Tough enough to be tender

As the leader of one of Southern California’s preeminent punk bands, Social Distortion front man Mike Ness has seen more than his share of danger over the last 25 years.

Drug addiction, jail, police clashes, barroom brawls, family disputes, even death -- Ness has witnessed them all, then chronicled them in potent songs that chart life’s darker byways.

But with his group’s first studio album in eight years, he finally feels ready to tackle the most dangerous territory of all: love.

“I’ve been in some of the worst neighborhoods and some of the most dangerous places in this country -- tell me what’s more dangerous than love?” the 42-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist says from a roadside diner on a tour stop in Minneapolis.

He’s just polished off a veggie burger, part of the vegetarian regime he adopted six years ago and one sign of the dramatic turnaround he’s made since he was a heroin-addicted punk rocker who didn’t care whether he’d live to see another sunrise.

Social D’s new album, “Sex, Love and Rock & Roll,” debuted on the national album chart at No. 3 -- the group’s best showing ever -- and has sold 92,000 copies since its release in September. It suggests, as do a string of five sold-out shows this week and next at the Wiltern LG, that although Social Distortion has been gone for a while, the band hasn’t been forgotten.

Ness says he substituted the word “love” for “drugs” in the title as more than a witty play on the pop music cliche.

“For me it had a couple of meanings,” he says. “One was the whole punk [belief that] ‘It’s not cool to say you’re in love or talk about it. It’s OK to do it, but not to talk about it -- that machismo thing. I like to tear down those kinds of stereotypes and walls. Even tough guys fall in love, pal.

“The other way I looked at it was, ‘Who needs drugs when you have love?’ Probably the reason I went to drugs was because I didn’t have that.”

What hasn’t changed for Ness and Social D over time is the drive to enjoy life now. But 2 1/2 decades into his career, Ness, now married and the father of 12- and 8-year-old sons, has another perspective on what that means.

In the song “Faithless,” he sings in a buzz-saw voice matched by the group’s signature noise-soaked guitars: “I remember a time I believed the words ‘love’ and ‘pain’ were the same.” Indeed, those two words are tattooed across the knuckles of his left and right hands.

The album’s first single, “Reach for the Sky,” notes, “The day may come when you’ve got something to lose.” Then in “Highway 101,” Ness confesses, “I believe in love now, with all its joys and pains.”

While some may look at a middle-aged punk rocker singing of love and suspect that he’s turning sappy, for Ness, it’s the opposite: He’s finally become strong enough to open up to love. No one has told the man of a thousand brawls to his face that they think he’s gone soft.

“They know better,” he says with a steely laugh. “My answer to that is ... I’d rather take a beating from 10 grown men than to have a broken heart.”

His heart was broken, however, four years ago when his longtime bandmate and close friend, guitarist Dennis Dannell, died at 38 of a brain aneurysm. That loss inspired the song “Don’t Take Me for Granted” on the new album and partly explained the long delay since 1998’s “White Heat, White Light, White Trash” album.

Former Cadillac Tramps guitarist Jonny Wickersham stepped into the rhythm guitarist role for the long-running band, which also recently added Rancid bassist Matt Freeman to take over for John Maurer. After “Sex, Love and Rock & Roll” was recorded, Maurer decided to get off the touring merry-go-round and concentrate on his family.

During the group’s gap between recordings, Ness also launched a solo career with a pair of albums, one with cover versions of some songs nearest to his heart (“Under the Influences”), the other (“Cheating at Solitaire”) with his own songs stylistically reflecting the love he developed for blues and country music growing up in Fullerton.

But even factoring in the release of a live Social Distortion album during the same period, eight years is a long time between studio efforts. “When you’ve got a wife and kids,” he says, “you get caught up in your daily routines.”

His daily routine has included coaching one son’s baseball team, working around his house in central Orange County and reminding his 12-year-old to practice his saxophone daily, an example of how Ness is trying to foster in his kids the self-discipline he still finds a challenge.

“I’ve learned that writing is a very easy thing to put off,” Ness says with a laugh. “But I also know that [my wife and children] are also very inspiring things, very positive things, and that I can get a lot of inspiration from the positive things in my life. I think in the past the majority of the stuff I wrote about was drawn from negative emotions. What comes out in this record is a little more positive and optimistic.”

And he doesn’t view that as a seismic shift.

“For me it’s all connected,” he says. “The domestic life provides a balance for me that was kind of missing. I still obviously have my rebellious nature, and that’s never going to go away no matter how domesticated I get. I feel I’ll either be one of those old men who is really kind and generous, or I could easily become one of those crotchety old guys who chases kids out of his yard.

“Either way, that spirit inside is part of your personality, and it’s never going to go away. It’s something inside you that you draw from, whether it’s a discontent with the status quo, the power of love or politics or just cool stuff. I feel very passionate about all those things, so I think there will always be stuff to write about.”

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Social Distortion

Where: Wiltern LG, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Friday through Monday

Price: $25

Info: (213) 380-5005

Randy Lewis can be reached at randy.lewis@latimes.com.