No Strain, No Gain for Punk Refugee Mike Martt and Co.

When veteran punk rockers can’t see the point in screaming any longer, it’s often considered a sign of inevitable mellowing.

At 38, Mike Martt of the Low & Sweet Orchestra prefers to see the steadily softening trend of his nearly 20-year rock career as “life in progression.”

At the Coach House on Friday, Martt fronted the seven-man folk-rock band with a rough, earthy, Everyman’s voice. He played the part of a survivor of hard times and hard emotional weather who has learned to endure through stoic acceptance rather than venting his rage.

Surrounding him was an Irish-flavored lineup keyed by a chiming mandolin, the sweetly rusty fiddle of Kieran Mulroney, and the occasional banjo plunking of guitarist Zander Schloss, another reformed punk rocker who shares most of the songwriting with Martt.

While playing during the 1980s with Tex & the Horseheads and Thelonious Monster, Martt earned a reputation as a sturdy sidekick-type on the L.A. indie-rock scene. Low & Sweet’s debut release, “Goodbye to All That,” on the hot Interscope label, is his first album as a front man.

But Martt’s roots are in Orange County--and, in fact, those roots may run deeper than any other O.C.-bred rock musician’s. He grew up in Sunset Beach, attended Huntington Beach High School and got his musical start here fronting an early-’80s punk band called Funeral.

“My family has been [at its Sunset Beach homestead] since Pacific Coast Highway was a dirt road,” Martt said the day before the Coach House gig, speaking from his home in Long Beach. “My grandfather built the place 83 years ago, right on the sand, as a kind of cottage where the family could come down from East L.A.--which was Little Italy back then--and vacation on the beach.” The house soon became his Italian immigrant granddad’s permanent residence.

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Martt says people tend not to believe him when he says his father was a deep-sea diver who fished for abalone, and his mother, a Native American who could pass for Polynesian, was a professional hula dancer. Martt was considering a nautical career himself in the U.S. Coast Guard, but punk rock got the better of him, and he never finished high school.

His musical back pages are about to be revealed, he says: A tiny reissues label, Grand Theft Audio, plans to issue a Funeral CD, featuring songs from the two singles the band put out, plus lots of unreleased material.

“I didn’t want to do it, to tell you the truth,” Martt said. “But [the label’s owner] offered me money, and I needed to pay the rent.”

Martt’s step-by-step withdrawal from punk began in 1983, when he moved to L.A. and joined Tex and the Horseheads, which tempered its punk content with country influences. Next came a five-year stretch in the turbulent but sometimes brilliant Thelonious Monster, a band that ranged from wild rock ‘n’ roll to intense blues and plaintive balladry.

In the early ‘90s, Martt moved on to fronting his own band, in a style that recalled Neil Young, and then began playing acoustic gigs accompanied only by a harmonica player.

At one of these acoustic shows four years ago he renewed acquaintance with Schloss, a guitarist whose credits include the nerdy, doomed grocery clerk of “Repo Man,” as well as rock hitches with the Circle Jerks, Joe Strummer and Thelonious Monster.

Schloss had the idea of moving toward a Celtic-rock merger a la the Pogues; while he and Martt had never been very close before (they usually passed by each other in Thelonious’ revolving-door lineup), they discovered that in this new context, they were a songwriting combination that clicked.

At the Coach House, Martt’s rough but understated approach worked well at times, but overall it left one wanting him to push more against his limitations and break through his prevailing restraint.

His conversational, unforced approach is fine in the sonically controlled environment of a recording, where it keys the winning natural warmth and intimacy of “Goodbye to All That.” But it was less suitable onstage, where a singer has to reach out more overtly and grab a listener.

With his deep, grainy, voice, narrow range and gargly tone, you could sometimes close your eyes listening to Martt and think you were hearing a preview of the quieter, folk-tinged solo project that Mike Ness of the acclaimed O.C. punk band Social Distortion may someday undertake. But Ness, with his innate sense of drama and swagger, probably won’t go for the understatement-to-a-fault that characterized Martt’s singing.

In “I Had to Leave a Friend Behind,” Martt has written an uncommonly affecting sad ballad; he told the audience it was inspired by his decision to cut off from his old Thelonious Monster comrade, the notoriously drug- and booze-prone singer Bob Forrest, because “I was in danger of him dragging me down.”

The song might have been a wrenching show-stopper in a more dramatically inclined singer’s hands. Martt sang it honestly, but one couldn’t help imagining Rick Danko or the late Richard Manuel of the Band singing it sublimely.

The high, hoarse cry and intensified dynamic Martt used to punctuate the ending of “Sometimes the Truth Is All You Get” was a step in the right direction.

For a rock singer, sometimes it isn’t enough if the truth is all you give. Martt faces the tricky performance challenge of embellishing his songs with the storyteller’s drama that can bring experience fully alive, while remaining true to the untheatrical essence of his characters: the ragtag dignity of their restrained bearing in the face of knowing that life is hard, and raging about it won’t help.