Playing by His Own Rules Now : Pop music: Versatile instrumentalist David Lindley is out of the industry fast lane and setting his own pace. He plays the Coach House tonight.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of the music industry that the only way David Lindley is likely to hit No. 1 with a bullet might be with an actual bullet.

Though he’s one of the most respected instrumentalists rock music has produced, accompanying such artists as Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt as well as creating his own distinctive brand of rock, he doesn’t even have a record contract these days, much less anything that’s moving up the charts.

Lindley has, however, taken to racking up trophies in competitive target pistol shooting. Mr. Dave, as he likes to be known, was a singular enough figure on the rock scene, with his wisteria-like lank black hair, steel-wool sideburns and blindingly clashing polyester outfits.

Now the gun world gets to wonder about him, as he roams international competitions in Tennessee and other locales with his bolt-action .22 with high-rise scope mount--a “bizarre” gun that Lindley says looks like “something that should be in a hospital.”

He must get his guns at the same Twilight Zone pawnshop he buys his instruments in. Along with coaxing music out of the most discounted of discount-store guitars, he plays a plethora of stringed things, including saz , cumbash , oud, zither, 1920s-vintage Hawaiian guitars, eight-stringed fiddle, banjo and his current passion, a niblets-sized cumbash , which in standard size is a 12-stringed fretless Turkish banjo with a metal bowl for a back.

Lindley will bring some of his musical menagerie to the Coach House tonight with his pal, hand-drummer Hani Naser.

It’s part of something of an “unplugged” tour--not just instrumentally unplugged, but unplugged from the record industry and the fast-lane treadmill of the music business.

“You have to get out of the fast track, because the fast track is the thing that eats you up,” Lindley said by phone from his Claremont home last week. “I’ve already done that, so I don’t have to do it anymore. I don’t like working for record companies.”

He’s certainly done his time. In the late ‘60s, he was in Kaleidoscope, a band whose Middle-Eastern-meets-Cajun-meets-psychedelia predilections were a little heady even for those times.

In the ‘70s, he distinguished himself as a session player and as the emotive musical counterpart to Jackson Browne’s vocals. But after gracing one Browne tune with a twisted guitar solo that Lindley likened in tone to a “sick seal,” he thought it best to strike out on his own.

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Leading the band El Rayo-X, Lindley came out flying with the album-radio hit “Mercury Blues” in 1981. He recorded three albums for Elektra/Asylum, the last being 1988’s “Very Greasy,” and toured like crazy to promote them.

El Rayo-X hasn’t performed in more than three years now (Lindley says he may take the band down off the blocks one of these days). He’s spent his time instead with his family, on his shooting, woodshedding on new instruments and new techniques, plus taking on projects that are either low-pressure or of special interest to him, such as performing with Naser and journeying to appear at an Asian music festival in Kazakhstan.

He said it wasn’t difficult deciding to sidestep the cluttered road to stardom. “It’s like, you know when you’re at a bad party, and it’s not fun, and then you kind of leave. You know when to.”

Instead, Lindley has put out an album on his own terms on his own label: Pleemhead. (The moniker came to him out of the ether one day when he was trying to remember someone’s name.)

Titled “David Lindley + Hani Naser Live in Tokyo, Playing Real Good,” the album is just that, full of feeling, rampant musicianship and Lindley’s high nasal vocals. He sells the CD at shows and by mail. (It’s available for $17, postpaid, from “The National Endowment for I, Mr. Dave,” P.O. Box 1342, Claremont, Calif. 91711).

The bad part of doing it yourself, he says, is that you actually have to do it yourself: He spent the evening before embarking on his tour working through the bookkeeping on the album.

It does have its advantages, though.

“For one thing, you get paid ,” he said, with undisguised glee. “You actually get paid for doing it. When you go and you do an album for a record company, you don’t see any royalties. If you write songs, you wind up putting them on the album whether they’re good or not, because then you at least get some publishing money. That’s the only way the artist makes any money. No one makes any royalties, unless you’re gigantic. Instead, the money is always ‘in the pipeline.’

