-eclectics Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are HighTone alumni who have moved on to major labels.

Gaffney says HighTone showed interest in his first album before he signed with ROM, but made no offer. He credits Dave Alvin, the former guitarist for the Blasters and X, and now a HighTone artist, with helping to persuade the label to sign him early this year to a three-album deal. The two have been friends since 1987 when Gaffney opened a show for Alvin in Hollywood.

Gaffney and his band toured the Southwest twice after their 1990 album came out. Now, he says, HighTone is trying to set him up with a booking agent who might get him steadier touring work--either with his six-member band or, if that proves cost-prohibitive, as a solo performer. Gaffney, who still makes his primary living doing yacht maintenance work at a Newport Beach boatyard, says there is talk that he might be able to join in an all-HighTone tour with Dave Alvin and Rosie Flores, another of his friends from the Southern California roots-and-country scene.

His immediate goal is more modest and less far-flung. He’d like to find new gigs for his band in Orange County to go with its steady Tuesday night residence at the Canyon Inn, a small bar in Yorba Linda.

But so far, the boom in country music nightclubs hasn’t caught up with Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts, who don’t mind doing cover material, as long as they can do it in their own way. Bar owners are looking for a safer sort of country band these days, Gaffney figures: “I think they’re going more into the achy-breaky whatever-it-is.”

But there are signs that an audience is catching on to Gaffney’s own whatever-it-is.

Last month, before his new album had come out, he found himself at the Regina Folk Festival in Saskatchewan, giving his first performance in Canada since the early 1970s when he kicked around for a while in Toronto, playing in bands with his older brother, Robbie.

“Amazingly, they were yelling out song titles (from ‘Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts’). I couldn’t believe it. The people were so nice up there. They’re yelling out titles, and I’m going, ‘What the hell is wrong with you people? Why don’t you give me a little anger?’ ”

It’s like Gaffney to call for anger from a crowd that’s offering approval. He clearly enjoys turning a dryly ironic quip in a song lyric or in conversation, and if he can make the wordplay self-deprecating, so much the better. He doesn’t mind playing the clown, and to prove it he puts the interview momentarily on hold to slip into a shiny, reddish-orange smoking jacket that his wife found in a Costa Mesa costume shop. With its tasseled belt and quilted lapel, it’s a fairly ridiculous piece of raiment that Gaffney sometimes wears on stage. He says he has a fez to go with it, but at the moment he isn’t feeling that silly.

One doesn’t suppose that ol’ George Jones, or any other country star, ever would describe himself as “a dancing cretin with the faraway eyes” as Gaffney does with wry delight in one of his new songs, “I Never Grew Up.”

In another song, “They Made a Mistake,” Gaffney is equally flippant about his creative method:

I never go out. I don’t do much, you know,

I tell a little story, then I watch my nose grow.

I’m just a little puppet who’s a-made out of wood,

Slinkin’ around, doin’ no one no good.

Gaffney says he took part in a songwriter’s panel at a folk festival last year and explained his creative process like this:

“The kids were asking, ‘How do you write songs?’ I said, ‘I’m sitting in front of the TV (a favorite spot of his) having a beer, and something comes to my mind, and I go ‘what the hell’ and write it down.’ ”

That’s just part of his self-mocking “dancing cretin” act, though. On closer inspection, Gaffney, like all good songwriters, clearly casts for inspiration in deeper depths than the “Andy Griffith Show” repeats and parade of sporting events that take up the bulk of his tube time.

Not all the craziness in “Mi Vida Loca” involves the pratfalls of a dancing fool. Gaffney also portrays characters wounded by love, paralyzed by guilt, or grasping for a golden past that is beyond retrieval. If Gaffney found these people on television, it must have been a set tuned to reruns from his own past.

One of them is his father, Frank, a career Army pilot who died in 1987. In “Artesia,” Gaffney recalls days of vibrant teen-age cruising through hometown haunts, then ends with a sobering portrait of his father growing old, bitter, and lost, for no discernible reason other than “old Frank’s passage of time.”

“I loved the hell out of him,” Gaffney says. “He was a singer. He sang one night in the Catskills with Bunny Berigan’s band.”

The other places and people in the song also are drawn straight from life. “Pete and Rosie got married. Santos was a badass Mexican that got tattooed up,” Gaffney says, ticking off the characters, his old cruising buddies. “Holmes’ Cafe was the place you’d go to fight on Carson. You’d go cruising looking for trouble, and you’d always end up getting your ass kicked, whether you won or not.”

“Quiet Desperation,” a ballad with a George Jones-style ache to it, tells the story of one of the adult Gaffney’s friends, who tried to patch things upwith his estranged wife but wound up having an argument instead.

“He told her she’d never be nothing without him, and she blew her brains out that night. You know what the cold thing was? She used his gun, one that he’d given her. He’s been in tears over (hearing the song). I (wrote) it (out of) love for him.”

The song’s grief-stricken protagonist is seen trying to go on with his life while shielding his children from the guilt he feels over their mother’s suicide. In the wonderfully drawn “ ‘68,” Gaffney and co-writer Dave Alvin portray another case of survivor’s guilt: This time the main character, a Vietnam veteran named Jimmy, squanders his time in bars, paralyzed by guilt over the death in battle of his best friend, Joe.

For that story, Gaffney says, he used quite a bit of poetic license.

“That’s my cousin Jimmy. He was like the black sheep of the family. He’s real successful now--I think he works for some movie production company. He and his buddy Scott, who I call Joe in the song, visited me and my first wife. They left me with a $170 phone bill and broke my guitars wrestling around. Jimmy went to Vietnam, and Scott did too but he didn’t die, I don’t think. There ain’t no (true) Vietnam story there.”

Heard alongside those accounts of youthful vigor lost, of guilt, and of time as an enemy that can turn your own father unaccountably sour, such light, self-mocking ditties as “They Made a Mistake” and the album-closing “I Never Grew Up” become more than casual jokes. They are affirmations of the lively spirit that Gaffney is able to hold onto through his music.

Gaffney says he hasn’t had that racing-the-jaguar dream in a while. But it seems that the television is still on somewhere in his head after he shuts it off and goes to bed.

“The other night I had a dream about sleeping with the fat girl from ‘L.A. Law.’ We were all in the Army and we happened to be in the same barracks. Susan Bloom (the show’s obese lawyer) said, ‘Come over here honey, I’ll comfort you.’ ”

Hearing this, wife Julie harrumphs.

“That’s why you’re such a good songwriter, honey,” she says, in a voice bespeaking a good nature growing somewhat strained by this latest turn of her husband’s imagination. “You have silly dreams to show for it.”

Who: Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts.

When: Tuesdays from 8 p.m. to midnight at the Canyon Inn; Sundays from 4 to 9 p.m., Gaffney plays as part of an informal trio at the Stag.

Where: The Canyon Inn, 6821 Fairlynn Blvd., Yorba Linda. The Stag, 145 E. 19th St., Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: To the Canyon Inn: Take the Riverside (91) Freeway to the Imperial Highway exit and go north to Esperanza Road. Turn right on Esperanza and go three blocks. The Canyon Inn is in a mini-mall at Esperanza and Fairlynn. To the Stag: Take the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway south to Newport Blvd. and turn left onto 19th Street. The parking lot is on the right, directly behind the Mesa Theater.

Wherewithal: Admission is free at both places.

Where to call: Canyon Inn: (714) 779-0880. The Stag: (714) 631-9813.