The Two Eggs and Toast Blues

Almost daily, Michael Ubaldini strolls into the Magnolia Cafe, an old-fashioned, diner-style family eatery in his Fountain Valley neighborhood, eases his lanky, pompadour-topped frame onto a green swivel chair at the counter, and orders coffee or the No. 6 breakfast special--two eggs and toast for $2.39, the cheapest thing on the menu, a meal for a struggling rocker.

This has been going on for five years now, so Ubaldini knows the other regulars and the staff, some of whom own his CDs and go to his gigs. They know what it means when, occasionally, he moves from the counter to the first booth inside the door and starts scribbling away on a stained coffee napkin.

“This seems like an odd place to sit and write a song, but for some reason I can think clearly here,” Ubaldini said last week while sitting at a corner booth at the cafe, splurging on a tuna melt and fries, courtesy of his interviewer’s expense account. “It’s almost like you’re so relaxed, you can almost melt into your subconscious. Then you get [awakened by] ‘More coffee?’ ”

Lyrics to some of the key songs on Ubaldini’s new album, “Acoustic Rumble,” emerged from his lunch-counter reveries. The album, a stark heir to Bob Dylan’s early folk records and, especially, to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” is a rarity for any Orange County rocker--not just in its one-man acoustic production (Ubaldini plays guitars and harmonica), but in its sustained thread of social commentary.

Ubaldini, 31, writes from the point of view of a patriotic lunch-pail poet who feels shunted aside and betrayed by his country, one of the irrelevant “Shadows and Ghosts,” as one song title puts it, in a land of instant celebrity and even faster information technology.

It’s surprising coming from Ubaldini, whose output on two previous CDs with his band, Mystery Train, featured roots-rock rave-ups celebrating the quest for the hottest girl in the bar, balanced by reverent evocations of the mythical South from which rock ‘n’ roll emerged.

Ubaldini can’t pinpoint a single event that led to his creative transformation, and he says his prolific songwriting output continues to include gleefully lusty numbers of the sort that set the tone for his band’s “Mystery Train” (1995) and “Hidin’ From the Devil” (1997) albums.

Contentious cable talk shows, drive-by killings and the alchemy by which criminals can become celebrities were among the soiled spots in the culture that made him wonder where America was going.

“Acoustic Rumble” is not just a socially aware album but also a deeply personal journey in which the social concerns are just one layer in revealing the passions, fears, sorrows, escapes, cherished myths and core values of an artist.

The album establishes Ubaldini, a devoted reader of American literature who took to rock ‘n’ roll early (he was hooked for life at age 8, when he saw Little Richard perform on television) and never got a college education, as a thinking person’s rocker with the ‘50s rebel-without-a-cause look later adopted by the Clash.

It goes Springsteen’s “Tom Joad” one better by couching its commentary in consistently memorable music; half the songs on the Boss’ most political album sound more like essay-writing than music-making.

Ubaldini says he always has a few usable melodies in progress. Sometimes an idea that will fit them with lyrics hits him at the Magnolia Cafe and he starts writing on the spot.

One time, Ubaldini was sitting at a booth with a friend when his father, Ivan Ubaldini, and two of his fellow retirees sat at the counter and began discussing whether their World War II generation had been brainwashed into romanticizing America and disregarding its blemishes, such as racism.

That became an inspiration for “Poem to My Country,” in which Ubaldini becomes the blind patriotic lover whose eyes have been opened to America’s betrayals of its ideals and its indifference to everyday injustice.

But in the end, he vows, in a straining, wounded voice that creates the album’s most arresting and pivotal moment, to go on loving:

Do you miss me, like I miss you?

You say I’m free to leave

I wear my heart on my sleeve,

You can turn your back, I won’t.

My love is stronger

That’s why I’m so sad,

And I miss you.

Another of Ubaldini’s lunch-counter experiences hasn’t turned into a song yet: his father’s death on May 3 of a heart attack, minutes after Ubaldini had waved a casual goodbye while walking out the door, headed for the Magnolia Cafe.

After Ubaldini finished posing for a photographer, one of the cafe regulars, George Emery, greeted him. “You gotta write a song for your dad,” said Emery, a friend of Ivan Ubaldini who knew in advance what Ivan had gotten his son last Christmas--a rare mid-’60s vintage Beatles souvenir watch--and kept it a secret.

“I’ll get one done,” Ubaldini told the white-haired man.

He knows it won’t be easy.

“It was the worst day of my life,” he said during the interview. His father, the son of an Italian immigrant opera singer, couldn’t carry a tune himself but loved to play country songs on guitar and taught Michael his first song: Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya.”

He didn’t criticize when Michael decided to pursue his passion--the scant rewards of which have left him living still in his parents’ home--instead of a safe career.

“We were buddies,” Ubaldini said. “When it first happens, you don’t want to believe it. Something in your mind shuts off. I tried to write [a song about my father], but at first you just want to say, ‘This really sucks.’ I couldn’t come up with anything.”

While standing outside for more photos, Ubaldini got another bit of advice from a cafe patron. A balding, mustachioed man in a wheelchair approached and said: “Nobody can get a job without an agent. Even the big boys. Any celebrity at all has an agent.”

Ubaldini has no agent, no manager, no substantial record company. (JT Records, which released “Acoustic Rumble” last week, is a tiny independent that didn’t have much luck getting wide distribution for Ubaldini’s previous album; the label can be reached at https://www.jtrecords.com.)

Except for a few promotional gigs in Japan in 1994, when the first Mystery Train album was released there on a major label, Ubaldini hasn’t gotten out of Southern California to play--you can discount two seat-of-the-pants, cross-country trips in which he popped into bars and coffeehouses unannounced and asked if he might have a gig.

While he has managed to sustain a local roots-rock career since 1984, Ubaldini’s stock at the moment isn’t high enough to land him a spot on Hootenanny ‘99, the annual roots-rock fest in Santiago Canyon. He’s chagrined that he couldn’t get on the bill, given his long fidelity to the genre.

“It’s just frustrating,” he said, summing up his lack of pull with promoters, agents, record companies and the rest of the music-biz machinery. “It’s almost like they’re not grasping it, the timing is off or something. I want the stuff to get out there. Rock ‘n’ roll gave so much to me, it was so magical, that I want to give something back.”

“Acoustic Rumble” quietly roars with those frustrations. But it also affirms, in the end, a faith in simple things, like the value of a good, honest song, and the magic in a sudden, unexpected link between a man and a woman that can lead to a moonlit waltz.

“Believe me, I’ve driven every piece of garbage under the sun,” Ubaldini said of his continuing marginality on the rock scene. “If it runs, that’s all I care about. Who wouldn’t want to have nice things? But I’ve always felt that what I have is inside, anyway. Riches are inside, encased in a person’s heart.”

* Michael Ubaldini plays Tuesdays in June at the One Eyed Parrot, in the Charter Center, 7862 Warner Ave., Huntington Beach. (714) 842-8839. Also Friday at Diedrich Coffee, 22621 Lake Forest Drive, Lake Forest. (949) 837-4555 and Saturday at Diedrich Coffee, 3972 Barranca Parkway, Irvine. (949) 559-9125. All performances are free and start at 8 p.m.

Mike Boehm can be reached by e-mail at Mike.Boehm@latimes.com.