THREE-PART HARMONY : Fetching, Funny and Fundamentally Sound, the Roche Sisters Are Hitless Wonders Bound by Tenacity

About 10 years ago, the Roches recorded a rousing pep talk of a song called “Keep on Doing” that counseled perseverance and humor in the face of adversity.

The three harmony-singing Roche sisters, Maggie, Terre and Suzzy, are still practicing what the song preaches. They have kept on going through a 12-year recording career as hitless wonders, continuing to hone their fetching, funny and technically accomplished act despite a lack of mass commercial success.

It’s a hard-to-classify act that doesn’t fall into any of the easily tagged, readily salable pop music categories. There’s some folk in there, some soft rock, and a classic choral music influence, too. The Roches added a bit of a country twang to a few of the carols on “We Three Kings,” the album of Christmas songs they released last year; they also offered a reading of “Winter Wonderland” sung in Brooklynese.

The Roches effectively have blended the humorous and the heartfelt. Their songs subtly but acutely convey the idea that life is an enterprise simultaneously painful and funny. Above all, there have been those three beautifully meshed voices--Maggie providing lower-register grounding, Terre a sweet, elevated, ethereal lilt, and Suzzy hovering in the mid-range. A Roches show will encompass its share of delicate and intimate balladry, as well as impressive displays of force such as the trio’s trademark show-stopper, a three-part a cappella rollick through Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”

Between the exacting technical demands of their music (it requires an unending rehearsal routine that keeps the sisters in almost daily contact), the inevitable friction that comes when grown blood relatives remain at close quarters for years on end, and the group’s continuing lack of commercial validation, it has taken some doing for the Roches to keep on doing.

In separate phone interviews from Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where the sisters live within eight blocks of each other, all three Roches readily acknowledged that the sometimes turbulent Roche personalities have not always meshed as seamlessly as the sweet Roche voices.

“It’s been a struggle to keep it going,” said Maggie, at 39 the oldest sister (Terre is 38 and Suzzy is 34. Their brother, David, 33, serves as road manager and sometimes opens the Roches’ shows with his own solo-acoustic act). “We all are really different personalities. It’s a constant compromise. I know people who can’t be in a room with their families for 10 minutes, so I think it’s pretty remarkable we’ve been able to keep it together. It’s not peaches and cream, but what we have is really strong. In a way you’re trying to be your own person, but in a way it’s a very deep support system. You think, ‘I want to be me for a while,’ but it’s hard to walk away. You have very intense bonds.”

A particularly intense moment of sisterly interaction took place one night in Norfolk, Va., about six or seven years ago. Terre and Maggie, it seems, had a falling-out. As Suzzy recalls it, Terre went to Maggie’s motel room intending to make up with her. Instead, Terre grabbed a chair and heaved it through the wall.

“I can’t remember what it was about,” Terre said in a light tone. “Suzzy talked me into going down and confessing my crime. The man at the desk came up and looked at the hole and said, (she mimics a Southern drawl), ‘Ma’am, that’s a $10 hole, I’m afraid.’ I thought it was going to be into the hundreds of dollars. It goes to show how inexpensive those walls are.”

An emphasis on creativity was the sisters’ common bond as they grew up in Park Ridge, N.J., where the walls were presumably sturdier.

“We weren’t like the Osmonds or something, where our parents formed us into a singing group when we were 7 years old,” Maggie said. “But we’re a close family, and we all did the same things. We all made up songs, we all played the piano that was in the house, we all wrote stories, we were all cut from the same cloth.”

The sisters got early experience singing in school and church choirs (in an era of cutbacks in school music programs, let it be noted that Maggie points to the influence of a public school choral instructor named Paris Simms, “one of those great teachers who’s like a legend-in-the-school type guy. We learned a lot from him”).

With some coaxing from their father, Maggie and Terre began performing as a folk duo. When they found out that Paul Simon was giving a songwriting course at New York University, the two teen-agers cornered the pop hero outside a classroom and persuaded him to listen to their work.

“We thought he was going to listen to these songs and say, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard,’ ” thus giving the two Roche sisters instant entree to the big time, Terre recalled. “Instead, he just said, ‘If you like, you can join this songwriting class.’ For us, that was the beginning of the reality of the music business, as opposed to your fantasies of it.”

