It’s Time to Pass Go and Collect Again : Pop: Jack Tempchin, whose prime songwriting properties are about to pay, plays the Laguna fire benefit today.

The two veterans of the Southern California rock scene were sitting in a cozy recording studio, talking about what it means for a songwriter to come up with a hit that turns into a rock standard.

“It’s like having hotels in Monopoly,” suggested Steve Wood, whose ‘70s band, Honk, got on the game board but never cashed in.

That raised a grin on the bearded, bespectacled face of Wood’s friend, Jack Tempchin.

“Somebody (just) landed on my hotel,” Tempchin said.

For two decades, Tempchin--a tall, wry, soft-spoken San Diegan--has held the lease on two penthouse suites in the Hotel California. He wrote “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and co-wrote (with Rob Stradlund) “Already Gone.” The Eagles recorded them, and you probably know the rest of the story, not to mention the melodies and most of the words.

Tempchin’s two prime properties are paying dividends again: Both are included in “Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles,” a new compilation album in which contemporary country stars cover signature songs from the most popular band of the ‘70s country-rock movement. The album, a benefit for ex-Eagle Don Henley’s favorite cause, the preservation of the historic Walden Woods in Massachusetts, has spent the past seven weeks in the Billboard Top 10.

Tempchin, 46, approves heartily of the new versions of his songs: Little Texas’ close-to-the-original rendering of the love song, “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” and Tanya Tucker’s interesting take on “Already Gone,” which registers a good deal of hurt to go with the original’s triumphant expression of kiss-off scorn for an ex who has been found wanting.

Tempchin, who has homes in Los Angeles and in the San Diego County community of Encinitas, also approves heartily of what the new album will do for his bank balance. Most of the proceeds from sales of “Common Thread” have been earmarked for the Walden preservation project, but Tempchin, who didn’t know about the album until he read about it in Billboard, says that nobody has pressured him to kick in his songwriter’s royalty.

“It was nice of them (not to ask),” he said.

Tempchin will be turning his talents toward a charitable cause today, when he performs on a benefit bill at the Coach House for the Laguna Fire Relief fund. The Laguna Fire Relief is a community group that gives money directly to people who sustained fire losses.

Tempchin may dip into the bag of well-known songs he has written, which also includes “Slow Dancing,” a romantic ballad that was a Top 10 hit for Johnny Rivers in 1977, and several solo hits by Glenn Frey, the former Eagle with whom Tempchin has maintained a steady songwriting partnership for 12 years.

More likely, though, Tempchin will offer a sizable helping of his recent stuff. Since taking a couple of years off in 1990-91, this low-keyed, low-profile musician has been staying busy. In 1992, Tempchin released “Staying Home,” an album that he literally stayed home to record at his house in Encinitas. He recently completed “After the Rain,” enlisting Wood’s help to lay final over-dubs on tracks originally recorded about five years ago. And a third do-it-yourself album, the blues-flavored “Lonely Midnight,” is due out early next year. For the past 2 1/2 months, Tempchin and his band, the Cosmic Ramblers, have been playing from 8 to midnight every Tuesday at the Marine Room Tavern in Laguna Beach. They’ll skip their date on Dec. 7, then resume the following week.

Tempchin has financed his recent recordings himself and is hoping to find a label to market and distribute them. “After the Rain,” which features a sleek harmony sound abetted by Frey, J.D. Souther, Timothy B. Schmidt and David Crosby, is about to be released on a small German label, Taxim.

“Common Thread” is the country establishment’s acknowledgment of what has been obvious now for years: the ‘90s Nashville sound that has brought on a sales boom for country music owes a huge debt to the ‘70s Southern California country-rock sound that Tempchin helped make popular.

Tempchin figures Nashville is entitled to recycle that sound; as he sees it, country music is simply reclaiming something it loaned to the California rockers.

“We stole all their stuff in the ‘60s,” he said. “And it’s not like they’re copying. They’ve got the same people there making records” who 20 years ago were working as players and producers in Los Angeles.

Tempchin recently resumed making trips to Nashville to write songs for the country market.

“I was going to Nashville (regularly), but then I stopped a couple of years ago, right when (the market for country music) took off,” he said. “For years they’d been telling me, ‘It’s going to be huge, man.’ ” Emmylou Harris (“White Shoes”) and George Jones (“Someone You Used to Know”) are among the country singers who have recorded Tempchin’s material.

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One excellent result of Tempchin’s Nashville connection is “Bad Seeds,” an elegiac outlaw anthem he wrote with country singer John Brannen. It has become a staple for the Missiles of October, the fine Laguna Beach roots-rock band that also will play at the fire relief benefit.

Tempchin says that he didn’t start playing the guitar and writing songs until he was about 20 and that he began writing his own material so he wouldn’t have to struggle with the difficult chords that might crop up if he had to play somebody else’s. While enrolled at San Diego State, where he graduated with a triple major in psychology, English and music, he began playing the coffeehouse circuit, observing and learning from such players as Hoyt Axton and Mississippi John Hurt.

“It was a casual scene. You could just write your own songs and get up and play. It was almost like a Beat coffeehouse in the ‘50s,” Tempchin recalled. “In the coffeehouses, people started doing my songs. That’s what gave me the idea I could be able to write.”

Tempchin struck up a friendship with Frey and Souther, L.A.-based musicians who performed together as Longbranch Pennywhistle.

