A Life of the Blues : * Randy Rich has had a few other jobs, but mostly he’s made his way by playing his music on the L. A. bar and club circuit.

He has punched cows for a living, been a construction worker and driven a garbage truck. On the whole, Randy Rich would rather play the blues.

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Randy Rich and the Ravens (drummer Pete Gallagher and bass player Brad Vance) have gained a substantial following in the San Fernando Valley area over the last three years with their hard-driving mix of blues and rock ‘n’ roll. They can be heard regularly at the Santa Clarita Brewing Co.

Rich, 42, who was born in Florida but spent his high school years in Canoga Park, is a charter member of the hard-scrabble L. A. bar and club circuit. Apart from a few labor jobs, it’s all he’s ever done.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t doing this,” Rich says. “It seems to work. I love doing it. I can’t think of life without it.”

The son of an aircraft builder, Rich got his first guitar when he was 11. As a teen-ager in the ‘60s, he and his pals were devoted to disc jockey Wolfman Jack’s radio show. “If you weren’t listening to it, you were in trouble,” he says. “We were always running around record stores looking for old blues records, the more obscure the better.”

Rich played in rock ‘n’ roll bands at school dances, but at home in the garage he returned to the blues. For years, he played only acoustic guitar, playing for change on the streets of San Francisco, in the Yosemite Valley and at Silverton, Colorado’s turn-of-the-century fairs.

“I played a lot of different styles,” Rich says. “I’d do Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and then ‘Milk Cow Blues’ with a bottleneck, anything that’s indigenous to this melting pot of music that we have in America.”

Rich spent three years in Nashville playing guitar for singer-songwriter Ed Bruce (“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”). “But in the Nashville bars, we’d jam blues,” he says. “I didn’t have the voice for country. The blues seems to be my best avenue of expression.”

Eclectic in his musical tastes (“Beethoven to Charlie Parker,” he says), Rich admired such British blues invaders as the Blues Breakers and Eric Clapton, but he found their American success frustrating.

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“For some reason, it was OK for English guys to play the blues, but not for young American white guys,” he says. “We knew where the music came from, although Clapton and the others never tried to fool anyone. In fact, they took blues players like Freddie King and Albert King on tour with them. They exposed audiences to the old heroes.”

Rich mixes in some Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Willie Dixon numbers in his sets now, and pays tribute to the old masters in his own repertoire of 28 original songs. Although he has never had an album produced, Rich’s songs are well known to his fans, who will invariably request “Voodoo Thing,” a psychedelic number with a touch of Hendrix; “Suspicions and Doubts,” a traditional slow blues, and “Rock This Joint,” which has shades of Chuck Berry.

Rich sells tapes of his music from the stage wherever he plays, and he says he has sold hundreds. Record labels have so far spurned him, he believes, because his music cannot be pigeonholed.

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“I wouldn’t say we’re strictly traditional blues,” he said. “I’m more into mixing other influences: old-time country, Cajun and rock ‘n’ roll. The small independent labels think I’m too rock ‘n’ roll; big-time labels think I’m too blues.”

That didn’t stop Mark and Sheila VanLeeuwen from booking Randy Rich and the Ravens into their new micro-brewery and bar, the Santa Clarita Brewing Co., for regular “Brews ‘n’ Blues” dates.

Mark VanLeeuwen, 33, quit his career as an insurance broker to turn three storefronts in a Soledad Canyon Road mall into a 150-seat brew-pub and restaurant.

Open since early January, the pub sells burgers and pizza and 400 gallons a week of handcrafted ales. In addition to blues nights, it has live bluegrass on Sunday nights and a sports trivia contest every Monday broadcast live on local radio station KBET (1220 AM) from 7 to 9 p.m. With two pool tables, two dartboards, two electronic-dart machines, a video game, huge clear windows and a strict no-smoking policy, it might seem like an odd place to hear the blues.

“It’s a little brighter than most bars, and it’s a bit of a three-ring circus,” says Randy Rich. “But everyone sure seems to have a good time.”

WHERE AND WHEN

Who: Randy Rich and the Ravens.

Location: Santa Clarita Brewing Co., 20655 Soledad Canyon Road, Santa Clarita.

Hours: Pub is open 11 a.m. to midnight Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday. Randy Rich and the Ravens play at 9:30 p.m. Saturday and April 16 and 23.

Price: No cover.

Call: (805) 298-5677.