Starshipper Lands on His Feet on ‘Highway’ : Pop music: Craig Chaquico, who plays the Coach House tonight, took off with Grace Slick and friends. Now he’s on a New Age road.

A few years ago, after spending virtually his entire adult life in one job, Craig Chaquico found himself looking for a new career direction.

From 1974 to 1990, Chaquico had a lucrative and secure gig as lead guitarist for Jefferson Starship (later just Starship). The Bay Area band, which began as an offshoot of the ‘60s countercultural icon Jefferson Airplane, scored 13 gold and platinum albums during a tenure marked by stylistic shifts and frequent personnel shake-ups.

Chaquico (the name is of Portuguese derivation) had joined the band when he was in his teens and was the only member who played on every Starship record.

In 1990, he left Starship, which had spent the ‘80s as a popular, if critically derided, exponent of the slick, metal-tinged style that came to be labeled “corporate rock.”

Chaquico’s first instinct was to try more of the same. He launched another hard- rock band, Big Bad Wolf, but found that record labels weren’t interested. Then his wife, Kimberly, became pregnant, and Chaquico decided it was time to tone it down.

For the first time in many years, he set aside the electric guitar and started plucking an acoustic around the house because, as the cheerful rocker put it over the phone recently from his home in Marin County, “it seemed like the natural thing. You got the vibe that the acoustic guitar was more conducive to the pregnancy.”

By the time his wife gave birth in 1991 to their first child, a son named Kyle, Chaquico had his new direction.

The result is his first solo album, “Acoustic Highway,” an all-instrumental record that has done well on the New Age charts since its release last fall. Chaquico and his three-member band will play tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

Chaquico, an enthusiastic, upbeat talker, said he didn’t have to go far to find inspiration for the album’s nine compositions, most of them evocations of scenes and feelings that unfold in the day-trips he loves to take through Northern California on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

The music places a premium on lyrical melodies, active rhythms and the rippling, glistening, fluid tones that Chaquico and his collaborator, Ozzie Ahlers, got by processing his steel-string acoustic guitar through electronic effects.

The lead-off track, “Mountain in the Mist,” gives his musical impression of Mt. Tamalpais, the Marin County landmark whose peak he can see from the window of his home studio in Mill Valley. (Looking in another direction, Chaquico can see Sammy Hagar’s house, a vista that, perhaps fortunately, has not inspired any music to date.)

Another song, “Angel Tears,” began when a thunderstorm broke out and frightened his infant son.

“I grabbed a guitar and started playing happy music so he would see it was OK, and it soothed him,” Chaquico said. “I said to myself, ‘Whatever it was, I want to use it as a song.’ ” The dancing, glistening theme he developed evokes the onset and passing of a delightful shower.

The nature-conscious album’s most somber moment is an elegiac piece called “Summer’s End.”

“It came from a real sad place,” Chaquico said. “At the end of summer (while he was working on the album), my mom and dad had real severe heart attacks within three weeks of each other. My guitar became my best friend, and it got me through this challenging time. Since then, knock on wood, my mom and dad are doing great.”

Chaquico, 39, doubts that he could have come up with as evocative an album if he hadn’t gone through experiences such as the birth of a child and the severe illness of his parents.

“If I had tried to do a solo album 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have had the feeling I put into this record, and it wouldn’t have touched people as much. To play with feeling and emotion, you have to have had these feelings. Unless you’ve laughed through it and cried through it, I don’t think you can put it in your music.”

Chaquico grew up on a dairy farm outside Sacramento, the son of a mother who played piano and organ in church and a father who had been a professional jazz musician in his youth.

He took up the guitar at 10 and in the late ‘60s fell under the spell of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. He joined his first band at 14 in a way perhaps unique in rock annals: He was inducted into the band by his high-school English teacher.

“He said, ‘We need a lead guitar player in my rock band,’ and I ended up being in a band with all these guys 15 years older.”

Chaquico’s stage gear included paste-on whiskers: “Back then, you had to be 21 (to perform in a drinking establishment). I had long hair (hiding) my face, and I’d wear a fake mustache and play four sets a night. I thought I was in the big time.”

Soon, he was.

The band, Steelwind, began getting gigs in the Bay Area, and members of the Jefferson Airplane became fans. Airplane singer Grace Slick invited Chaquico to play on one of her solo albums, and his 16th birthday also marked his first professional recording session.

When Jefferson Starship formed, fronted by Slick and fellow Airplane alumni Paul Kantner and Marty Balin, Chaquico was drafted into the band. He was 18 when he first toured with them.

As Balin, then Kantner and finally Slick departed, Chaquico remained with the band, playing guitar and contributing to the songwriting.

“I always was a team player, and I got along with everybody,” he said, pointing to the lawsuit in which Kantner stripped the band of the right to the “Jefferson” half of the name as the only “tense” moment of his tenure.

“There’s no hard feelings, especially (toward) Grace. For someone who was a big star, she never had that kind of attitude of ‘I’m the lead singer, the prima donna, and you guys are just in the band.’ ”

Chaquico said he became disenchanted enough to leave in 1990 when Mickey Thomas, the lead singer who joined in 1979, began planning with the band’s management to rely heavily on session players in the studio.

“It was becoming a little too fabricated; it wasn’t like a group.”

In reinventing himself for the New Age market, Chaquico says he is unconcerned about being perceived as a rocker who has put himself out to a mellow pasture.

“What I’m doing now is more challenging. It’s all new territory, so I don’t have to compare myself to what I did before.”

As to the possibility that he’d be dismissed as an aging rocker grown too mellow to rock ‘n’ roll, he said: “I was a little nervous about that, but I’m not worried about that any more. The music I was playing made me laugh in the right places and cry in the right places and was giving me goose bumps. I could tell it was emotionally valid.”

Fronting a band with a drummer, keyboards player and electric bassist, Chaquico has played his “Acoustic Highway” songs at motorcycle events and at a recent San Francisco show in which he opened for Hagar, the high-decibel rocker who fronts Van Halen.

“The whole crowd was into it,” he said. “It just goes to show that people are ready to hear acoustic music, even if they’re total headbangers.”

Chaquico has been bolstered by his victory last month in the annual BAMMY (Bay Area Music Awards) ceremonies. “Acoustic Highway” was named outstanding independent album, besting a field that included a collaboration between Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

Now he is working on a follow-up to “Acoustic Highway” that he hopes to release this summer.

There is a chance that Chaquico will also be heard blazing away with an electric guitar in the near future, on the soundtrack of a feature film, still in production, that stars the animated clay character Gumby.

A few years ago, Chaquico was recruited to play along to a scene in which an electric guitar-toting Gumby rocks out in a park.

“Gumby shreds, man,” Chaquico said. “He sounds like a cross between ZZ Top, Van Halen and Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

* Craig Chaquico plays tonight at 9 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Naked to the World opens. $13.50. (714) 496-8930.