Growing Up With the Blues : Pop music: Kid Ramos first picked up a guitar at age 14 and joined the James Harman Band at 21. After a few years off, he’s back with a new ensemble, which will be performing tonight in Dana Point.

Kid Ramos is 34 now, but “Kid” he remains. Back on his 25th birthday his old band mates tried renaming him Adult Ramos, but it just didn’t stick.

At the time, the muscular guitarist with the character-actor face was one of the pistons firing the James Harman Band, which to this writer was far and above the best band ever to come tearing out of this county.

Veteran bluesman Harman still fronts an exciting outfit, but the group’s ‘80s lineup--with Ramos and the late Hollywood Fats constantly juicing each other with their guitars--was a magical and volatile combination of musical personalities you’re lucky to come across a few times in a lifetime.

When Ramos left the band five years ago, it was to take up the adult life of being a husband and breadwinner, pursuits not always consonant with a career in the blues.

People started calling him Dave instead of Kid. Unless you happened to be on his bottled-water delivery route or in the church where he played on Sundays, the man considered by many musicians to be one of the best blues guitarists on this coast had all but dropped out of sight.

But at the handful of gigs he’s played in recent years--including one backing Bruce Willis at the Planet Hollywood opening last fall--he’s been attacking the blues with the same zeal, whimsy and unguarded emotion that earned him his nickname.

Now he’s starting to play locally with a band of his own: Kid Ramos & the Big Rhythm Combo featuring Lynwood Slim, a name that may be a tight fit on the marquee of the Heritage Brewing Company, where they play tonight in Dana Point.

Sitting in the well-kept, ‘50s-furnished Anaheim house he and wife, Linda, share, Ramos explained earlier this week why he’s returned to performing, and why he’s keeping his day job.

“I caught the desire to play again,” he said.

“This time it’s for the fun of it and the love of the music. We really beat our heads against the wall in the Harman Band. It was always, ‘We’re going to get this big record deal,’ or ‘We’re going to reach this pinnacle and it’ll be OK.’ And in the meantime we couldn’t make a living.”

Though he felt he made the right decision to leave the musical life behind five years ago, it wasn’t an easy one.

“I was scared because I was 28, married and had no money in the bank and no trade. All I’d ever done was play guitar. There were times when I couldn’t listen to music, because if I did I really started getting the Jones to play.”

Ramos was a genuine kid when he first picked up a guitar at age 14, his interest fortified by a pair of B.B. King and T-Bone Walker albums he’d bought after reading an interview in which Duane Allman recommended them. Given a nylon-stringed classical guitar by his step-dad, the first thing he learned to play was a Chuck Berry riff.

“My parents were professional opera singers. It was great because since they were musicians, they were real tolerant when I wanted to learn to play guitar.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, you’ll end up in the gutter.’ There was always music in the house. They’d have musician friends over for parties that featured pasta and opera. There’d be people sleeping under the piano when I’d get up the next day,” he said.

His first electric guitar was a budget Kay purchased from a pawn shop. “I was working at a gas station my family owned, and every day I’d walk by this pawn shop on Anaheim Boulevard, look at this guitar and say, ‘Man, I gotta have this thing!’ It was a real funky Gumby-shaped-lookin’ one for $37.50.

“I finally saved up enough money and bought it, and it was the worst thing I ever owned, horrible,” he said. “The strings were so high I got scabs on my fingers playing it, but I’d practice on it all day, in the morning before school, then at night until I’d fall asleep with it.”

He played in a number of bands in high school, doing keggers and block parties, but, “at that age everybody was into playing Led Zeppelin and all that.

“I couldn’t find guys that liked the kind of music I liked. I’d try to get them to do one or two blues numbers, but nobody could ever play it right. So when I finally heard James Harman it was like a dream to me.”

Ramos went to a club gig of the Alabama-born singer-harmonica player at the urging of county guitar guru Steve Soest. At the same time, Soest had been suggesting to Harman that he check out the then-21-year-old Ramos as a potential band member.

“We went down to the Newport Red Onion, and I was blown away by the way they sounded, though the guy they had on guitar was kind of scatter-brained and didn’t bother learning the songs. So James was looking for a guitar player.

“He called me up to sit in. I was very nervous and this guy’s guitar was nearly booby-trapped--very hard for me to play. I felt like I didn’t do well at all, but James invited me back, so I went home and practiced all day.”

Soon Harman was inviting him to sit in regularly, which didn’t sit too well with the band’s regular guitarist. Before long Harman asked Ramos to replace the old guitarist, who in the meanwhile had been getting irked by Ramos’ frequent guest appearances.

