POP MUSIC : He’s a Happy-Go-Lucky Guy (Really) : American Music Club leader Mark Eitzel just writes songs about how life is so tough. Why? Sunny just isn’t very interesting.

The last thing you’d expect to get while interviewing Mark Eitzel is a suntan. As leader of San Francisco’s moody rock band American Music Club since the mid-’80s, Eitzel has forged a reputation as a songwriter who lives under a dark cloud. His music has been called frightening, self-loathing, tortured and brilliant--but never sunny .

After listening to AMC’s often bleak and despairing albums, you’d expect to find Eitzel sitting in his West Hollywood hotel room with the curtains drawn--if he were awake at 2 p.m. This is night music, late night .

Yet there he is, splashing around in the swimming pool.

Realizing it’s time for the interview, Eitzel quickly slips out of the pool, grabs a towel and heads to a lounge chair to talk.

“You know, it’s strange, but you get the feeling that some fans actually want to think of you as suicidal,” he says when the band’s extreme image is brought up.

“This guy in Australia even asked me about it during an interview: ‘Is your music suicidal?’ I told him, ‘No, it’s not . The music is about life, and, well, sometimes life is just hard.’ ”

It’s easy to see why Eitzel sometimes recoils at critics’ characterizations of him. Melody Maker magazine, in reviewing the group’s major-label debut this year, declared that most of Eitzel’s songs could stand as “short stories or love letters or suicide notes.” The Village Voice describes him as a writer who has “perfected the art of self-torture.”

And what does Eitzel think about all the darkness suggested by such song titles as “I’ve Been a Mess,” “Dallas, Airports, Bodybags” and “Apology for an Accident”?

“Putting all those emotions into songs actually helps you get through some of your problems,” he says, squinting in the afternoon rays.

“It isn’t hard on me at all. Maybe it is harder on the listener. . . . Maybe that’s why people worry about me and seem to want to psychoanalyze me. Sometimes I feel I ought to lay down on a couch when people interview me.”

Leaning back on the lounge chair, he puts a hand over his forehead and adopts a pained expression--as if ready for the analysis to begin once again.

Smiling only slightly, he says, “Now, what is it you want to know?”

If critics seem to be competing to see who can come up with the most colorful tag for Eitzel’s music, others are devoted to outdoing each other in lauding that music.

Rolling Stone magazine called the group’s “Everclear,” which was released on the tiny Alias Records label, one of the five-best albums of 1991 and named Eitzel as that year’s best songwriter. Blowing away all competition, an Irish rock weekly has declared flatly that Eitzel is “the greatest living songwriter.”

That kind of praise for a virtually unknown band raises expectations--not only visions of extraordinary music, but also of a songwriter with a larger-than-life persona.

The music speaks for itself, but Eitzel hardly fills the latter bill as he sits on the lounge chair.

He’s thin and pale and somewhat wary of all the sudden interest in him these days. After all, he’s not exactly your average rock star.

Eitzel--who wears a business suit onstage and has a stark, close-cropped hairstyle--is in his mid-30s and has played for years before crowds of 50 to 100 people. “Mercury,” the band’s major-label debut on Warner Bros. Records, comes after six albums on various U.S. and British independents.

Until recently, in fact, everyone in the San Francisco-based quintet still worked day jobs. Eitzel collected a check for stacking books at a Bay Area library.

Despite the acclaim his music has received, the soft-spoken Eitzel tends to downplay his own accomplishments--to the point of stopping in the middle of a long, rambling story to apologize for what he feels is his inarticulateness.

“Interviews are really hard for me,” he says anxiously. “If I’m smart, it’s only in the songs. It’s not in me.”

In the best of those songs, Eitzel combines the confrontation of Elvis Costello with the confessions of Leonard Cohen as he explores questions of self-worth.

Yet his music isn’t without moments of disarming wit or even absurdity--hence such titles as “What Godzilla Said to God When His Name Wasn’t Found in the Book of Life.” He calls his publishing company I Failed in Life Music.

In one of his most ambitious songs, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” Eitzel lays all his songs in front of the veteran balladeer and asks him to help Eitzel understand what he is doing wrong--why the songs haven’t touched more people or brought more happiness.

The song could be seen as simply a good joke--a put-down of Vegas-style pop stars. But much of the song’s power comes from the vulnerability of Eitzel’s acknowledgment of his confusion and frustration as an artist.

