Slim Dunlap Emerges From Replacements’ Shadow : Music: Guitarist, who plays Bogart’s tonight, is slowly climbing the stairs of success. He has his own group and a solo album, “The Old New Me.”

Slim Dunlap played guitar for four years in the Replacements, one of themost acclaimed and influential rock bands of the 1980s.

But as he launched his solo recording career this year, (solo albums being de rigueur for ex-Replacements in ‘93), even committed Replacements fans probably had a dim idea of what Dunlap was about, and very slim expectations of what he could do.

The guitarist, whose given name is Bob, joined the Replacements for the more-stable but less-brilliant later chapters of an often-chaotic career that produced some of the best rock songs of the ‘80s. He played on “Don’t Tell a Soul,” a good album, but less memorable than the band’s definitive troika (“Let It Be,” “Tim” and “Pleased to Meet Me”), and on “All Shook Down,” the 1990 release that suggested the Replacements were about ready to call it a career--as they did the following year.

On stage, Dunlap was the skeletal-looking fellow who stood off to the right while most fans focused on front man Paul Westerberg, howling and croaking at center stage in his role as the game but overmatched rock ‘n’ roll prizefighter, or let their attention wander to bassist Tommy Stinson, who always had the coolly dissolute look of a born-rocker.

Dunlap, who headlines tonight at Bogart’s in Long Beach, may have been overshadowed in the Replacements, but his album, “The Old New Me,” is a more endearing work than Westerberg’s solo debut, “14 Songs.”

It rocks on a foundation of choppy, spitfire licks that are derived from Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones but are played with enough spin of his own to infuse that simple, familiar format with vigor, personality, and juicy raunch. Along the way, Dunlap also dabbles in rockabilly, swivel-hipped Latin rhythms, acoustic balladry that calls to mind both the Stones and early Bruce Springsteen, and offers sweetly lyrical picking on an old James Burton instrumental ballad.

Dunlap didn’t sing or write for the Replacements (that being the domain of Westerberg, the dominant member), but he emerges on his own album as a sturdy, warm-voiced singer. In his songwriting, he takes the stance of a weathered but wry observer who has seen hard knocks but has kept his compassion and his sense of humor through circumstances that might have left others bitter and jaded. Like Westerberg, he is firmly on the side of the underdog, figuring it’s better to have a big heart than to be a big deal.

Only “Partners in Crime,” an ode to rock’s big-hearted losers, sounds like a Replacements song. Instead of setting up comparisons between Dunlap’s album and solo records by Westerberg, Stinson and his other old band mate, drummer Chris Mars, it’s more apt to measure him against the recent solo work of Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The Old New Me” is the album that either of the Stones guitarists might have made if their singing voices weren’t pickled in formaldehyde, and if years of the limousine life hadn’t made it hard for them to reach back for a down-to-earth perspective.

As he spoke over the phone recently from a friend’s house in San Francisco, Dunlap was about as far from the halls of jaded superstardom as a rocker can get. A wheezing van had been unable to carry Dunlap and his band to Seattle for a gig the night before, so they had decided to crash on a hospitable floor before proceeding with the tour’s remaining dates in California.

Living in vans and on floors certainly means slimmer pickings than Dunlap enjoyed with the Replacements, who, while never best-sellers, emerged as a respectable concert draw during their latter years.

The hardships of low-budget touring don’t seem to have lowered Dunlap’s spirits or diminished the enthusiasm that he says is vital to what he does.

His first solo tour has been “as much fun as I’ve had on the road,” said the rocker, a friendly talker who speaks in the soft, drawling, easygoing voice of a rancher in a TV Western. “I’ve brought some guys that have never been on the road before. . . . Some guys have done it too long and lose the thrill of it, and I can’t stand that. If this ever becomes drudgery, I couldn’t do it.”

Dunlap, 41, had been part of the Minneapolis rock scene for years when the Replacements called on him to replace Bob Stinson, the unruly guitarist whose hard-living ways had exceeded even their high threshold of acceptable chaos.

Dunlap had grown up in the farming community of Plainview, Minn., indoctrinated in ‘50s and ‘60s rock by older sisters and a father who supported Dunlap’s interest in music. He moved to Minneapolis in his late teens, and embarked on an assortment of gigs that saw him play country music and R&B; as well as rock.

“I played in every little band I could play in, every band that would have me,” Dunlap recalled. “Slowly but surely, I got this reputation as a guy who could play anything. One night you’d see me play bluegrass in a little pizza shop, the next night it would be hard rock.”

Dunlap got a taste of touring in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as a member of Curtiss A, which recorded on the same Twin/Tone label that would launch the Replacements. With a laugh, he says that his wife, Chrissie (they’ve been together 23 years and have three children), probably has had a bigger impact on the bigger rock world than he has himself. Through much of the ‘80s, he said, she was the booking agent for First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub that was a hub of the city’s fertile rock scene.

“If we’d lived off what I made, we’d be hurtin,’ ” Dunlap said. “I’ve got the ultimate rock wife. Guys that do this and don’t have a home are the ones who go nuts.”

