Bittersweet Journey of Archie Roach : Music: Aboriginal Aussie, who plays Coach House tonight, refuses to be haunted by past.

From Seattle to London to Compton, there has been no shortage in recent years of artists pushing anger and bitterness into their recordings. They all must have their reasons. But if anyone has a right to be angry and bitter, it is Archie Roach.

Like many aboriginal Australians of his generation, the 37-year-old singer was taken forcibly from his family when he was 6 years old as part of a government program of “assimilation.” In the words of a government representative at the time, the program was intended to allow the children to “live like white Australians do . . . a life worthy of a human being.”

Life for Roach became a series of foster homes, at least one of them brutal. His parents died before he could see them again. Disillusioned and dispossessed, he took to a scuffling, alcoholic life in the streets, interspersed with brawling and jail stints.

Over time he found ways to face his problems. One of them was with a guitar. And while there may be a lot of hurt, confusion and naked feeling in his music, there is no hostility.

On his debut album “Charcoal Lane” (released in the United States last year by Hightone Records), he turns the sharp pains of his past into arrows sent soaring upward by a voice that paradoxically blends the urgency of Bruce Springsteen’s ballad style with the sweetness and peace heard in the late Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui’s vocals.

The album has been acclaimed in Roach’s homeland and here. Hightone is about to release his second album, “Jamu Dreaming,” and Roach is making his second visit to the States, this time with fellow Aussies Paul Kelly, Deborah Conway and Chris Wilson on the “Melbourne Shuffle” package, which comes to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight.

The three-city mini-tour kicked off Friday at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Tex. Reached there by phone Thursday, Roach explained why he leaves the anger to others.

“I’ve already had my fill of being bitter and angry. There was nothing I could seem to do to get out of this trap where I was fighting people, physically and mentally. I got sick of feeling that way. I wanted some peace. I didn’t want the bad feelings anymore, didn’t want to feel bad toward anybody. I came to a point in time where I had to do something for myself, otherwise I would lose myself.

“When I stopped drinking, it helped. I had a bad drinking problem, and the people I met, lovely people from all walks of life that were afflicted with the same problem I had with drinking, they reached out and helped me. And it gave me a different outlook on life.”

More help came from music. Roach had grown up loving Sam Cooke, taking solace in his music. Later Kris Kristofferson’s music made him appreciate how much could be said with a lyric. After Roach began playing guitar, a relative suggested that he try writing about himself and his experiences. “So I did and it became a cathartic release for me.”

The resulting songs on “Charcoal Lane” track his life with unvarnished, affecting poetry, from “Took the Children Away” with its heartbreaking memories, to the bittersweet title song, which recounts times when he and other street alcoholics would “tarpaulin muster for a quart of wine.” It reminds one of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” in its depiction of the small, human riches to be found amid the poverty of life at the bottom.

Roach was discovered by Paul Kelly’s guitarist, Steve Connolly, and was asked to open shows for Kelly, which led to Roach’s record deal. The album won two Aria Awards (the Australian Grammy) and the attention he has received since--including a profile in People magazine--has caused people to look to him as a spokesman for aboriginal concerns.

It’s not a role he’s entirely comfortable with, in part because “after the isolation from my people, coming back I found myself in culture shock. But if there’s something I feel I should say, I will.

“Part of it is trying to explain to my people and others that I think we should deal (with the problems within the community) first and try to heal ourselves, make ourselves better, and then we can go on from there,” he said. “There are problems everywhere, and there are some particular to us, but I think our prospects are looking pretty good.

“What I’m trying to say is that some rotten things have happened, but we can’t dwell on that; otherwise we’d only chew on that and stagnate and our spirit no longer grows the way it should, and we no longer live the way we should spiritually,” he said. “We may live in the cities now, but you can still retain certain values. I think that’s what’s starting to happen now, rediscovering those old values, and we’re feeling more positive.”

In stark contrast to the ideas that prevailed during his childhood, there now seems to be a popular belief that the world’s non-technological societies represent a paradise of human harmony.

“That’s a myth,” Roach said flatly. “We’re still people with all these human emotions and feelings. We had ignorance. We had, if not all-out wars, our territorial skirmishes. And with the old traditional rules, the punishments can be pretty terrible. Basic human feelings are still there, things like jealousy and greed.”

But he does think that as the dominant cultures are finding their societies growing less controllable and less humane, there are important things that can be learned from aboriginal society.

