Tired of Dodging Slings and Arrows : Pop: It’s been tempting for Dramarama’s John Easdale to break up the largely luckless band, but he’s decided to stick it out awhile longer. ‘I’m still on the fence’ about the group’s future, the O.C. resident says.

Is Dramarama to be, or not to be?

John Easdale, who has the ultimate say in the question, has spent the past few months pondering it, back and forth, like some indecisive Hamlet.

Dramarama’s singer and main songwriter says he is willing to make one last stand with the long-running band in hopes of finally reversing its outrageous fortune in the music marketplace. After releasing five good-to-excellent albums since 1985, Dramarama can claim a staunch following in its home territory of Southern California, but not the national audience needed to sustain a career.

On its most recent album, “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi,” Easdale and band took arms against a sea of troubles. They played thunderously and sang with desperate intensity about such slings and arrows of the rock ‘n’ roll life as drug addiction and the tendency of rock’s business apparatus to dash a musician’s hopes and stunt his sense of self-worth. Career-wise, it didn’t do much good: While the band was out touring last fall, its record company, Chameleon, was going out of business.

That leaves Easdale, 32, to weigh his options as he sits in his own Elsinore--actually a modest apartment in a quiet section of La Habra, where a supportive wife and three cute, blond daughters form a welcome alternative to the wacked-out royal Danish court, not to mention the less-stable precincts that many a rocker inhabits.

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As the tour wound down in November, Easdale said, he had decided that Dramarama had run its course; that the band had been around too long without a breakthrough and, however unjustly, was being perceived as old news by radio programmers and other gatekeepers of the music marketplace.

“We’ve been meeting with some apathy, just because we’ve been around for so long,” said Easdale, a good-natured, earnest but fundamentally shy man who tends to look off in the distance as he speaks. “We’re not the flavor of the month, the flavor of the year. We’re just around. Radio thrives on new things.”

So Easdale had pretty much decided to disband Dramarama. He would stick with Chris Carter, the Dramarama bassist who produces the band’s albums with Easdale, and together they would try to establish a new band. As keen observers of the rock scene (they have co-written a regular review column for BAM magazine), the duo was well aware of the succession of creative ‘80s and ‘90s rockers who had switched bands and managed to reap commercial benefits without betraying their artistic standards: the Pixies metamorphosing into Frank Black’s solo career and the Breeders, Belly springing forth from Throwing Muses, Cracker from Camper Van Beethoven and Bob Mould reaping sweeter returns with his new band, Sugar, than with his old one, Husker Du. But Dramarama had one more round of shows to play, a New Year’s swing through its home region that included club dates in Bakersfield, Ventura and Los Angeles, and ends tonight with two performances at the Coach House. The fans’ response has persuaded Easdale not to give up on Dramarama just yet; at the Whisky on Jan. 1, he announced from the stage that the band was not breaking up.

“It was just a loving reception from people,” he said, puffing at the latest in a succession of Marlboro Lights. “It was amazing. So we’re going to give it another shot.”

The plan is for Easdale to write four or five new songs (he has finished two so far), to record them with the band in demo form and to hope that a new major-label record deal results.

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Dramarama’s future seemed bright in 1986 when its song “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)” off the group’s “Cinema Verite” album, became a hit on KROQ. Inspired by such fruitful sources as the Rolling Stones, Mott the Hoople and David Bowie, the band had formed during the early ‘80s in Wayne, N.J., where Easdale, Carter, guitarists Peter Wood and Mark (Mr. E) Englert and adjunct member Tommy Mullaney all grew up. The only personnel change has been on drums, where Blondie alumnus Clem Burke took over after the recording of the 1991 release “Vinyl” (the group’s original drummer was Jesse).

The band members moved to Los Angeles in the wake of the KROQ success and quickly found a loyal audience.

Dramarama had some trouble following up that initial breakthrough. Failure to get a label deal led to a brief breakup in 1988, but by ’89 the band seemed to be on track when it signed with Chameleon and began to build a national cult following with the album “Stuck in Wonderamaland.”

“Vinyl” and last year’s “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi” were both extremely strong bids to secure Dramarama’s place in the rock world. When the former failed to do that, you could tell from Easdale’s songs on the latter that lack of success was tearing at him.

“Senseless Fun,” from “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi,” vented his anguish over having to serve the demands of Muse and market.

“In a nutshell, that song is what the whole thing is about, and where we’re still at,” Easdale said. “At first, it’s just love of music. Now, you’re in the business and trying to make a living off it. It takes away some of the magic, but hopefully you don’t lose the innocence and love of it. In the end, you do it because you love it. I’d still write songs and sing and play guitar, even if it was only for myself. It’s what I do, what I’ve devoted my life to.”

But there is a fearsome side to that kind of devotion, which Easdale captured in “Work for Food,” a fictionalized vision of one possible future he sees for himself: the rocker who winds up forgotten, economically bereft and psychically damaged.

“I know a lot of guys who put all their faith and hope into the (assumption) that they’re going to make it, and they don’t. I’m kind of like that. I bypassed finishing college, and never got any training for a career.”

Easdale isn’t asking for riches or stardom; in fact, he frankly admits that he lacks the stage charisma of the born-rocker.

“I never wanted to be famous,” he said. “I just want to make a living, pay the rent and feed and clothe the kids. Otherwise, I’d swallow my pride and lower my standards and write songs that, instead of being songs I deeply feel and care about, are songs my sister, who has pretty mainstream tastes, would like.”

The struggle to overcome drug dependency is a theme that Easdale said he felt compelled to write about on “Hi-Fi.” He handled it powerfully, and from shifting perspectives, in such songs as “Prayer,” “Don’t Feel Like Doing Drugs” and “Right On Baby Baby.”

“When I was a kid, (taking drugs) was something you did for fun on a weekend,” he said. “Then, over time, it became something you did on a daily basis, part and parcel of life. With a family, it doesn’t work. It was hard for me to come to grips with that. When it came time to say, ‘Enough’s enough,’ it was a real struggle. It had become more a part of my daily regimen, like cigarettes or food--a very powerful thing. I’ve had to bury two very good friends who passed away as a direct result (of drug abuse). Without getting too personal, it was on my mind.”

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A nervous laugh enters Easdale’s voice as he talks about the pressures now confronting him, and the Hamlet-like choice he faces in deciding whether to lower the curtain on Dramarama’s career.

“I’m still on the fence about what’s going to happen,” he said. “I hope I’ll come up with some good songs for the band and it will all work out fine. (The recent shows) gave me the initiative to at least give it a shot. I think (the other members) would understand if I wanted to move on.

“It was kind of scary to think of doing something else. A lot of times, (what’s) familiar is more comfortable. Staying with the band might be a cowardly thing to do. But these shows were really good, and I felt there was some life in it.”

In the face of all this uncertainty, Chris Carter did what a courtier at Elsinore might have done: He consulted an astrologer.

“I just had a guy do my chart for the first time,” the upbeat bassist said over the phone from his home in Studio City. “Apparently Mercury is in the best place ever for a Virgo, and John, Pete and me are all Virgos. This could be a good beginning of the year.”

“I don’t put much faith in horoscopes, but that’d be nice,” Easdale said, when told of Dramarama’s apparently clean bill of astrological health. “I could use all the luck I can get.”

* Dramarama plays two shows tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano: a semi-acoustic set at 8 and an electric set at 10:30. Factory opens both shows. $19.50. (714) 496-8930.