Pop’s Mr. Accessible : Rock: Pete Anderson, who plays the Coach House Sunday, is sending his band through ‘boot camp.’

Logic tends to get twisted in an industry town. In L.A., the heart of the music business, the prevailing attitude is that musicians shouldn’t gig a lot, that new artists instead should develop an air of exclusivity--as if there’s something unhip about actually playing music for people.

Pete Anderson, meanwhile, has been gigging in every little cubbyhole in town. The only break in recent weeks came because he was out gigging in cubbyholes, saloons and nightclubs across the nation.

Though he has only recently put himself into the spotlight, he has been heard by millions as Dwight Yoakam and Michelle Shocked’s producer / guitarist; his other production credits range from the Meat Puppets to Roy Orbison. He isn’t out to defy L.A. convention with his numerous gigs, but he does have his own agenda to advance.

“I wanted to put ourselves in boot camp as a band,” he said, “to put ourselves under some extraneous circumstances playing some of the more funky places before we went into potential unfriendly territory outside of California. That’s because this is the same band that toured with Dwight last year, and with him we travel in Lear jets and stay at the Ritz. So now it’s ‘If you guys are going to tour with me, you’d better get used to this ,’ because we’re going to play Bob’s Frolic Room III.”

He was calling from New Jersey where he and his jet-accustomed keyboardist Skip Edwards, bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Jim Christie were touring in a gear-cramped van. The outfit plays the Coach House on Sunday night and the Foothill in Long Beach on May 27.

Late last year Anderson, 46, released his first album, “Working Class,” a mix of what he calls “American music,” ranging from Texas shuffle blues (applied to Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire”) through soundtrack themes just waiting for a movie. The guitar work is monstrously good but never overshadows the song-crafting, which is solid and soulful. Anderson’s engaging singing is in the vocal vicinity of John Prine and J.J. Cale.

The album came about, he said, because “I needed to exorcise the tunes I’d been writing, needed an outlet for my musical ideas. Plus,” he said with a chuckle, “I have my own label, so I didn’t have to audition.” Anderson is one of the owners of Little Dog Records, an independent label distributed by Rounder.

Though just playing guitar is his favorite gig in the world, he doesn’t think that makes for a great album. “If some guy was asking another guy about the new record, what I didn’t want him to answer was ‘Well, you know, it’s a guitar player record.’ I wanted the response to be ‘It’s not what you’d expect at all, and I like it.’ I wanted a record that’s based on music first, with the guitar playing fitting in where it should.”

However, his guitar playing was an impetus to his doing the album. “I wanted to maybe waylay some misconceptions about me musically, because Dwight’s career keeps getting bigger and bigger and all-encompassing, and that’s terrific. But (as a result) I’ve been thought of as a country guitar player and country record producer, and I want to be thought of in a broader musical sense.”

*

Though he is a respected producer, his sole production decision on “Working Class” was to not produce the album, ceding the job to bassist Dusty Wakeman.

“I just thought I’d be doing a disservice to myself,” Anderson explained. “It’s really difficult to be objective about yourself, and I wanted to have the luxury of putting my brain only in Artist Mode and not worrying about anything at all except showing up, playing, having a good time and ‘what’s to eat?’

“Also, I think there’s a lot of people who say they produce themselves and put their names on the record, but if you were a fly on the wall, you’d find they have an engineer or musician who’s really in there producing or co-producing the record. I think it’s some sort of ego stroke.”

As others do, he likens producing a record to the function a director plays in film but also describes it in more down-to-earth terms.

“A producer is very much like a contractor you hire to come over and put a pool in your back yard. He shows up, tells you what it’s going to look like, how much it’s going to cost, when he’s going to start and be done, you give him half the money, he gets it done and you give him the other half. You’re happy, he leaves and you jump in the pool.

“In other respects, to be a producer it really helps to have raised a child. If it’s a band, you’re kind of like a band member; if it’s a single artist, you’re this person’s buddy and confidant. You want to make them feel extremely comfortable in the environment in which they record, and they tend to be apprehensive. It’s like going to the dentist. Some guys think this is going to hurt real bad, and you’re just trying to make their teeth look the best they can.”

Anderson was born in Detroit and arrived in Los Angeles in the 1970s. “Working Class” isn’t just an album title to him. He has worked in tire factories and soda pop plants. One of his first jobs was as a stock boy for Vernor’s Ginger Ale, and you may be pleased to know that its flavor extract actually is “flavor aged four years in wood” as claimed.

“They would make huge barrels of the extract,” Anderson recalls, “and when you were moving them, the ginger and alcohol coming through the barrels was so strong your eyes would burn.”

*

In the early ‘80s when Anderson teamed with the then-unknown Yoakam--who was living in his car at the time--their brand of undiluted country was a million miles from what Nashville was accepting, and it found more of an audience among L.A.’s musical counterculture. That changed when the Anderson-produced “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc.” was picked up by Warner Bros. and Yoakam became a sensation.

Anderson has produced all Yoakam’s recordings since then, including his “Streets of Bakersfield” duet with Buck Owens. Of his dozens of other productions, his two albums with Shocked (“Short, Sharp, Shocked” and “Captain Swing”) were particular standouts, reaching the artist’s core while expanding her musical range--and surprising her in the process.

*

Unlike most artists, she hadn’t intended on stardom. A recording of her singing around a campfire had become a fluke hit in England, leading her to a major label, and the activist singer was not comfortable with the idea of entering a studio.

In a 1990 Times interview, Shocked related that she “didn’t even really know what a producer was. I just figured that whatever they were, they were going to try to make me sound like all the other crap on the radio.” She said she went into the studio with every intent of sabotaging the proceedings but was won over by Anderson’s openness. “I didn’t expect to find such a strong ally in such a strange place.”

“She was very skeptical,” Anderson recalls. “She’s kind of an anarchist without a country, very political without any politics, not unlike what I was when I was like 19 or 20, angry about the government. She thought she’d come in and cause problems, and there was no problem.

“‘Cool, sure, let’s do that. You want to hang upside-down from a trapeze and swing it and have me record it? No problem.’ She was very much like a sister, a sister you get along with.”

He prefers to regard what he does as work rather than precious art.

“We’ve been in so many different circumstances, from little stages the size of a postage stamp to big clubs like the House of Blues in New Orleans to a honky tonk in Batesville, Miss. And you just show up and do it. We don’t want to cry: ‘Oh, it’s cold; oh, our dressing room stinks; there’s no candy; there’s no food.’ It ain’t about that. We’re men, and we show up and go to work. And we have a great time doing it.”

*

Anderson said it wasn’t disturbing to go from being a sideman to the spotlight, but it is demanding.

“When I’m playing with somebody as a guitarist, that job is pretty easy. I mean, there’s chances to take a break and a breather, playing rhythm while they sing, and then you load up for your cool solo and jump around, then you take a little drink and look at the drummer and play some rhythm and end the song.

“But when you’re doing the front thing--especially in this band where I take almost all the solos--I don’t have much time to kick back. When we count the first song off, I’m committed to complete and utter attention to what I’m doing for an hour and 10 minutes. It’s like ‘Uh-oh, the space shuttle’s taking off; there’s no turning back.’ Once it starts, it would be kind of embarrassing to stop it.”

* Pete Anderson plays the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, Sunday at 8 p.m. $15. (714) 496-8930. * Hear Pete Anderson: To hear a sample of the album “Working Class,” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5560.