Eitzel was born in the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek, the younger of two children. His father was in the Army, his mother a housewife. The family moved frequently--stopping in such locales as Taiwan and England, where he lived during most of his teen years.

“As a kid, I was always pretty alienated . . . never had any friends,” he says. “But it was OK.

“One thing those years taught me was that a lot of people don’t know how to be alone. That’s one thing about Army kids. You can always tell them apart. They are usually politer than most people and they are also a little separate.”

Eitzel’s musical favorites during his childhood and teen years included such mainstream pop acts as the Beatles and (surprise) the Monkees. Despite their cartoonish image, the Monkees often had excellent material, including John Stewart’s “Daydream Believer” and Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

“Mostly, I was interested in words,” he says. “I always wanted to be a writer--short stories, plays, whatever. Songwriting just worked best for me. To me, a song is like a puzzle I am trying to figure out. And a good song should have a bit of mystery in it so that it can take on different meanings the more you hear it.”

Although he had different favorites over the years, the music that hit him the hardest was the punk music he heard in England in the late ‘70s.

“Punk and the Sex Pistols changed everything for me,” he says. “It just swept away all the numb, vacuous music that preceded it in the ‘70s. I went home after seeing the Damned and wrote my first song.”

If the teen-age Eitzel fell in love with the do-it-yourself rawness of punk, he stopped short of the colorful, safety-pin symbolism of the British movement.

“I refused to get involved, because I thought punk-rock was not about how you dress, but how you think and what your attitudes are,” he says.

Returning to America in 1978, Eitzel eventually enrolled at Ohio State University, where he started his first band, the Cowboys.

After moving to San Francisco, he formed American Music Club as an acoustic trio in 1982. The outfit often played poetry readings because it couldn’t get booked in regular rock clubs. There was a rawness and individuality about those early shows, by most accounts, that became even more pronounced as the lineup expanded over the years.

“Mark’s music seemed so extremely honest, like someone was reaching out, trying desperately to grab you,” said bassist Dan Pearson, who is joined in the current lineup by Vudi on guitar, Bruce Kaphan on pedal steel and keyboards and Tim Mooney on drums.

Acclaim came steadily, but sales and money were meager as the group released its various independent albums and played small clubs around the country.

No one was more surprised than Eitzel when Warner Bros. Records offered his band a contract last year. But he and the band were clearly ready for a change. They were weary of the club circuit and of hearing fans constantly complain about being unable to find their albums in stores.

“After ‘Everclear’ we decided we weren’t going to make another album with an independent,” Eitzel says. “It’s not worth it. You go on tour and there’s no support from the record company. You end up sleeping on floors because there was five of us to a room.”

Michael Ostin, the Warner Bros. Records executive who signed American Music Club, remembers the excitement of seeing the group for the first time.

“Everything was so loose and ragged, yet so unbelievably heartfelt,” Ostin, senior vice president of artists and repertoire, said in a separate interview. “They connect on such a pure, raw, emotional level. Mark wears his heart on his sleeve like nobody else. It’s like he takes a knife and cuts his guts open and lays them out on the table.”

The “Mercury” album has received glowing reviews, but sales have been modest. The collection reached the Top 20 on the college-alternative rock radio charts but didn’t crack the Top 200 on the pop sales charts.

But Ostin is satisfied with the group’s progress.

“I’ve already heard a couple of new things he has written, and he just gets better,” Ostin says of Eitzel. “I think we, as a record company, just (need to) stay committed to them--and allow them to make records and grow.”

Onstage at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, Eitzel paces nervously as the band plugs in for the first number.

When the music starts, he’s already at full throttle vocally. He howls and shouts and screams, reaching all the time to express the extremes of his songs.

Things work marvelously for a few numbers, but Eitzel pushes too hard and his voice gives out like a blown speaker. He tries a couple more notes, then gives up and heads for the dressing room. He returns a few minutes later without the band and tries again to sing. But it doesn’t work. The voice is gone for the evening.

Rather than go back to the dressing room, Eitzel walks dejectedly through the crowd and out the front door. It’s the kind of fiery exhibition that fuels Eitzel’s hip, underground status. But he dislikes it when words like clever and hip are applied to his music.

“The goal isn’t to be clever or hip,” he says forcefully during the hotel interview. “Cleverness by itself is nothing--because your work can be clever and still be meaningless and cold.

“The goal is to be honest and true, which is why I admire someone like Paul Westerberg so much. I trust him as a writer, which is the best compliment I can give someone.”