“I had just finished writing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ right before the Eagles got together,” Tempchin recalled. “Glenn heard it and he got me to sing it into a tape recorder, and then he took it over (to the rest of the band) and they worked it up.” Tempchin said the song grew out of mellow romantic moments with not one girlfriend, but several in succession.

“I was having relationships at an accelerated rate at that time. One verse was one relationship, and the next verse was another girl.”

Tempchin didn’t get a chance to make his own mark as a performer until the mid-’70s, when he joined two other singer-songwriters, Orange County veteran Richard Stekol (a Honk alumnus who now plays in Tempchin’s Cosmic Ramblers) and Pittsburgh transplant Jules Shear, to form the Funky Kings. They did the original version of “Slow Dancing,” reaching No. 61 on the Billboard singles chart in 1976. The Funky Kings broke up after releasing one album (titled “Funky Kings”) for Arista, and Tempchin subsequently did a solo album for the label.

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Tempchin says he felt special satisfaction when “Slow Dancing” became a hit for Rivers.

“It showed it wasn’t just Glenn and the Eagles” who made his work click with a mass audience, he said. A lovely, aching, simply wrought remake of the song appears on the “After the Rain” album.

Tempchin released a solo album for Arista in the late ‘70s and spent a few years on the road opening for such headliners as Kenny Loggins and Chicago. Tempchin and Frey began their songwriting partnership in 1981, the year the Eagles broke up. Frey had liked some songs Tempchin sent him during the Eagles’ final days, and they had their first writing session at Frey’s house as he prepared for a post-Eagles solo career.

As Tempchin tells it, they thought so much of what came out of that session that all of it ended up in Frey’s waste basket.

“I came over the next day and he had taken the pads out of the trash and looked at ‘em and thought it wasn’t so bad,” Tempchin remembers. The retrieved batch of songs included two that would become signature hits for Frey, “The One You Love” and “Party Town.”

Since then, Tempchin has co-written the bulk of Frey’s solo material, including the hits “You Belong to the City” and “Smuggler’s Blues.”

“We just sit down and write ‘em when he has a record to do,” Tempchin said. It appeared that Frey’s recording career would be put on hold earlier this year as he took the lead role in a TV series, “South of Sunset.” But CBS canceled the show after just one episode, and Tempchin said that he and Frey are working now on material for another album.

“He’s going to do an album of early-Eagles-sounding things, all new songs,” Tempchin said. “We’ve already written a bunch of stuff for it.”

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When Tempchin opened for Frey at the Coach House last year, his performance had to come as a mild shock for anyone who associated him strictly with the mainstream hits he has written. His solo set was steeped in the blues and veered occasionally into the kind of off-kilter territory you’d expect from such performers as Tom Waits. “Shut Up and Get Me a Beer,” for instance, peered in on a slice of domestic hell, while “Late Night TV” was a strange little tale of isolation and tube addiction that ended with an apt musical quotation from “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground--a band that Tempchin surprisingly cites as one of his early influences.

In those songs, Tempchin says, his “beatnik poet” inclinations surface. When he is writing songs pitched toward Frey’s mainstream following, he writes from an entirely different angle.

“When you write with a partner, a different thing takes over,” he said. “If people come to see me thinking it’s going to sound like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ by the Eagles, it’s not.”

In 1990, Tempchin decided to take a rest from music--beatnik poet, mainstream pop or otherwise.

“I was tired of music. I thought, ‘I’ve done that. I’ll try some other stuff here.’ But you go, ‘Wait a minute, this other stuff isn’t any fun.’ ”

About two years ago he started performing again, playing blues in a little bar near his Encinitas home. Then he worked up the folk-oriented “Staying Home” album in his home studio.

“After the Rain” has some of the old ‘70s Southern California polish to it. The highlights include “I’m Daddy Now,” Tempchin’s reflection on the life of his father, a retired milkman, and his own growing sense of responsibility as the father of a young son. That song and “Big Sky Country,” with its country-boy-flees-the-big-city motif, sound like natural prospects for the contemporary country market.

Having gotten over his music-weariness of a few years back, Tempchin figures that exercising his songwriting muscles is now the best way to proceed. Instead of making demos to pitch his work to other artists, he likes the idea of making his own albums. It’s a way to get songs to flow, he says, and a way to show listeners more of himself.

“We’re trying not to make it real slick,” producer Wood said of Tempchin’s blues album in progress. “Jack’s charm in person is his personality, and it’s not slick.” Tempchin’s band on the album includes Stekol on guitar; Greg Leisz, another of his longtime musical buddies, on Dobro and steel guitar; L.A. session veteran Bob Glaub on bass, and two more Honk alumni, Wood and Tris Imboden, on keyboards and drums.

“My theory is I just have to do what I do,” Tempchin said. “I can’t go even one step over to fit into what’s happening, because I’m not going to fit.”

* Jack Tempchin appears in a benefit concert for the Laguna Fire Relief, today from 2 p.m. to midnight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.

The benefit’s schedule is as follows: the Rounders at 2; Three Blind Mice at 3; Random Allies at 4; the Eliminators at 5; the Eric Henderson Quartet at 6; the Missiles of October at 7; Honk alumni Steve Wood, Beth Fitchet Wood and Richard Stekol at 8; Jack Tempchin at 9; Flying Crowbar at 10 and the Cram Brothers at 11. Also appearing in slots to be determined are Jodi Siegel and Michael Hamilton.