FUNNY AND FERVENT : This Rocker Can Be Quite the Cutup, but He Takes His Work Seriously

Get Peter Himmelman in front of an audience and he can be the consummate cutup, a wit who excels at off-the-cuff humor, composes comic songs on the spot and typically goes the extra mile to get close to his listeners. Well, maybe just the extra half-mile. That, Himmelman said, is how far he had to walk on a recent night in Kansas City before he found a spot where he felt comfortable performing. Some 250 fans followed him out of a club and down several city blocks after some obnoxious regulars and a bad PA system convinced him that only an impromptu exodus could save his show.

“It’s beautiful when you do that,” Himmelman, who plays with his band Saturday at the Coach House, said recently over a backstage telephone from Ames, Iowa. “(It creates) a certain sense of unity. I only do it when I get angry. I want to sing these songs they want to hear, and when people are talking (and interfering with fans’ ability to listen), I don’t just want to throw it away. I take what I do seriously.”

That much is clear from the six albums Himmelman, 34, has issued since 1986. As funny as he can be in his comical moments on stage, the songs this Minnesota-raised, Santa Monica-based rocker commits to tape are marked by an unrelenting fervency and a serious, spiritually informed cast that parallels early U2.

His new album, “Skin,” is different only in that it is his first “concept” album. In it, he traces the progress of a reincarnated soul that failed miserably in its previous existence but struggles to live a moral, loving and meaningful life in the next go-round. The reincarnation motif, usually associated with Buddhist and Hindu belief, might seem odd for a singer who grounds his daily life--and a substantial number of his songs--in traditional Judaism. But Himmelman (who refuses to perform on Friday nights, the start of the Jewish Sabbath) says he has found precedent for the “Skin” plot line in his study of Jewish texts.

His songs explore dualities: good versus evil, the joy of comprehending the divine and its earthly manifestations versus the anguish of feeling fallen, isolated and without purpose. He can’t explain that other duality which informs his career: the songwriter consumed with trying to fathom ultimate questions, versus the on-stage jester who loves to give his fans a good time.

“ ‘Painfully earnest’ is what I am,” Himmelman said lightly, quoting a recent review in the New York Times. He has some humorous songs, with titles like “Dixie the Tiny Dog” and “Disgruntled Postal Worker,” but they are novelties he cooked up for his live shows, not songs intended for albums.

“It seems like the artists I like didn’t do a lot of funny stuff, novelty songs,” he said with an audible shrug. He sees the humor in his performances as a necessary way to set the audience at ease, so it will be more receptive to his fervent stuff.

“When you’re going to do anything sort of confessional, you want to make sure you’re friends first,” he said. “You don’t want to say something and be rebuffed.”

On this tour, fans will have to wait a while for Himmelman’s wit to kick in. He has been playing “Skin” straight through at the start, as an introduction to shows that can amble on unpredictably from there.

“We’ve just been banging it out, but that’s not the answer,” he said, noting that he hopes eventually to find ways to build upon the album’s concept, to possibly flesh it out for a film or a theatrical staging. But he doesn’t attach any special significance to joining the ever-expanding club of rock conceptualists.

“It’s just something that’s been interesting to me,” he said. “There’s no reason why I’ve done it. You sit down and create something. You go to the well, and this is what I fished up.”

Himmelman, who has a cult following, puts limits on what he will do to fish for a wider fan base.

“People magazine wanted to do a big spread on the last album (the excellent 1992 release “Flown This Acid World”),” he recalled. But he said the magazine quickly lost interest when he refused to pose for one of People’s trademark celebrities-at-home photo spreads with wife and kids.

“I think it’s a necessary safeguard against obscuring the line between your real self and a cartoon persona,” he said of his insistence on keeping his family life private. “You need to have these walls of separation. Everyone’s trying to tear down walls, but walls are also good. They help to preserve what you think is sacred.”

He isn’t entirely walled-off about his family. Over the years he has released moving songs declaring love for his dying father (“This Father’s Day”) and his nurturing mother (“Child Into a Man”), as well as tender, hopeful ballads celebrating the births of his 4-year-old son, Isaac, (“Laugh My Beloved”) and his 2-year-old daughter, Raina, (“Raina”). Himmelman said that he now is under some familial pressure to deliver the musical goods for 9-month-old Chaya.

Passing up People spreads and appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson’--as he did a few years ago when an invitation conflicted with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot--is obviously not the way to maximize one’s audience. But Himmelman said he is more concerned about its intensity than its size.

“I’ve never found out what it took to be a big star, and it’s not my big goal in life to find out, either,” he said. “I work the same way I did as a kid, working with color crayons. I just say, ‘Wouldn’t this be fun to do?’ Then I talk to the guys I’ve worked with and been friends with for years (most of Himmelman’s band grew up with him in Minneapolis and have been playing with him since they all were in their teens) and see their reaction to it.”

He acknowledged that “there’s a certain (sales) number in my mind we need to do” to maintain a record contract and sustain a career. He said his label, 550 Music/Epic, has been pushing a single, “With You,” on the Adult Album Alternative format and that the company regards “Skin” as “the most easily marketable” record he has done.

“The irony is, you could say it’s a weighty subject matter, an odd thing, a conceptual album. You’d think it was just the opposite.

“I’m not very mercantile about it,” he summed up. “But I feel successful in my own way. In every city we draw people, they have all my records, they call out songs from ‘Synesthesia’ (an album from 1989 that, following on the heels of ‘Gematria’ that same year, gave Himmelman the all-’80s title for obscure album titling).

And, as that recent Kansas City gig shows, his fans prize him enough to follow him that extra half-mile.

Himmelman said that earlier in his career, he himself might not have gone the extra distance to rescue a marginal evening.

“I used to leave the stage with a bad night all the time, or a perfunctory night. Maybe it was having kids and being on the road, but now you know your time is limited and you don’t want to waste it. I guess it’s the common cry of adulthood: ‘Where is the time?’ There was such a quantity of it, you could squander it to no end and you’d wish it would pass. Now, I’m trying to conserve the minutes.”

* Who: Peter Himmelman.

* When: Saturday, May 21, at 8 p.m. With Kevin Montgomery and Aimee Bovee opening.

* Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (5) Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit and turn left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

* Wherewithal: $10.

* Where to call: (714) 496-8930.

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