“For me, there’s always been a special feeling among my people and a sense of belonging. Wherever I’ve gone in Australia, I’ve been looked after, just because of the common bond of our heritage that we share.

“In it, each individual is important. In our society right across the board the two most important people are the youngest child and the oldest person. If we don’t ensure that the youngest child and oldest person are well, we aren’t living up to our responsibilities.

“We don’t have a monopoly on spirituality or a monopoly on loving, sharing and caring for one another. It’s just that I suppose we’ve been practicing it for a bit longer.”

*

Roach met his musician wife Ruby Hunter when they both were homeless and living on the street (he tells a bit of her story in the new song “From Paradise”). Since pulling their lives together, they have taken to practicing what they preach: They not only have two sons but are registered foster parents with three long-term foster children in their home and others whom they take on “while their parents sort out whatever problems they have.

“When things go wrong for you as a child, and you’re not treated as a child should be,” Roach said, “I know I tend to reach out to children so that they don’t get hurt.”

The importance of having a family, he added, helps him keep the bloatedly self-important music business in perspective. It also helps him shape his music. Though the new “Jamu Dreaming” album doesn’t shy away from uneasy issues, it is decidedly more upbeat than his first album, and he said one reason is that he had his family in the studio with him this time.

“It made things a lot easier. Otherwise in the studio, it’s always like you’re down in the bunker. There’s no sense of time or space. Sometimes it can be really demanding and hard work when you’re doing one song for most of the day. To have my family there, and have them singing on some of the songs, makes me realize what I’m singing about. To me, it never has been just getting up and singing a song. But when my family is there it really brings it home.”

Another thing marking the shift in tone between the albums, Roach said, is that “the first album was more about where I’ve been and the sort of life I had. This one is more about my life now and which direction I’m taking.”

The album’s “Love in the Morning” is one of the most ebullient tunes about lovemaking to pop up in years. As opposed to such sleazeball horizontal hits as “Afternoon Delight,” the song has a truly celebratory air, with his wife’s carefree laugh and Roach’s mid-song declaration that “it’s a spiritual thing.”

“We once split up for a while because of the problems we had,” Roach said, “but we came back. For most couples love goes beyond a physical attraction, but it took me a while, because I was drinking and that, for it to become more than a physical thing for me.”

The polar opposite of that song, and the album’s darkest moment, is “Walking Into Doors.” It’s about spousal abuse, and Roach said “it’s a lesson I had to learn myself.

“I got that (title) from a poster against domestic violence I saw in a health clinic. In it there’s this sister sitting on a couch, all busted up bad, and she’s thinking to herself: ‘I’ll just have to tell the doctor I walked into a door again.’

The violence “happens when you’re out of work and spending 24 hours a day with all the frustrations and burdens of the bloody world on your shoulders and you don’t know what to do, and there’s no one else there to have a go at except your missus. We men may never know why we’re that way, but it’s just got to stop,” Roach said.

A great many of Roach’s songs focus on children. To him they’re not just symbols of purity and hope but the living embodiment of those qualities. The most poignant song on “Jamu Dreaming” is “Mr. T,” with its simple lyrics about a special moment rarely marked in songs:

*

The first time I saw my baby begin to walk,

It made me look. Now he can talk,

And the last time I phoned my baby it made him cry,

And it made me cry. Now I know why,

‘Cause he’s starting to understand the meaning of love.

*

“Mr. T is the name we gave to our foster son Terrance,” Roach said. “He was 2 or 3 and I was away in Perth in Western Australia with Paul Kelly. I rang up home and talked to everybody, and any other time before on the phone when I’d talked to Terrance he just said ‘Oh, hello, Dad’ and just took off and couldn’t care less. This was the first time when he heard my voice on the phone that he stopped and started crying because he didn’t know where I was.”

In the song Roach confesses to having missed such moments with the two sons he and Hunter had.

“When my boys were the same age, I never had that much time for them, never really knew them that well because I was drunk all the time. I’d have people around drinking, or go out drinking, or not come home.”

Often, he finds, music is the place where he confronts himself.

“A lot of the songs I wrote, like ‘Took the Children Away’ and ones like that, were ones that helped me come to terms with things--things I couldn’t deal with or talk about are dealt with in music. I wasn’t writing these songs for a record. That’s something I never thought of doing until I was approached to make that first one. So it’s really made me happy to have people come up to me in the States and tell me they’ve felt something in the songs too.”

* Archie Roach, Paul Kelly, Deborah Conway and Chris Wilson play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Show time: 8. $10. (714) 496-8930.