A Blonde Who Had Less Fun : Pop music: Johnette Napolitano tells why she walked out of the successful Concrete Blonde. Her new band, Pretty & Twisted, plays the Galaxy in Santa Ana on Saturday.

Johnette Napolitano says she didn’t have a parachute, let alone know what color it was, when she bailed out of Concrete Blonde early in 1994.

All she had was a strong feeling that she needed a change after nine years fronting one of the era’s most esteemed and artistically rewarding L.A.-based rock bands.

“I dropped my own hatchet and was scared to death,” Napolitano said of her decision to break up the band against the wishes of her longtime sidekicks, guitarist Jim Mankey and drummer Harry Rushakoff. Napolitano, who turns 38 next week, was forsaking the safety of a band that had one gold album, 1990’s “Bloodletting,” among its five releases, and always seemed a candidate for breakthrough success.

“My mom was [asking], ‘What are you going to do?’ People very close to me were wondering: Did I know what I was doing? I didn’t know what I was doing. But I didn’t want to do [Concrete Blonde] any more. I wasn’t very happy,” recalled Napolitano, whose conversation, like her performing persona, ranges between freewheeling outspokenness and thoughtful ruminations. She was speaking from a hotel room outside Detroit, a stop for her new band, Pretty & Twisted, which plays Saturdayat the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana.

There followed a time of solitude and reflection (a summer living on the cheap in Paris) and a period of craft-oriented woodshedding at home. Aiming to be a self-sufficient record producer, Napolitano got high-tech gear and honed her studio skills by copying favorite tracks like an aspiring painter duplicating old masters. Among those she replicated were songs by Roxy Music, the British art-rock band that was one of the influences on the “Pretty & Twisted” CD. “I like that combination of groove and mood and poetry,” said Napolitano, who included Roxy’s “Mother of Pearl” on the album.

Napolitano moved ahead with Pretty & Twisted after recruiting old friend Marc Moreland, the guitarist of another ‘80s-vintage L.A. band, Wall of Voodoo. They added Danny Montgomery, an American drummer she had met in Paris. The debut album has won good early notices for its atmospheric textures and evocative songwriting, which oscillates between tense glimpses of downward-bound, self-destructive characters and softer, comforting visions of people reaching for a sense of peace and equanimity.

Napolitano said she felt more doubt than triumph during recording, her maiden voyage as sole producer of an album.

“I thought, ‘For 10 years I’ve done all this, and I’ve got to find out how much I’ve learned and what I know.’ I was afraid that I would bail out, I would buckle under and I wouldn’t be able to finish it. But I kept through it and it came out.”

She had finished most of the work by March but had doubts as to just how good it was until she began playing the tracks for some old associates: Jim Mankey, her key creative foil in Concrete Blonde, and his brother, Earle, a veteran record producer.

“The first person I played it to was Jim Mankey, and he really liked it. And Earle mixed it and he liked it. Jim and Earle were my big brothers. When Jim started asking me how I got certain sounds, I just swelled up. He’s asking me! It meant the world, because they taught me.”

Napolitano said that she and Jim Mankey are back on good terms and co-producing an album for Los Illegals, a bilingual rock band from East L.A. Meanwhile, she said, playing with Pretty & Twisted has proven to be a far different experience than Concrete Blonde, even though the bands’ basic bass-drums-guitar lineup are identical.

“Like Concrete Blonde, this whole thing is the sum total of who’s involved,” she said. “A lot of the thrashy stuff I did 10 years ago, like ‘Still in Hollywood,’ that’s not what I care to do any more. . . . Now I’m able to use a lower register because Marc is ‘a soundscape artist,’ as a paper in Canada called him. . . . He’s just an atmospheric genius. Jim is an incredible guitar player, a flamenco quality guitar player. Sometimes all I wanted was one note or a sound, and it was almost insulting to ask him to do that.”

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Napolitano said that Moreland, unlike the stationary Mankey, carries some of the load generating onstage dynamism. “Danny and I will sometimes look over and be so amazed at whatever the [expletive] he’s doing over there. He’s really a character, a star. I feel I don’t have to run around.”

Happy as Napolitano says she is with her new band (which has resisted playing any Concrete Blonde material, although she said she’s mulling a version of the brilliant Andy Prieboy composition “Tomorrow, Wendy”), it hasn’t been easy. No sooner had Pretty & Twisted’s debut tour ended on a high last spring than all three were faced with personal trials: Montgomery was suddenly hospitalized and had to undergo surgery (he’s back in good health now, she said), Moreland learned that the grandmother who raised him was dying, and her own mother was having heart trouble.

“We’d had the best month [on tour], and we were just thinking it was all too good to be true, and [the personal upheavals that suddenly hit were] a reminder. For a band that’s been together only six months, we’ve been [through] trial by fire. It was rough, but you won’t find three people more appreciative of what they’re doing.”

The 18 months have brought personal changes as well. She said she has quit hard liquor in favor of a daily glass of red wine (“good for your heart, good for your blood; my doctor said I have the lowest cholesterol she’s ever seen”) and given up marijuana (“stupid weed, it just makes me an idiot and eat too much and sleep too much”). She also has connected with Catholicism after having grown up in a household devoid of religion. “I’ve felt a lot better since I came to terms with it. I’ve studied Eastern religions a lot, but the Catholic faith is what fits me best.”

Personal change--or the inability to effect it--is at the heart of such Pretty & Twisted songs as “The Highs Are Too High” and “Don’t Take Me Down,” in which Napolitano sees others caught in a desperate whirlpool of excess or emotional debility and vows not to be sucked in with them.

“I’m the oldest of five kids, and I had to deal a lot when I was a kid with things in my family,” Napolitano said. “I was always the strong one. When you come from a certain type of environment you wind up being the one who takes care of things. I found myself in the last 10 years trying to help people. But you can’t make people change. That’s been a heavy realization for me in the last year or so . . . . When you make a change in your life and do something that makes you happy, you wake up. It gives you such self-esteem and strength. If you can’t roll with change, life is too hard.”

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