Haven’t We Met?

Kenny Rankin is a survivor.

How else to describe a singer-songwriter-guitarist who: played in Bob Dylan’s backup band on “Bringing It All Back Home”; had songs recorded by Carmen McRae, Helen Reddy and Mel Torme; appeared more than 25 times on the “Tonight Show”; had hits with a pair of Beatles songs; was invited by Paul McCartney to sing his songs when McCartney was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame; did an album of standards with a large orchestra before Linda Ronstadt recorded “What’s New?”

Rankin is back again, the personal demons that made his career a roller coaster of peaks and valleys exorcised. Tonight he performs at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, singing in his still-sweet roving tenor accompanied by his own guitar.

“I’ll play solo for about two hours or so,” he says. “I’ll do a lot of new songs, some of the old things that people always want to hear, and a few Christmas songs from my new CD.”

The new CD, “Kenny Rankin: A Christmas Album,” includes a set of holiday classics interpreted in his unique style.

“People have been suggesting that I do a Christmas album for years,” he says. “But they always mention it the day before Christmas, when it’s too late. So this time I got around to it in August. I did some standards--’White Christmas,’ things like that. But I Rankin-ized them, which is what I like to call it.”

He also made it into somewhat of a family project, with the participation of daughters Chanda and Gena Maria.

“One of the girls did the cover art,” he says, “and both sang with me on ‘Silent Night’ and ‘O! Holy Night.’ ”

Rankin dedicated the album to his fourth-grade teacher.

“When I was 9 years old,” he recalls, “I sang ‘O! Holy Night’ in a Christmas play in school. And my teacher, Miss Isabel Pringle, came over to me and patted me on the head and said, ‘Kenneth, that was lovely.’ Little did she know that her support and her encouragement were starting me on the path in music that I find myself today. So I thought it was an appropriate dedication.”

A Washington Heights Musical Education

That path began when Rankin (who says he’s in his late 50s) was growing up in the Washington Heights section of New York City, absorbing the colorful mixture of Latin rhythms, doo-wop, rhythm and blues, jazz and soul music coursing through Manhattan at that time.

Mostly active as a songwriter in his early years (his “My Carousel” was the B-side of Andy Williams’ 1965 hit, “And Roses and Roses”), he finally recorded his own debut album, “Mind-Dusters,” in 1967.

Other albums followed--among them, “Family,” “Like a Seed,” “Silver Morning” (which included his renderings of “Blackbird”), “The Kenny Rankin Album” (with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), “Inside,” “After the Roses” and, in the ‘90s, “Professional Dreamer” and the Brazilian-tinged “Here in My Heart.”

But it was a path with many circuitous twists and turns. And Rankin, who now feels that he is completely out of the darkness, is the first to acknowledge that it’s been an arduous journey.

“I thought for most of my life that what I did was who I was,” he says. “And if you didn’t see it that way, too, you were going to have a problem with me. I would punish you by word or deed, because I was at the center of the universe.

“But once I accepted the fact that I was not at the center of the universe, two things happened right away. The first was, boom, the pressure was off, because I wasn’t trying to play God. And No. 2 was that I let go of the temptation to try and manipulate you and everything and everyone in my life. Now I’m just taking things as they come to me. And, you know, the truth is that I didn’t know I didn’t have a life until I started to get one.”

A good part of the process of starting to get a life had to do with getting past his addictive behavior.

“In ’82 I quit the cocaine,” says Rankin. “I thought it was part of the music industry, and I got caught up with all of it. Then, after I lost the use of my left arm from a chiropractic adjustment that went south--fortunately it’s OK now--I thought my life was over as I knew it, so I started drinking, heavily. I finally went into treatment the week that ‘Professional Dreamer’ came out, and I’ve been completely sober since 1995.”

He Wants to Be Known

for the Gift of Music

Rankin is reluctant to emphasize the recovery aspect of his life, despite his commitment to it.

“I don’t want to be known as some kind of recovering lunatic,” he says. “I want to be known for what God gave me, and that’s my music. I’m not embarrassed about being sober anymore, and I’m always happy to help someone else out of the darkness.”

What Rankin really wants in his life, now that the peaks and valleys have leveled out, is simply to be himself.

“I never used to feel I was enough,” he says. “But now I like me the way I am, whether one ear sticks out further than the other or if I don’t think my calves are big enough. That stuff doesn’t bother me anymore.

“What’s important to me now,” he concludes, “is to write a good song, to be a good friend, to be an honorable person, and to be a good father to my son and two daughters. And to know that when I’m on stage, it’s not about me, it’s about the people who come to get their feelings evoked, who come to get their memories stirred, who come to get into themselves. I happen to be there at that time in their lives, and I get invited into their evening. And now I understand what an honor that is.”

BE THERE

Kenny Rankin, with opening act Barbara Aglio, at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tonight at 8. $17.50 to $19.50. (949) 496-8930.