Clegg Faces Up to the Pain of Life : Pop music: The singer, who’ll play in Solana Beach, sees no point in running away from the world’s changes--even though some have caused him grief.

As the ‘90s opened, Johnny Clegg watched in awe at the radical changes in the world around him--the kind of changes that politically active musicians such as himself often cry out for, but all too rarely witness in their lifetimes.

The British-born, South Africa-reared singer-songwriter touches on the feeling of viewing history in the making in “Your Time Will Come” from “Heat, Dust and Dreams,” the new album by Clegg and his band, Savuka:

I saw the Berlin Wall fall

And I saw Mandela walk free

I saw a dream whose time has come

change my history--so keep on dreaming

The stinging irony is that while he was in the midst of recording that album, his friend and fellow band member Dudu Zulu was shot to death while trying to mediate a dispute between feuding South African clans.

Where all too often the wholesale brutality in the outside world forces the individual to take refuge in life’s small victories, Clegg found himself in the position of looking to global-scale political upheaval to provide a sense of balance in the wake of an intensely personal loss.

“It’s an irony,” Clegg said in a recent interview. “But I think South Africa is a country of ironies. It’s just the pain of living: You get the beautiful moments, you get the painful moments. You try to unravel them and make some sense out of them, which is what I was trying to do on the album.”

But there are some wounds even art can’t heal.

“It’s still a hole for me,” Clegg said, a few days into Savuka’s first U.S. tour in three years, and its first without Dudu Zulu. That tour brings the group through the Southland for shows Friday at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, Saturday at the Ventura Theatre and Sundayat the Belly Up in Solana Beach.

In addition to his role as one of Savuka’s percussionists, Dudu Zulu played a highly visible role as Clegg’s partner and foil in energetic Zulu dance numbers that climaxed each performance.

Clegg said he even considered disbanding the group when he began to feel it might be “cursed.”

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During the recording of Savuka’s previous album, “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World,” a professor and fellow anti-apartheid activist, David Webster, whom Clegg considered a friend and mentor, was assassinated in Johannesburg.

Ultimately, Clegg heeded his own words in “These Days,” from the new album: “Got to get up, got to move out / Face the tide beyond the door / Outside there’s a whole world changing / We can’t stand here, trapped inside.”

If anything, he said, Zulu’s death “has brought us closer together in a way. The band is stronger than ever.”

Clegg wishes he could say the same about the euphoria he felt immediately after the 1990 release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment, when the South African government took the first official steps toward dismantling apartheid and after the collapse of communism and with it, the Soviet Union.

“After the Berlin Wall, Mandela, Tian An Men Square, the pro-democracy efforts in Africa, what have we got? We’re left with a racist Germany, a huge ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia, a very, very fragile situation in the East, a complete mess in South Africa,” Clegg, 39, said.

“That’s what ‘These Days’ is about: We who dreamed that we could change the world, or at least contribute in some way to making it a better place, must not be disheartened by these events. We must have a long-term view.

“One senses a certain embarrassment in the liberal-progressive community. Some people are basically saying, ‘Maybe we were a little utopian, maybe we set our aims to high and we should have been more modest.’

“There are people who basically say, ‘I’ve done my bit, I don’t have any more energy, I just want to get on with my life.’ . . . This song is saying, ‘Look, you can’t run away.’ It’s not a matter of disengaging; we’ve got to get more engaged.”

It’s hard to think of Clegg managing to get more engaged.

Since he was 15, he’s been arrested numerous times for running afoul of South African laws aimed at keeping in place the wall separating the ruling white minority from the country’s black majority.

Mostly Clegg’s run-ins with the law stemmed from going places whites weren’t supposed to go, doing things whites weren’t supposed to do.

“To me, they were fun things, things I wanted to be a part of: dancing with Africans at a migrant workers’ hostel, playing with them at night on the roofs where they live, and things I wasn’t allowed, because of the apartheid laws, to do,” Clegg said.

His own two bands--Juluka (Zulu for “sweat”) and then Savuka (“we have arisen”), which formed after Juluka broke up in 1985--have flaunted the status quo with racially integrated lineups.

Clegg’s songs--sometimes overtly, sometimes metaphorically--frequently challenge any group that would deny equality to another.

He’s been phenomenally popular in South Africa--mostly through the band’s exuberant concerts (radio has often refused to play Savuka’s records)--and in many European countries.

