Bluegrass Is Always Greener : Music: Though he’s far from a household name, Byron Berline, who plays tonight in Laguna Niguel, has made a steady career of the genre he has fun with.

When he first settled in Los Angeles more than 20 years ago, Byron Berline found himself keeping some heady company.

The Rolling Stones summoned the young bluegrass fiddler from Oklahoma to saw away on “Country Honk,” their rustic reworking of “Honky Tonk Women.” Before long, Berline was the fiddler of first resort for a burgeoning country-rock scene that included the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. As time went on he would get the call for sessions by Bob Dylan, the Band, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

As his career took off and he looked for a place of his own, Berline got some house-hunting advice from the great guitarist Clarence White, another traditional bluegrass player who had turned to rock as a member of the late-’60s and early-’70s lineups of the Byrds. Berline might have been playing with some of the Hollywood elite, but White suggested he find earthier digs.

“Clarence White told me, ‘Go to the San Fernando Valley. That’s where all the country and bluegrass players live.”

In 1972, Berline moved into his comfortable, but far from ostentatious house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Van Nuys. It has a grassy yard, a small pool shaded by a thick, expansive palm tree, and an attached music studio that Berline calls his “pickin’ room”--a carpeted, comfortably furnished place decorated with memorabilia and enough stringed instruments to stock a music store.

These days, Berline says, White’s advice about the Valley being bluegrass central no longer applies.

“Everyone’s going to Nashville now. The music scene’s drying up out here, and a lot of the country players have left town. But I’m comfortable here.”

Berline isn’t one to sing a sad, lonesome song, at least not when he is off stage. His bluegrass band--Berline, Crary & Hickman--renamed itself California a year ago, as if to underscore the idea that Nashville hasn’t claimed all the good pickers (the band plays tonight at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments in Laguna Niguel).

The high-profile studio sessions vanished as the Southern California country-rock boom went bust in the late ‘70s. But Berline has been able to continue a steady career of touring and recording geared toward the more specialized bluegrass and traditional folk audience.

Tall and trim, with deep blue eyes under swept-back blond hair, Berline at 47 has the look of a well-preserved ex-athlete. He sat in his music room, recalling in an affable, easy-rolling voice a career path that he feels has been marked by good fortune, even if it hasn’t made him a household name.

“I feel fortunate being in the right place at the right time at all points of my life,” Berline said. “I was lucky. Things could have gone the other way.”

Berline’s first big musical break was an accident of birth. His father, Lue Berline, was a German immigrant’s son who worked a ranch and wheat farm in Caldwell, Kan. near the Oklahoma border. He also played banjo and fiddle at barn dances and social events. Byron, the youngest of five children, started playing as a toddler, working the bow while his father held the violin.

When Berline was in his teens, father and son started making the rounds of fiddle competitions.

“You were always searching for someplace to play, and contests were a release for that,” Berline said. “You had to have the right attitude. He told me, ‘Never go to a contest with the intention of winning.’ ” Instead, Berline went to soak up new styles: “I met all these really good Texas fiddle players, and it influenced my playing a lot.”

Berline had other talents. A high school football star, he won a football scholarship to the University of Oklahoma.

During a freshman football practice, Berline literally caught his next big break: While trying to haul in a pass, he fractured his right thumb and one of his fingers (his left hand, crucial to controlling fiddle strings, was unhurt). End of football career, but start of a more serious pursuit of music.

“You didn’t have time to do anything when you played football,” said Berline, who kept his athletic scholarship by switching to the track team as a javelin thrower. “That left me a lot more time to make music.”

In 1963, the Dillards, a bluegrass band signed to Elektra Records, turned up to play on the Oklahoma campus. Berline hadn’t heard of the Missouri-based group, but somebody suggested it would be worth his while to show them what he could do. The Dillards had already packed their gear to leave when Berline approached them.

“I just played the fastest tune I knew, which was ‘Hamilton County Breakdown.’ They unloaded all their instruments right there, and we jammed for two hours straight.”