Dunlap had known the Stinson brothers for years, had played with Tommy Stinson in one of his side-bands, and had jammed a bit with Westerberg. He says that legend has it that the Replacements chose him in 1987 because they figured he could match them drink for drink at the bar, but that in fact they picked him because they knew he was a fast study who could play their style.

“Being the backup to Paul Westerberg is not the most enviable task,” said Dunlap, who remains friendly with Westerberg and Tommy Stinson. “His style is wickedly hard, the whole chord approach, and the odd sense of time. That’s what makes him what he is.”

Even if he was in the background, the Replacements gig took Dunlap from being a respected guy on a local scene to a figure with enough of a national profile to launch a solo career.

“It was a great thing,” he said of his run with the Replacements. “I wouldn’t be sitting here doing an interview without it.”

Dunlap said he liked the idea that people didn’t know enough about him to have strong expectations.

“With Tommy, you kind of expected his to be a little hellion record. And with Paul, I figured ’14 Songs’ would be similar to a Replacements record. But I could come out with anything.”

Recording for Twin/Tone, Dunlap said he kept his recording budget to $5,000 in a deliberate attempt to make a basic, uncluttered album. His lyrics are direct and stay close to personal experience. “Partners in Crime” was inspired by Dunlap’s warm feelings for old band mates who drifted away from rock ‘n’ roll, while “The King & Queen” pays tribute to a farm wife who delighted in dancing to the jukebox in his old home town, while her husband, the town tough, lurked about.

The album’s two acoustic ballads come from the most direct sort of personal experience. “Taken on the Chin” is a memorable, poignant sketch of life in mean urban streets. This, Dunlap says, is a case in which inspiration literally hit the artist in the face.

The song grew out of a confrontation with a drunken beggar on a Minneapolis street.

“A guy asked me for money, and the way he asked was so rude, I said it was the worst line I had ever heard, and I wasn’t going to give him one cent,” Dunlap recalled. “He punched me, bam, right in the choppers. It didn’t really hurt, but it kind of stunned me.” A cop was nearby, but refused to do anything.

“I kept saying, ‘Is that legal now, you can just punch somebody?’ He said, ‘Why don’t you just be a man and take it on the chin.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a song, dammit.’ Later, I realized the cop was right, that this person was just totally mentally ill, so what would be the point” of arresting him?

“The Ballad of the Opening Band,” a song that should be dear to any musician slogging it out on a local bar circuit, is about rockers who take it figuratively on the chin night after night, opening for hostile or indifferent audiences that have turned out to cheer barnstorming headliners.

It’s an underdog’s role that Dunlap has found himself in quite often--including a month’s worth of recent dates as opening act for a Dramarama tour.

“I have always loved to open,” he said. “You walk into a club and get that vibe: ‘Uh-oh, here we go.’ When you win over a crowd that starts out like that, it’s a fine feeling. But I also love when you don’t go over, the feeling of being the odd man out. It’s never really bothered me. If you don’t like me, that’s your right. It doesn’t upset me. Some people who hold themselves in extreme esteem find it hard to take, but I don’t.”

“People see (the scenario in ‘Opening Band’) as a sad thing, but the guy in the song gets to play,” he continued. “There are so many great musicians in America who didn’t get attention. They haven’t gotten any acclaim, but there’s a specific thing they do that nobody can touch. No one gives them the time of day, but they’re still out there doing it. That’s what I love. This business is all about the little eccentrics out there who get lost in the shuffle.

“That’s the sad thing about so many young bands now. They become players after they see Nirvana or the Replacements, because they think, ‘If we’re lucky, that could happen to us.’ You’re better off buying lottery tickets than trying to make it in the music business. I’m not a person who’s made or broken by (my) status in the business. That’s a big joke, because all the wrong people make it.”

Having drawn good notices with his first solo album, Dunlap plans to spend 1994 churning out not just a follow-up album, but three follow-up albums. The idea, he said, is to show up slow-moving commercial behemoths who create at a sclerotic pace enforced by today’s prevailing marketing strategies.

Dunlap is no fan of the current norm, in which a rocker will release an album, then tour endlessly to promote it, making sure to sop up every conceivable dollar that’s out there to be spent on the product. Typically, the artist will then lay low for at least a year or two before beginning the cycle again.

If that regimen had prevailed in earlier days, when corporate giants had yet to see rock’s vast commercial possibilities and develop ways to maximize the take from each release, we might have had only one or two Jimi Hendrix albums, instead of the five he made in a three-year span. The Doors’ pace of six studio albums in the four years before Jim Morrison’s death would have been similarly slowed. Bob Dylan might never have gotten around to writing and recording his revolutionary mid-’60s albums, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde,” because he would have been too harried and exhausted after spending all of ’65 and most of ’66 on the road pushing “Bringing It All Back Home.”

“The business shouldn’t restrict someone,” Dunlap said. “You should be making your music, not worrying who’s gonna like it, and see what happens.”

Now that Dunlap has escaped the shadows at stage right with one of the year’s best debut albums, it will be interesting to see what happens next for him.

* Slim Dunlap and the Freewheelers play tonight at 9 at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. $8. (310) 594-8975.