He has yet to have a certified hit in the United States, no charted singles and a peak at No. 123 on Billboard with the “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World” album. But Clegg says he is feeling “pretty bullish” about the early response to the new album and single.

The band’s music itself is frequently a testimonial to the logic of integration: Western-friendly melodies and lyrical hooks typically are wedded to percolating Afro-pop rhythms.

That isn’t always an easy task. Like so many aspects of Clegg’s life, it has required him to unify elements as distinct as yin and yang.

“The problem between African cyclical musical structures and Western linear structures is the problem of the circle versus the line. . . . In ‘Tough Enough,’ I use the cyclical traditional format in the verse, a linear chorus, then back into the cyclical verse. The juxtaposition of the linear and the cyclical is, I think, one of the best I’ve ever done.”

Because the new album has a sparser sound that emphasizes guitars more than the keyboard-dominated predecessor, it seems natural to ask Clegg whether it represents just another step in his evolution as a musician, or something more like a turning point.

But what first appears to be a straightforward question strikes Clegg as another way of trying to pound a square peg through a round hole.

“This thing about evolution is a very Western notion,” Clegg said. “There’s tremendous pressure on artists to perceive their careers in a linear fashion, to know that you’re moving from one station to another to another.

“The true nature of art is that you go sideways, you go backward, you go laterally. You pick out things you’ve done, you mix the past, future and the present. . . . I see stuff in this album from the first album I ever did. A song like ‘The Crossing,’ reminds me of Juluka’s first album.

“Part of this concept of linearity and evolution (stems from) the business side of the record industry. Any corporation that’s involved in promoting product is going to want to convince the audience that this is a better version of last year’s model,” he said. “And I resent that in a way.

“Last year’s model was perfect for last year. All a record is is a snapshot of what you feel. Sometimes you can transcend that and if you’re very lucky in your lifetime you can write one or two evergreen, transcending songs that live for all time. . .

“As far as evolution, I think it works backward: It’s usually the early material that artists think is superior. Very few actually improve on their first four or five albums. Listen to early Peter Gabriel, early Police--I don’t think they improved on that stuff. I’d say there’s enough evidence to severely challenge the concept of artistic evolution.”

Clegg still lives in Johannesburg with his wife, Jenny, and their son, Jesse, who is almost 5. He says he prefers bringing up a child in the volatile atmosphere of South Africa to European countries such as Sweden or Scandinavia, where life may be more stable, but also more sterile.

“I grew up in a climate of violence in South Africa. . . . I believe in struggle, I believe you have to be in tension with the world in some way or other in order to become shaped and defined. Now clearly, you don’t want to expose your children to Beirut or those kinds of forces, if you can prevent it,” he said.

“At the same time, the South Africa you see in the media is a very fragmented and one-dimensional picture. The country is full of people, and they continue to fight, (but they also) get in fights with their mothers-in-law, and everyday life goes on.

“The song I wrote to Jesse--’Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World’--most of the other songs I’ve heard other artists sing for their children have been really wishy-washy, sentimental songs.”

In that song, “I said to my son: ‘You have to wash with the crocodile in the river / You have to swim with the sharks in the sea / You have to live with the crooked politician / Trust in those things you can never see.’

“That’s the real world. I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t bad. There is beauty and there’s wonder. But you have to understand that dependent on that are these other elements.”

At the same time, he’s quick to note that should tensions in his homeland reach the point where anarchy looked imminent, he would move his family out of the line of fire.

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As a former university professor of anthropology--a position that grew naturally out of his interest in African music and society--Clegg has spent much time considering the distinctions between European and African cultures.

“European civilizations have developed along a line of repressing instincts, or allowing them out only through very specific, socially sanctioned channels, which has led to a transcendental aesthetic like ballet and classical music. . . .

“These are the highest aesthetic moments that European culture gives you. What they are really is that they are desperate attempts by the human spirit to escape the bonds of earth.

“African aesthetic is exactly the opposite: It says to get down, get on to the earth, be a part of the earth, be earthbound, be connected to the earth, don’t try to transcend the earth. There’s a far more open tradition of expression.”

* Johnny Clegg & Savuka and Murray Attaway play at 8 p.m. Friday at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. $25. (213) 380-5005. Also Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Ventura Theatre, 26 S. Chestnut, Ventura. $17.50. (805) 648-1888. And Sunday, with Attaway and Bitoto, at 8 p.m. at the Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave., Solana Beach. $23.50 (advance); $26 (at the door). (619) 481-9022.