That bit of luck led to Berline’s recording debut. In July, 1964, he joined the Dillards in Los Angeles to record “Pickin’ and Fiddlin.’ ” The band gave him a front cover credit--”featuring Byron Berline, fiddle”--and included the crew-cut collegian in a group cover photo.

Berline also played some Los Angeles shows with the Dillards and made his first contact with a Los Angeles folk-rock scene that was about to explode.

“I remember Gene Clark borrowed 30 cents from me at the Troubadour club to buy a pack of cigarettes. He said, ‘Y’know, I’m going to be in this band that’s gonna make a lot of money.’ ” The next time they met, in 1969, Clark (who died earlier this year) had left that band, the Byrds, and could afford to buy his own cigarettes.

Berline’s “Pickin’ and Fiddlin’ ” session with the Dillards led to another break: Ralph Rinzler, a folk music expert who helped scout talent for the Newport Folk Festival, wrote the liner notes for the album. Impressed with Berline’s playing, he asked the fiddler and his father to appear as a duo at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

“That’s the year Bob Dylan got booed” for playing an electric set with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. “People were carrying on. I was on the side of the stage when it happened. I couldn’t figure out why they were (booing). He just kept on playing.”

Berline said his own set went well (he and his father followed Peter, Paul and Mary on stage; Berline said he is excited that Vanguard Records is planning to include four songs they played on an upcoming retrospective album of Newport Folk Festival highlights). He also got to jam with Bill Monroe, the acknowledged founder of bluegrass music.

“He said, ‘I sure would like you to play in my band,’ and that was exactly what I wanted to hear.”

Berline finished his degree in physical education (he planned on teaching and coaching high school sports), then joined Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1967. It was a short tenure, though: after seven months, Berline was drafted into the Army.

After five weeks of basic training at Fort Polk, La., and with a tour of duty in Vietnam looming as a distinct possibility, Berline got another break. The military base threw a family-day event, and Berline volunteered to provide the entertainment, summoning a Dallas-based band, the Stone Mountain Boys, to back him up.

A colonel who happened to be a big country-music fan caught the show, and Berline soon found himself with a less hazardous assignment: working for the base’s entertainment division. So Berline spent the next two years keeping up his musical chops.

On the day before his discharge in 1969, Doug Dillard called and asked Berline to come to Los Angeles and join him and Gene Clark in the recording studio for a new venture, Dillard & Clark. Berline found the pickings good; after an exploratory three-month stay, he and his wife, Bette, decided to move to Los Angeles permanently (they have a college-age daughter, Becca, a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara).

Back in Oklahoma, they were packing for the move when the Rolling Stones called and asked Berline to hurry back to the West Coast. They were looking for a fiddler to play on “Country Honk,” a track being recorded for their 1969 “Let It Bleed” album. Ex-Byrd Gram Parsons, one of Berline’s new country-rock pals, recommended him for the job.

“I went in and listened to the track and started playing to it,” Berline recalled. Then he was summoned into the control room. “I thought, ‘They’re not digging this at all.’ ” As it turned out, the band didn’t want Berline to play any differently. They just wanted him to play in a different place--outside the studio, on the sidewalk.

“There was a bulldozer out there moving dirt. Mick Jagger went out himself and stopped the guy.” Berline performed eight takes, while the recorders also picked up ambient street noise, including the car horns that appear on the finished track.

It was an unorthodox introduction to rock ‘n’ roll record-making. But Berline had no trouble finding more conventional sessions. “I could go to the Troubadour club any night of the week, just go in and get a session. It was always a challenge for me to fit in to what everybody else was doing. I looked forward to it. I thought a lot of the (country and bluegrass) purists back in Tennessee would frown on it, but I couldn’t care less.”

One of Berline’s grandest moments was his Cajun-style fiddle part on “Acadian Driftwood,” a moving historical epic from the Band’s 1975 album, “Northern Lights--Southern Cross.” At the time, he was a novice when it came to Cajun fiddle styles.

