The Paladins Home-In on a New Course : Roots rock: On the heels of releasing its fourth album, the band, at the Coach House Friday, wants a fresh start.

The Paladins had a hard time deciding what to call their first new album in four years.

It always helps to have a name that is pithy and descriptive and easily under stood. But the Paladins’ career and music has defied shorthand description.

High school buddies Dave Gonzalez and Tom Yearsley founded the band 14 years ago in the San Diego County town of Encinitas. When their debut album came out in 1987, they were tagged as a rockabilly band, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. If you asked Gonzalez and Yearsley, they were playing all-purpose, rootsy rock ‘n’ roll.

Their next step was to sign with the respected Chicago-based blues label Alligator. The Paladins knew the Alligator association would help them get publicity, good bookings and reliable distribution for their records. They thought they could be on Alligator, which released their albums “Years Since Yesterday” and “Let’s Buzz,” and not get pegged as a blues act. In hindsight, they now agree, they were wrong.

Now on a new label, the Paladins, who play the Coach House on Friday, regarded their fourth album as an opportunity to start fresh, emphasize the new, and clarify what they were about.

Gonzalez, the Paladins’ guitarist and primary lead singer, and bassist Yearsley had recruited a new drummer with impressive credentials--Jeff Donavan, a longtime sideman to country star Dwight Yoakam. Songwriting was to be a big focus of the new album. The Paladins wanted to prove themselves as writers worthy of a general, broad rock audience, rather than only a specialized following of blues-guitar or ‘50s-rock lovers. Gonzalez, Yearsley and Donavan wrote songs as a unit and supplemented their output with contributions from two accomplished friends, Dave Alvin and Jack Tempchin.

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They signed with a Houston-based label, Sector 2, and decided to call the album “Re’Jive’Inated,” in honor of the fresh outlook.

That’s when things got complicated again.

The record company thought a punning title would be confusing, Gonzalez recalled as the trio gathered for a recent interview. What’s more, the title tune “Re’Jive’Inated” was an instrumental, and a jazz-leaning one at that; its tempered, Wes Montgomery-influenced sound is not exactly the first thing you’d want easily confused rock radio program directors to cue up when it came time to decide whether the Paladins should get a spin.

The band’s next title idea was “One Step Closer to the Blues,” the refrain of a heavy, catchy, tough-sounding album track that alternately calls to mind Stevie Ray Vaughan and ZZ Top. Then they thought better of it, because they wanted to downplay the idea that they were just a blues band, which is exactly what people would assume if they judged an album called “One Step Closer to the Blues” by its cover.

So the Paladins decided to go with “Ticket Home,” the title of the song that best represents their new approach. Its strong, melodic refrain and layered, atmospheric production would seem to make the song a contender for album-rock playlists. While the album includes a couple of stripped-down, hot-rocking workouts, such tracks as the title song, “Every Time I See Her,” “One Step,” “One Love,” “Comfort You” and “Brand New Heart” would seem to position the Paladins for a possible breakthrough to the mainstream that such roots-music brethren as Los Lobos, Jeff Healey and Robert Cray have enjoyed at least intermittently during their careers.

The Paladins give some of the credit for the more complex recording approach to Cesar Rosas, the Los Lobos guitarist who co-produced the album with the three band members.

“Cesar would say, ‘You really need to put an acoustic guitar here,’ or, ‘Man, I hear an organ sound here,’ ” Gonzalez said. “In our early days, we were insistent: no overdubs.”

That, noted Yearsley, was because the Paladins felt during the 1980s that they were carrying the roots-music torch against the “homogenized studio sounds” of synth-based, slickly rendered music.

“We were rebellious against that. We recorded nothing we couldn’t (reproduce) on stage.” With “Ticket Home,” he said, the aim was to preserve spontaneous energy in the performances, even as the arrangements and recording methods became more detailed.

The Paladins had come to Costa Mesa for the interview. Gonzalez and Yearsley, both 33, drove from Encinitas in the gray Dodge van on which they have logged some 270,000 touring miles since the mid-’80s. Tagging along was Yearsley’s sweet-natured 5-year-old, Tommy Jr. Donavan, 40, came from Pasadena, his base for a side career as a studio musician and teacher of drumming whose recent credits include sessions for John Fogerty’s next album.

Seated around a lunch table, Gonzalez wore the jeans, boots, slicked-back pompadour and long sideburns of a ‘50s rocker. But there was none of the hipster’s jauntiness or stereotypical “rebel without a cause” attitude that one might expect, given the pop-cultural history behind that look. Instead, Gonzalez comes off as a thoroughly earnest man with a clear sense of conviction about the band.

Yearsley, dapperly attired in a sporty jacket and a fedora that harked back more toward the ‘40s (during the interview he swapped the fedora for the straw boater worn by the equally natty Tommy Jr.), was more laid back, but also earnest about the Paladins.

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Donavan, who has a quietly confident air, joined the Paladins 2 1/2 years ago when Yearsley called him to see whether he could recommend any of his students for an audition with the band. Donavan, who was still playing with Yoakam at the time, recommended himself. He played in both bands for more than a year, before parting with Yoakam last spring in what he says was a joint decision.

“I’d been doing a lot of work for major-album artists, and it was kind of a stifling world,” Donavan said. “The way records are made--the sterile, clinical production values--doesn’t jive with how I like to play. Instead of touring and having to play the exact record parts, there’s really no limit to what the drum part can do in this trio. You can go wild and crazy or play it real simple.”

Gonzalez says he badly wanted “Ticket Home” to be the Paladins’ ticket to major-label status. But none of the large companies that expressed interests offered a deal, and the band wound up with the fledgling Sector 2.

“For some reason (the big labels) would always pass. We’ve come to know that,” Gonzalez said in a stoical tone of voice. “It was very disappointing.” With Sector 2, he said, “we know they believe in us, so we have to believe in them.”

Yearsley and Donavan see advantages to the big-fish-in-a-small-pond approach. The band’s strategy now is to return to the hard-touring regimen that saw it average 250 dates a year before tapering off to 100 last year so it could devote time to writing and recording.

It’s a regimen that puts a strain on family life, as borne out in songs like the yearning “Ticket Home.” In fact, Yearsley and Gonzalez said, two previous Paladins drummers left the band because of the strain that the band’s frequent travels placed on their families. Yearsley is married to country singer Candye Kane (besides Tommy Jr., he has a 14-year-old son). Donavan is married and the father of a 13-year-old son, and Gonzalez is planning to get married in August.

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With those attachments, Gonzalez said, a hard-touring regimen becomes that much harder. None of the band was married when the Paladins first started traveling.

“We knew if we stayed on the road and persisted enough, we’d sell records. Now, it’s harder. We were known as the king of the club acts for so long, and we always wanted to bust out of it. We felt frustrated because we felt the songs could be on the radio or MTV and reach a lot of people. We’re hoping this album is the start of getting our name back out there.”

Have band, must travel. Maybe Gonzalez and Yearsley sealed that fate for themselves when they decided on a name for themselves. Gonzalez said it involves more than a connection with a gunslinging character from ‘50s TV.

“When we looked up the word, ‘paladin,’ we saw that it means ‘protagonist of a cause,” he recalled. “That was it. I always wanted to have an original-sounding rock ‘n’ roll band.”

* The Paladins, the Jive Kings and the Offenders play Friday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $10. (714) 496-8930.