The Simon contact would prove useful later on. First, Maggie and Terre, still in their teens, got extensive seasoning when a talent company that provided performers for campus coffee houses signed the as-yet unrecorded duo as a touring act. For 1 1/2 years--not counting a hiatus when they were kicked off the program for, as Terre puts it, “being unsociable” toward their collegiate hosts--they plied such outlying territories as North Dakota, Idaho, Wisconsin and Louisiana. Back in New York, they hooked up with Simon again, and he was instrumental in helping them make their 1975 debut album, “Seductive Reasoning.”

Instead of being buoyed by the experience, the two sisters were almost sunk. “By the end of the thing we were feeling intimidated about our own musicianship,” Terre said. “We were working with the top people in the business, and we’d never even played with other musicians in New Jersey. We had never taken any instruction, and didn’t know the names of half the chords. We were in over our heads. We felt we had absolutely no talent, that we had nothing to say. We did about four shows, and they were disasters.”

They responded by bailing out of the pop business, heading for a communal life in Hammond, La., where a friend they’d made in their coffeehouse troubadour days ran a Kung Fu school. Maggie’s “Hammond Song,” one of the Roches’ most memorable numbers, captures what it was like to go against the advice of music business friends who were sure they were committing career suicide: “If you go down to Hammond, you’ll never come back,” sings the song’s judgmental narrator. “In my opinion, you’re on the wrong track.”

The retreat to Hammond “was absolutely necessary,” Terre said. “We went to Louisiana and it was very exotic and very Southern, but we got homesick for New York.”

Back in Greenwich Village, the sisters got jobs as bartenders at the Folk City nightclub. Enter Suzzy, who had dropped out of acting school and moved to New York (her name was the usual Suzy, short for Susannah, she says, until her grandfather inadvertently added an extra ‘z’ to her name on a Christmas stocking, and it somehow never went away). Until then, the youngest Roche sister had only watched Maggie and Terre’s singing career from afar.

“I totally idolized them. They were older, and I never saw myself as part of it,” she said. “But after they quit, I felt I could get them back singing again.” Suzzy, who said her behind-the-scenes role in the group has often been as a “catalyst” and enthusiast, said she proposed forming a street-singing group to make some extra money. The sisters began by singing Christmas carols in December, 1976, discovered they had a good creative chemistry, and worked their way into folk clubs. By 1979, they had signed with Warner Bros. Records and released a debut album, “The Roches.”

The album was highly praised by critics, but didn’t generate sales to match. Their second album, “Nurds,” was widely judged a sophomore slump; “Keep On Doing,” which, like their debut album, was produced by the donnish British rock guitarist, Robert Fripp, marked a return to form. A 1985 album, “Another World,” featured some fine material, but it was hampered by heavy-handed production weighted down by blatant, machine-driven beats and synthesizer rhythms clearly designed to make the Roches more radio-ready. Radio still wasn’t ready for them, and Warner Bros. dropped the group.

That was a blessing, the sisters said. A little-heard independent EP, “No Trespassing,” gave them a chance to hone their new, machine-generated approach to music. Back on a major label, MCA, the Roches returned in 1989 with “Speak,” an excellent, subtly produced album that explored downcast, plaintive themes without relinquishing the characteristic Roches wit. “Big Nuthin,” a tartly funny ode to disappointment (“I guess I never knew just how big nothin’ could be,” mused Suzzy), got extensive play on the VH-1 video channel. While it didn’t translate into mass sales, a large audience was at least reminded that the Roches were still keeping on doing.

Now, after putting out their Christmas album last year, the Roches find themselves in an old bind, according to Maggie: wanting to do their next album their own way, yet faced with a record company that, as record companies are wont to do, would like to squeeze out a hit.

“We’re going back and forth with our record company, trying to agree on a producer and a strategy,” she said. “They want to make it more commercial than it is, and they think in terms of finding some hotshot producer. It’s frustrating. . . .”

“Our group has always been outside the mainstream,” Terre said. “I don’t feel there’s a choice: ‘OK, I’ve had it with being on the outside, now I’m going to be in the mainstream.’ You just go along and do your work. That’s all Bonnie Raitt was doing--she was doing her work. She kept going and she had a hit. It’s like winning the lottery.”

Whatever the production approach, Suzzy said, the next Roches album promises to be “a pretty up record” in contrast to the downcast “Speak.”

“It’s just a different time now. We’re just lighter,” she said. After writing a memorable series of songs on “Speak” about failed relationships, Maggie reports that she is on a romantic upswing these days and writing fewer songs. All three members have always contributed songs, working individually, collectively, or in combinations of two. This time, Suzzy and Terre are taking up the writing slack.