Ramos related, “The way I heard it, James told the other guitar player, ‘I’ve got to talk to you about something.’ And the guy said, ‘I know what it is. It’s that kid. You want me to tell him to quit coming around, right? To let him down easy?’ ”

The next thing Ramos knew he was playing with Harman five nights a week, three sets a night, “and then at the end of the night he’d hand me money. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do it.

“I totally owe a lot to James. I was struggling to rise to the occasion,” Ramos said. “I didn’t know all this stuff about the blues, about what went down in West Helena, Ark., and all these other different veins of the blues.

“James taught me all that stuff. We had awesome times, those record parties he used to have. We’d play old blues records and just point at them going around because the music was so unbelievable. We’d sit there at three in the morning listening, and almost crying because it was so good.”

He definitely felt he fit his nickname at the time.

“These guys I was playing with were like men . I didn’t know anything and they were heroes to me, people like Junior Watson (who was then living in Harman’s house) and Fats. They wouldn’t actually sit down and show me anything, but just being in the same room with them was in incredible education,” he said.

The real education took place on stage.

“I remember one stretch where we played 21 nights in a row, and we loved it, because that’s where we invented the music. It wasn’t a structured thing. It was growing and changing and surprising every night, where you’re so in the thick of it you hardly know what’s going on. Playing with Fats (who died in 1986) forced me to be the best I could, because he was always on . I’ve seen the guy drink a whole bottle of cough medicine and still play like a genius,” Ramos said.

The group was a popular club act in L.A. and Orange County, built a strong following on the road and turned out some critically lauded records. They had a musician’s musicians reputation that regularly drew members of X, ZZ Top, the Blasters and Los Lobos to their shows.

But as other non-mainstream bands have found, the more they tried to reach the next level of success, the more it eluded them.

That frustration, combined with changes in Ramos’ life and personality conflicts in the band, led Ramos and others to leave Harman’s group in 1988. Though they since have patched things up, the parting at the time, Ramos said, “was ugly and sad.”

“It wasn’t like breaking up a business. It ran deeper than that,” because the music and camaraderie between them had been so rare.

“But I had a wife. I couldn’t see getting married and then being gone all the time. When I got married I wanted to be a husband . I wanted to be the best at that I could be.

“I also had become a Christian. I never could sleep well on the road, so I started reading the Bible, the Gideons’ one they’d leave in every hotel room. I started having a change of heart about things.

“I didn’t have any conflict with playing blues music or anything, but I got involved working with youths at the church, and that’s more what I wanted to do. I couldn’t do that if I was on the road,” he said.

After a while he began accepting calls to do gigs occasionally. He was flown to the East Coast to play some shows with Roomful of Blues, and for a time was the guitarist of the Blue Shadows, the L.A. blues band that has since changed its name to the Red Devils, gained a major label contract and recorded with Mick Jagger. When the band started to get successful, he left because the more frequent gigging was making it hard for him to wake up in the morning for his water-delivery job.

After a period of relative inactivity, last fall he got the bug to start playing more. He started accepting more gigs, but found that wasn’t satisfying him.

“Some of these things were really bogus. I did one where I almost packed it up in the middle of the gig. There was this horrible guitar player drowning me out and a drummer who couldn’t find the beat. At that point I decided to try to get some guys together that I want to play with and not have to do stuff like that. If you’re going to play, you may as well do something you’re going to love.

“A lot of the people playing ‘blues’ have no feeling for it. You have to have a love and respect for this music. It has to be played right. It needs to have the essence there. Otherwise it’s going to die.”

Though his new band is still in a “let’s see what develops stage,” he thinks the musicians all feel the essence of the music.

The lineup is singer-harmonica player Lynwood Slim (who most recently has worked with Junior Watson) and longtime blues scene regulars Fred Kaplan on keyboards, Richard Innes on drums and Tyler Pederson on bass. The group’s sax player, Johnny Vu, isn’t expected to make tonight’s show because he’s touring with the Pleasure Barons.

Ideally, Ramos wants to have two more horn players in the lineup, though as it is he’s already taking less money for himself at some gigs just to properly pay the members he has. He’d like a band that can assay all blues styles, and even branch into swing or maybe even mambo music.

“I’m just excited to see what happens,” he said, though he has mixed feelings about the band becoming too successful.

“Music is my love, but it has to fit into everything else. My wife is pregnant, and I want to watch my kid grow up. If I could have that and make a comfortable life of it, obviously I’d quit carrying bottles of water around.”

* Kid Ramos & the Big Rhythm Combo featuring Lynwood Slim plays tonight at 9 at Heritage Brewing Co., 24921 Dana Point Harbor Drive, Dana Point. $3. (714) 240-2060.