“I’ve seen my albums all over the world, and everybody has them. It’s unbelievable how many records ‘El Rayo-X’ sold, and I still owe Elektra/Asylum $200,000.”

(An album’s recording and promotion costs are charged against artists’ royalty earnings. That’s how an artist can still wind up in debt to a record company on an album that has sold thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of copies.)

“Those albums have been out there forever,” he said. “With this CD, I’ve made more off of this in the first two weeks than I did in five years on Elektra/Asylum. That tells you something.

“What this does is it makes up for all that. I make sure everyone who participated in it--Hani, the engineers and all--get a percentage. And then I get the rest . Heh, heh, heh, heh. It’s actually payday.”

He feels that CDs generally are overpriced, and while the price of his is certainly up there with the rest, he said he may charge less for subsequent releases. In the meantime, he’s still reveling in finally getting paid for his efforts.

“Every once in a while you feel like the chimp--you know, the performing chimp. And you’ve got to get the banana for the chimp, see. Chimp’s got to get the banana! And this works out pretty well that way,” he said.

Something else working out is his resurrection of a quaint old notion: the honor system.

In the album’s liner notes, he acknowledges that some people will be making cassette copies. He asks that they send him $5 if they can afford to. If they can’t, he says he’ll understand, but adds that if they’re lying, “I’ll come to your house late at night and wait until you’re asleep and come into your dreams like Freddy Krueger . . . but worse, much worse.”

The notes are accompanied by a self-portrait of him playing slide guitar with a Buck knife. He says compliance has been pretty good so far.

He has more releases in mind for the label. The first probably will be “David + Hani Live in Maui, Playing Even Better.” He also has a live recording of El Rayo-X from the Belly Up in Solana Beach he would like to release.

There also is a recording he made with fellow slide guitar master Ry Cooder in Japan that he would like to see released. He also said he’d love to record and tour with Cooder more. They’ve collaborated on some soundtrack work, most recently for the upcoming Walter Hill film “Geronimo.”

That’s also Lindley’s slide guitar opening the “Beverly Hillbillies” soundtrack and prominently featured in Sean Penn’s “Indian Runner.” He composed and performed the music to “Song of Sacajawea,” an album and cartoon video narrated by Laura Dern on the Rabbit Ears label.

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His other recent project of note was his 1991 sojourn to Madagascar with guitarist Henry Kaiser to record with local musicians. They came back with three albums’ worth of material, the second of which, “A World Out of Time, Vol. 2,” was released this year.

It contains some of the most subtly stunning music you’re ever likely to hear, and like most things Lindley involves himself in, odd combinations of cultures that seem like the most natural thing in the world.

One such juncture is the album’s version of Lindley singing Merle Haggard’s “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” backed by the local players. “So it’s a Malagasy-reggae-Lindley kind of thing, with a solo in it that sounds like Paraguayan harp music. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever been on,” he said.

He also thinks he’s done some of the best playing of his life with Naser, whose drumming on the goblet-shaped Middle Eastern tombek follows Lindley’s every nuance, while also prodding him into new musical flights. Those are moments of transcendence for Lindley.

“The best times you play is when you don’t even remember what you were doing. In a way, you can’t participate in it, you can’t listen to it the way an audience listens to it. You don’t say to yourself, ‘Now I’m going to do this, and then I’m going to do that.’ You can’t think of how you look while you’re doing it or about making a mistake. You just do it, and that’s all you can do.

“I can remember several times when we really got going, me and Hani, when we went into another place. We couldn’t believe it, and also couldn’t remember it,” he said with a laugh. “That’s the good stuff. That’s what we try for.”

* David Lindley and Hani Naser, with opening act Hans Olson, play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $16.50. (714) 496-8930.