On stage, Suzzy is the most forward Roche sister, the seemingly natural ham who handles most of the between-songs patter. Terre holds back, but can be drawn into back-and-forth banter. Maggie is the Emily Dickinson of the group. She usually dresses conservatively, at least in comparison to her colorfully bohemian sisters. The author of “Speak,” a song about breaking through blocks to artistic expression, is disinclined to speak much to concert audiences.

Off stage, it’s the opposite. “I tend to hang back in real life,” Suzzy said. “I’m not as verbal as the other ones are. There’s that hierarchy of the family. They were always the big girls and I was the little girl. I always had this feeling that they were more important than me, they’re bigger and better than me. I feel very intimidated by them, which is weird. You’d think things (like that) would go away, but it comes from early childhood.

“They’re very heated people,” Suzzy added. “They were always getting riled up. When we were little, they’d go on and on, (complaining) about what time we had to go to bed--the injustices of the world. Did they tell you about the time they stood on a runway and told the pilot they were going to break his neck?” (No, they didn’t. But filling in the details of the long-ago incident, Suzzy said Maggie and Terre became infuriated when an airline pilot ordered them to put their guitars in the baggage compartment, when the group had bought an extra seat so the instruments could ride in the cabin and out of harm’s way).

“Maggie said to the guy, ‘If you break the guitar, I’ll break your neck.’ They also once kicked a guy in the (groin) for the same reason. That wasn’t a pilot, that was a steward. They don’t do that any more. We’ve all mellowed a little now.”

These days, Suzzy said, she is the one most likely to be setting off tempests within the group. She is the only sister who has a child, a 9-year-old daughter, Lucy, whose father is the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III.

“I’m always leaving,” for one of the Roches’ frequent road trips, she said. “It’s always a stressful thing. I feel guilty no matter what I’m doing. I think that’s a very common modern woman’s problem. Maggie and Terre are really more suited to this lifestyle. I’m always breaking down and saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore,’ and wanting to get myself a place to live that has a real kitchen in it and maybe a washing machine.”

(All three sisters live in small, rented apartments; Suzzy, who spoke on the phone while folding clothes she’d just brought back from the Laundromat, is sort of a poet of washing emporia. She immortalized one in “The Death of Suzzy Roche,” a farcical, self-mocking song in which she fantasizes about being done in by a laundry attendant for putting on pop-star airs--the real joke being the notion that anyone watching her own undies go round and round in a coin-op machine could be putting on pop-star airs to begin with).

Those “I can’t go on” episodes are just ventings, Suzzy said. Each time, she decides to keep on doing.

According to Terre, working out upsets within the group has gotten easier as the group goes on. “We’ve had so many years of working out our differences. Many times we would come to the point where we would think we would have to stop, ‘This is not going to work.’ Then it would break through to a different place. I can’t remember one argument about (musical differences). It’s more the kind of stuff that happens in families: ‘Since you were a kid, you’re always saying this to me and I can’t stand it any more.’ We’re constantly checking the working relationship, asking, ‘How is everybody doing?’ ”

The answer, all three Roches say, is that they are still excited by their music, and still deeply fond of singing with each other.

“For me, the forum of the Roches is more than I could ever dream of as a vehicle for my songs,” Maggie said. “I love the way Terre and Suzzy sing. I think it’s a very good way for me to put my songs across. I think we’ve had a remarkable career, and I’m grateful. We didn’t have the traditional path of a career (with a hit album to establish the group), but we just seem to have people around the country who like what we do and come out to support it. We’ve never had the gold record, but we’ve been able to continue to be artistic, which makes it worth it to me.”

“I just really enjoy it when it sounds great,” Terre said. “I feel like it’s almost a ceremony that I’m partaking in, more than performing for somebody. I believe people come to see us because the work is good and it has a lot of integrity. To me, it’s like a restaurant. You do good cooking and keep it up, and people will come to eat at your restaurant. In the doing of it, making food or making music, there’s something that’s enriching to the soul.”

“I love this,” said Suzzy, who, given a greater financial cushion, might want to take time off to explore the acting career she began with a supporting part in the film “Crossing Delancy.”

“There’s really nothing like the rush I feel when we have a new song. There are little personal triumphs I feel that keep me going, and I really love Maggie and Terre, and I like to be a part of their lives.”

Who: The Roches.

When: Saturday, July 13, at 9 p.m.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Center.

Wherewithal: $17.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.