Country Music Mavericks Are True to Their Name : Spotlight: While their roots are in their Cuban homeland, their playlist runs from pop to rock to old ‘honky-tonk nobody cares about any more.’ The band will be in Lake Forest tonight.

It’s 4:30 p.m. and the Mavericks are in the middle of a sound check at In Cahoots country nightclub.

Sound check is the time when a band’s main order of business is to be sure the stage monitors are on, that the bass drum doesn’t overpower the guitars in the house sound system, and that all the microphones are plugged in.

In this case, it’s a good four hours before curtain time: four hours before the members of the Florida-based band need to be concerned with winning over a public that so far has had little exposure to their music; four hours before they need to impress the club’s owners or any of the record company execs scheduled to show up.

So there’s not a lot of serious music-making going on--songs are started and stopped 30 seconds later, the drummer hits his snare incessantly while the sound mixer brings it up to the desired volume. That makes sound check a great time to glimpse a band’s real personality.

The Mavericks don’t just run through their set list for the evening. Instead, it’s a sort of musical stream-of-consciousness: players’ favorite tunes, songs they hope to add one day, songs they may have dropped long ago, or maybe a left-field choice to humor the other band members or to test their knowledge of musical trivia.

The Mavericks’ sound check is particularly revealing. As if to live up to its name, the group reels off a lick from Buddy Holly’s proto-rock ballad “Words of Love,” a snippet of Cuban bandleader Perez Prado’s 1955 instrumental hit “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” a casual yet chilling run-through of Patsy Cline’s signature song “I Fall to Pieces,” and a few bars of Fred Neil’s “Midnight Cowboy” theme “Everybody’s Talkin’.” Finally, they zip off a troika of operatic pop masterpieces by lead singer Raul Malo from the Roy Orbison songbook, reminiscent of Orbison’s effortlessly powerful vocals.

“We hate barriers--all these categorizations that the industry puts on music,” Malo, 28, explained during an interview later. “Go back and listen to Bob Wills--take out the steel guitar and the fiddle and put a clarinet in there and you’ve got Benny Goodman. So what’s the difference?”

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The Mavericks have been operating outside the mold from Day 1, when they formed not in Nashville, Austin, Bakersfield or any of the other standard country-music breeding grounds, but in Miami.

Malo’s parents settled there in 1959 after emigrating from Cuba to escape Fidel Castro’s new Caribbean order. The path the Malos and a generation of Cuban emigres took to the United States is chronicled in the title song from the Mavericks’ critically praised 1992 major-label debut album, “From Hell to Paradise.”

That album was released by MCA Records’ Nashville division, but it included a handful of songs that fell outside the country-music mainstream. Among them were the title song; “Mr. Jones,” a skillful look at those who yearn for the bygone “good-old days,” and “Children,” a powerful lament about the toll of child neglect and abuse. It also contained several straight country songs, from covers of Hank Williams’ and Buck Owens’ hits to such Malo originals as “This Broken Heart,” a Patsy Cline-drenched torch song.

Just when the Mavericks were getting categorized as the country-rock band without a category, Malo and his cohorts--bassist Robert Reynolds, drummer Paul Deakin, guitarist Nick Kane (who are augmented on tour by keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden)--turned away from that label as well.

“What’s hilarious is that from the beginning we’ve been pegged as this alternative, fringe band,” said Malo, whose stocky build, swept collar-length hair and single earring defy country-music convention as much as the band’s music does.

“I think we’re so un- alternative that we became the alternative. . . . We may play some pop songs, but most of the stuff we do--not only that we write, but that we cover--is just old country honky-tonk songs that nobody cares about any more. Maybe Dwight (Yoakam) does it--he’s really been the inspiration for it--and Rodney (Crowell) does it, too.”

While the album picked up lots of enthusiastic reviews, it generated little interest from country radio.

“There’s nothing to say about radio’s response to the first album, because there was none,” Malo said dryly.

His comment was more statement of fact than indictment.

“I think the first record was not commercially viable with what was on the radio at the time, and we knew it, and that was all right,” Malo said. “We wanted to make that kind of record. It was us at that time.

He says his writing has changed somewhat since he moved to Nashville and began collaborating with other country songwriters.

“I’m really learning how to trim a song down, how to cut it down to the point, which is really what I always wanted to do. But when you’re alone in Miami, you don’t co-write with anyone down there because nobody knows how to write country music.”

A great example is “There Goes My Heart,” the opening track on the group’s new “What a Crying Shame” album:

There goes my heart

Breaking in two

There go my eyes

Crying over you

My arms don’t want

For us to part

Here come the blues

There goes my heart

In fact, the album is devoted entirely to the kind of love-lost and love-thrown-away songs upon which country music built its name. To a degree, such songs have fallen out of favor with the country-music establishment of late, in their desire to send out increasingly positive messages, however superficial those messages may be. (To wit: The current slogan of Orange County country radio station KIK-FM, repeated endlessly throughout each day, is “Country music that makes you feel good .”)

But that hasn’t dimmed the Mavericks’ love for songs from real life, such as “There Goes My Heart” and others that sound straight out of country-music past; songs in which relationships detonate in a mushroom cloud, leaving the participants as little more than smoking heaps trying to put the pieces back together.

Whether it’s the change in tone or honing of songwriting skills, the new album has given the Mavericks their first taste of commercial success.

The title song is currently moving up, albeit slowly, Billboard’s country singles chart. Now that they are something of a known quantity in the music industry, the group members expect to make a deeper dent with the next single.

“Lemme tell you,” Reynolds said with a pregnant pause, “there’s something about having even a modest radio hit gives you the sort of validation you may not have bought into before you got it. You might have said before, ‘It’s OK--we can be a critically acclaimed band and tour.’

“But you get that one little taste of acceptance and you realize (radio can) bring people to your shows. They can do a lot for your career,” Reynolds continued. “You’re born the day that (first record) goes into the Top 40--that’s the day your life begins.”

That doesn’t mean the group has suddenly gone starry-eyed with visions of million-seller after million-seller.

“The reality of a No. 1 record,” Malo said, “is that they’re just (ego gratification) for record companies and songwriters and an excuse for people to party. I’d much rather have all my records make it into the Top 20 than to have five hit No. 1 and then never be heard from again.”

For one thing, a hit record is not an end in itself for the Mavericks, but the means to the end of playing live.

“We don’t play live to be able to make records; we make records to be able to play live,” Malo said. “It’s the most fun thing we do.”

The shift to the all-love-song slant of the new album, he said, had less to do with internal or external pressures to sell more records than with Malo’s desire to improve his songwriting.

“I really like writing songs like we did on this record,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t do social or political songs again. I would love to some day do it again.”

“If it comes naturally,” Reynolds added quickly. “Interestingly, out of 30 tunes Raul had written for the first record, four were social-political songs, and it just ended up that all four of those wound up on the record. . . . I think we got a lot of critical acclaim for tackling those kinds of subjects. . . . But Raul has always said that we don’t want to be on a soapbox. And I think this album explores our roots maybe even more.”

Those roots run deep in the soil of music that sprang from musicians who listened to their inner voices, not the music industry’s omnipresent advice-givers.

“There’s always going to be somebody telling you what to do or what not to do,” Malo said. “That’s why nobody is allowed backstage when we play--so we don’t have to hear about what songs to play or what not to play.”

* The Mavericks play at 8 tonight at the Country Rock Cafe, 23822 Mercury Road, Lake Forest. $5. (714) 455-1881.