Between Rock and a Hot Place : Music: Just when country took off, John Jorgenson, who plays in O.C. on Sunday, decided to leave it. Sort of.

If John Jorgenson didn’t question his own timing--leaving the consistent country hit-making Desert Rose Band last November, switching to rock ‘n’ roll just as country music was taking over the world--he had his friends to do it for him.

“My friends were going, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Jorgenson recalled in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles. “They said, ‘Why don’t you take advantage of your country heritage?’ ”

But the truth is that during much of his six-year tenure as lead guitarist and arranger in the band fronted by former Byrd Chris Hillman, Jorgenson was asking himself why he wasn’t taking advantage of his rock heritage.

“The style of music I played when I started playing was rock ‘n’ roll, and I missed that,” Jorgenson said. “Not that I had anything against country, but I looked at myself and said, ‘What happened?’ When I started, I wanted to play stuff like the Who and the Yardbirds and the Beatles and Stones, and I wasn’t able to do any of that.”

So at 36, Jorgenson--who lived in Orange County through the ‘80s and who will return as one of more than 25 acts playing a benefit for the Orange County Musicians Foundation at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Sunday--said goodby country, hello rock ‘n’ roll.

Well, not exactly.

While working on his own rock demo tapes and launching his solo career, Jorgenson was and still is taking on a lot of session work, and with country’s boom, much of it has a twang. Consider his (literally) most visible roles so far:

“I was able to step right from Desert Rose into the ‘Hot Country Nights’ TV show, where I was the house band guitarist,” he said. “That was a good transition thing.” And it led to an even choicer TV job. “I’m working on a sitcom with Delta Burke as her musical director,” Jorgenson continued. “She plays an aspiring country singer. We’ve shot four episodes of ‘Delta,’ and I’m in two of them, one singing a duet with her.”

Jorgenson has also been playing on recordings by country performers, albeit mostly the like of Carlene Carter and Mary-Chapin Carpenter who, even more than Desert Rose, are a little to the rock side of country’s mainstream. He’s been working with other artists, too, who long have blurred the lines between country and rock, including John Prine and, recently, Mike Nesmith.

That cross-genre sensibility was part of what attracted Jorgenson to Desert Rose in the first place. Hillman had pioneered country-rock with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Desert Rose continued somewhat in that tradition. But the effort carried mixed blessings.

“It was a nice balance,” Jorgenson said. “(Desert Rose) at its best was very powerful, had a strong instrumental and vocal attack.” And staying “a little to the left of mainstream country was good because it retained an identity. But if you’re left of the market, especially one that wasn’t as big as it is now, it gets difficult. We weren’t a bunch of guys who were going to put on cowboy hats. So it was difficult to keep morale up all the time.”

Also tough on Jorgenson’s morale was his inability to step forward in the Desert Rose Band, which came to be dominated by Hillman as a singer and writer, even though Jorgenson and co-founder Herb Peterson had proven their own talents in those areas. Handsome and relatively young, Jorgenson especially seemed a bit wasted in his role as sideman.

Without pointing fingers, Jorgenson said he was frustrated that the band never took advantage of its true collective potential. “That was my original idea, and it might have been the original concept in everyone’s mind, but it didn’t evolve that way,” he said. “Whenever people’s concepts are different, that leads to disappointment and non-harmony.”

He hasn’t soured entirely on the group concept--he gigs around Los Angeles as one-third of the guitar-wiz Hellecasters, with Jerry Donahue and Will Ray. But, with cautious optimism spurred by what he sees as a revival of rock guitar, he’s champing at the bit to lead his own band.

“I really enjoy that,” he said. “I get to connect more with the audience. As far as timing and being a guitar player, that couldn’t be any better right now. . . . There’s room for everything.”

* John Jorgenson plays Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, as part of the Orange County Musicians Foundation Benefit, which starts at 11:40 a.m. and will run till 9 p.m. Tickets: $20; special booths and balcony boxes for four to 10 people are available at $37.50 per person. (714) 362-4200 for information; (714) 496-8930 for tickets.