“Robbie Robertson played me an old record of some of the Nova Scotia fiddlers” to illustrate the sound he wanted. “It was in such a weird key. So I retuned the fiddle and played it. It’s the only time I’ve played the fiddle tuned that way.” Berline had a less prominent role on another rock landmark. He had been called in to cut instrumental music for Bob Dylan’s film soundtrack album, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

“(Dylan) said, ‘Can you sing?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I got up and helped sing the background vocals on ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’ ”

Besides his session work, Berline also became a full-fledged member of the Flying Burrito Brothers. When the Burritos broke up in 1972, his band mates Chris Hillman and Al Perkins invited him to follow them into Stephen Stills’ country-rock band, Manassas. But Berline by then wanted to take his own shot at tapping into a mass audience. He launched the bluegrass-oriented Country Gazette band, which had a major label deal with United Artists.

In 1973, Country Gazette signed onto a package tour that Berline thought had the potential to break the bluegrass-rock band to a mainstream audience. Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were the headliners on a bill that included a number of other ace players, including Clarence White. “We had 12 colleges booked for the fall, but then Clarence got killed,” the victim of a drunk driver. “We were still going to do the dates. Gram Parsons goes out to Joshua Tree to--quote--dry out, and get himself ready for the tour we were doing, and he died. That was really disappointing. Who knows what it would have done?”

Berline kept trying for mainstream success with a bluegrass-rock blend. After Country Gazette broke up, he formed a new band, Byron Berline & Sundance. It quickly landed a deal with MCA Records. But its debut album failed to find a large audience (Berline says the executive who signed the band lost his job, and Sundance’s chances for an effective promotional push vanished).

Berline had not found big-time success, but he at least had latched onto a couple of steady playing partners. Guitarist Dan Crary and banjo player John Hickman, two other founding members of Sundance, have been working with Berline since 1977. Their work as a trio, or sitting in on each other’s solo projects, has come out on smaller independent labels like Flying Fish, Rounder and Sugar Hill, which cater to the traditional folk and bluegrass audience.

“You can make a living at it, but just barely, playing bluegrass,” Berline said. “You have to have other irons in the fire to make a good living.” Berline’s other irons include instructional books and tapes.

With Berline, Crary & Hickman, Berline spent the late ‘70s and ‘80s traveling the summer bluegrass festival circuit. The trio also has toured in Japan, and the U.S. Department of State has enlisted it as a cultural ambassador on government-sponsored tours of the South Pacific and North Africa aimed at giving foreign audiences some exposure to traditional American music.

“They’re all mature guys,” Berline said, by way of explaining the partnership’s longevity. “It means a lot when you’ve got guys who are grown-ups in a band.”

Over the past two years, BCH has expanded. Steve Spurgin, a Texas-based bassist and singer, joined in 1989, bringing with him a sheaf of original songs that often focus on embattled rural values being eroded by a faster, more standardized way of life. Last year, the band added John Moore, a guitarist from San Diego County, and changed the name to California.

Moore’s presence allows California to keep playing when Crary, a professor of speech communication at Cal State Fullerton, is tied up with his academic duties.

“(Crary) is always in the band, but when he can’t make it we can go on as a four piece,” Berline said. Crary won’t be on hand for the Shade Tree show: He is doing some shows on his own to promote his latest solo album, “Thunderation.” The rest of the band will hook up with him for East Coast dates at the end of August.

A new California album has been finished, Berline said, and is being shopped to labels. He said he no longer entertains the dream of breaking through to a mass audience--not that he assumes bluegrass lacks the potential to win a wider following.

“They don’t play bluegrass on country radio. They don’t think it’s commercial enough. They have it all figured out. I don’t believe that for a minute. There could be a lot of ways to program a country radio show and do a lot of things and make it really entertaining.

“But what’s more important to me is to be able to do what I want to do. It would be nice to get radio play, but it’s not that important to me at my stage of the game. If we were on a major label, I’m sure we’d have a producer and they’d put us into a big blender and pour it out, just so we can sell more records. If I can’t have a good time playing, I won’t do it.”

California plays tonight at 8 and 10:30 at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. Tickets: $15 (availability is limited, and the early show is sold out). Information: (714) 364-5270.