Dave Matthews Steps Toward Success : Pop music: His band is off to a strong start after two solid albums. Its first Southern California tour includes a show Thursday at the Coach House.

The Dave Matthews Band became a do-it-yourself success by following the same principle as Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber: Look to where the money is.

For an unusual, acoustic-based jam band in Charlottesville, Va., the most ready money was to be found in the ample budgets of college entertainment committees and fraternity coffers. With its efforts greased by that cash flow, the Matthews band was able to travel extensively in the early 1990s, build an audience, and eventually reap the rewards with uncommonly strong album sales for a new, emerging act.

The band’s first album, “Remember Two Things,” was a live recording that it financed and marketed itself. In a recent phone interview, Matthews, who will front the five-piece group in its first series of Southern California dates this week (including a show Thursday at the Coach House), said that sales of the 1993 release have reached 160,000 copies, a phenomenal total for an album not backed by a record company.

Now the Dave Matthews Band records for RCA Records. “Under the Table and Dreaming,” its first album as a credentialed cog of the music industry, is off to a good start: The ready-made audience recruited in heavy regional touring and via word of mouth bought 34,000 copies in one week when the album appeared two months ago, good for a debut at No. 34 on the Billboard chart. While it has slid downward from there, sales have now passed 100,000. The band’s first video, for the wry, funky R&B-influenced; track “What Would You Say” has just been released to MTV.

“We focused on sources of money,” Matthews, 27, said of the band’s early strategy for making its way in the world. “I hate to say it that way, but in a lot of ways it was (true).

“We wanted to get out of town and start making money, so we made the focus going to colleges, where the money was. We made that a strategy and sort of moved around the Southeast. It supports you, and you get an audience, and the next time you go back you don’t have to play a fraternity party with the bottles flying; you can go to a bar with the bottles flying, and the next time to a theater with the bottles flying farther.”

Matthews is an effusive, if slightly scattered, speaker with a wry tone and a penchant for mimicking accents to color his conversation. His band’s hallmark is its ability to bring new colors to the now-familiar jam-oriented style pushed by bands like the Spin Doctors, Big Head Todd & the Monsters and Blues Traveler (whose front man, John Popper, adds his distinctive whistling harmonica to “What Would You Say”).

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Leroi Moore’s sweet, Wayne Shorter-style saxophone is the primary lead instrument, violinist Boyd Tinsley adds further non-standard accents, and the electric guitar, de rigueur in most rock bands, is non grata in this one.

The result is a spacious, distortion-free sound that moves with light, airy currents, placing the emphasis on beauty and delight in a pop era fraught with dense, fractured music.

Matthews, who sings and plays acoustic rhythm guitar, delivers philosophical (and sometimes slightly stilted) lyrics in a conversational flow that gets interrupted occasionally by a catchy chorus refrain.

The songs cover a variety of feelings, ranging from the lovely romantic balladry of “Lover Lay Down” to explorations of Cobain-esque depths of depression in “Rhyme & Reason” and “Warehouse.”

Elsewhere, Matthews turns his thin but pliant voice to lighter musings on the inscrutability and oddity of life. He’s a highly stylized singer who can sound like a low-octane version of Eddie Vedder or a less-grim cousin to Adam Duritz of Counting Crows.

Matthews’ upbringing yo-yoed between South Africa, where he was born, and the United States, where his father, a physicist who died when Matthews was in his teens, did research.

After finishing high school in Johannesburg, Matthews spent several years traveling. By 1990, he had landed in Charlottesville, a university town where he had spent part of his childhood. There, he tended bar, waited on tables, and set about forming what became the first serious band he had ever been in.

“I had these songs, and I didn’t know how I wanted them to be played by a band,” Matthews recalled. “I never had arranged any music. The one thing I knew I didn’t want was electric guitars. It wasn’t because I don’t like them; I grew up on them and I love them. But I just didn’t want them, because I hear them all around.”

Matthews recruited saxophonist Moore and drummer Carter Beauford from a network of local jazz-oriented players. The band’s young bassist, Stefan Lessard, was recommended by a friend of Matthews who was giving the teen-ager music lessons. The band had a keyboard player early on but eventually turned to violinist Tinsley. A second acoustic-guitar player, Tim Reynolds, plays on “Under the Table and Dreaming,” but Matthews said family commitments and other musical projects have kept him from joining the touring lineup.

While his band’s fortunes have surged over the past 1 1/2 years, Matthews also had to cope with tragedy. His older sister, Anne, to whom the new album is dedicated, was killed last January in a shooting in Johannesburg.

“It was just a terrible turn of events,” not related to South Africa’s turbulent racial politics, he said. Another song, the lyrical closing instrumental, “34,” is dedicated to a friend of the band who died of hepatitis.

Such events would seem to provide more than enough justification for the dark, angry tone that defines many, if not most, emerging new bands. Matthews insists on a wider vision.

“Music, in my life, has been one of the things that’s healed me, made me want to dance, to continue,” he said (a point of view taken on “Jimi Thing,” in which a troubled Matthews listens to Hendrix music with the plea, “If you could keep me floating just for a while / ‘Til I get to the end of this tunnel”).

“I often love angry and painful music,” he said. “I’m angry, but not only angry. I’m frustrated, but I’m not only frustrated. The focus for all of us is to express everything. If we play all of (the emotions), I get to express all the things that I am.”

* The Dave Matthews Band and David Gray play Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.