Attitude Adjustment

A wild youth might not guarantee success in modern rock, but there’s no getting around it: A history of tumult, conflict and alienation can fuel the themes that resound in the decade’s music. The examples keep piling up, from Courtney Love to the Geraldine Fibbers’ Carla Bozulich, Kurt Cobain to Eddie Vedder.

Add Everclear to the list. When the Portland-based trio broke through in 1995 with its second album, “Sparkle and Fade,” leader Art Alexakis’ upbringing in a poor, dysfunctional household beset by drugs and overdoses seemed to get as much attention as the music. Not that there was much distance between life and art, with such titles as “Heroin Girl” and lyrics that plumbed the insecurities and confusion of someone who, in Alexakis’ words, felt like “a kicked dog.”

But Alexakis offered more than an insider’s view of a damaged life. “Santa Monica” became a ‘90s anthem by distilling a complex mix of emotions--nostalgia and longing in the sweet melody and vocal, determination in the Everclear trademark square beat and power-chording--all of it shimmering with an apocalyptic glow:

We can live beside the ocean

Leave the fire behind

Swim out past the breakers

Watch the world die.

“I like lyrics that move me,” says Alexakis. “I like songs that don’t make me feel stupid for listening to them, that touch me emotionally, make me feel something, and make me want to rock. . . . I write really intense, personal things. It’s not easy. Writing a record is hard for me.”

The question that’s been hanging over Everclear has been: What do you have to say after you’ve done your heroin album? That seems odd to Alexakis, who sees “Sparkle and Fade” more as a record about “adaptation, accepting the good and bad things.”

Still, the new “So Much for the Afterglow” does answer the question. In portraits of co-dependents and teenage addicts, in an enraged attack on a neglectful father and a painful recollection of a mother’s nervous breakdown, Alexakis--collaborating with drummer Greg Eklund and bassist Craig Montoya--broadens his emotional and musical range to capture a spirit of wary hopefulness.

“I’ve always been optimistic,” says Alexakis, who brings the band to the El Rey Theatre on Nov. 25. “I think my songs are optimistic. . . . People who think they’re all doom and gloom are missing the point.

“My characters never give up. If I’d have given up, I’d have swallowed a bullet. And when I was still using [drugs] I considered it. When I hit rock bottom and started coming up again, I was pretty driven, pretty ambitious. I’m a lot more easygoing now, I think, having achieved some success.”

Sitting in an office in Capitol Records’ landmark tower in Hollywood, Alexakis, 35, is getting close to his roots in more ways than one: He’s eating take-out Greek food, and when he goes to the window and points out the restaurant on the next block, he’s looking down on streets he knows well.

He frequented them in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when he hit the clubs to see such L.A. bands as X and Jane’s Addiction. Trouble was, he usually didn’t remember much about it the next day. Sometimes he’d pass out during the show.

Alexakis grew up the youngest of five children in Culver City’s lone housing project. He was taken with music by the time he was 4, and he absorbed influences ranging from his mother’s classic country records to his African American neighbors’ soul music, from his sisters’ pop and folk to his brother’s hard rock.

He also started absorbing alcohol and drugs before he was a teenager, and he swerved into a turbulent decade that included the overdose deaths of both his girlfriend and his brother and an unsuccessful suicide dive off the Santa Monica Pier.

At 22, he quit drugs and moved to San Francisco, where he played in a couple of bands and ran a small independent label. He also met Jenny Dodson, whom he later married. The couple moved on to Portland, where they had a child, Anna, now 5, and Alexakis formed Everclear.

The band released its debut album, “World of Noise,” on the local Tim/Kerr label in 1993 and was then signed by Capitol. “Sparkle and Fade” came out in May 1995 and gradually built up steam, ultimately nearing the 1 million sales level.

Alexakis’ success--or at least the aggression with which he’s pursued it--hasn’t endeared him in Portland’s indie-rock scene, where adversaries have popped up to accuse him of being musically calculating and personally reprehensible. They’ve even circulated documents stemming from a 1993 domestic violence episode.

So much for the afterglow, indeed.

“After the last record and all the media hype and everything,” Alexakis says, subdued for the only time during the interview, “to have people digging back into my past for incidents and faxing police reports of things I did four or five years ago, when I was too poor to afford to be on antidepressants. . . .

“I was on welfare with a kid, my relationship [with Jenny] was dicey at the time--people with an agenda can make that into something a lot more intense or uglier than it was. It’s really easy to point out the bad things, but it’s not as much fun to point out, ‘Well, he dealt with it and life is better.’ ”

Besides, Alexakis has no problem with being called a careerist. He liked running that little record company in San Francisco so much that he plans to establish his own label.

“He’s an unusual combination of artistic ability and business acumen,” says Perry Watts-Russell, the Capitol artists and repertoire vice president who signed Everclear. “In his dealings with other artists, he will be able to communicate with them on an artistic level because he’s one of them, but at the same time he does understand the way the business runs.”

After three weeks in the stores and sales approaching 100,000, the commercial fate of “Afterglow” is still up in the air, but Alexakis knows that the band’s life span is finite anyway.

“We can put out two or three more good records--hopefully we will. . . . When it’s over, it’s gonna be over, and I’m good with that. No one likes failure, but the important thing is to be mature enough and steady and grounded enough in reality to know, ‘All right, this is hard now, but I’m gonna float, something else is gonna come along.’ “*

EVERCLEAR, El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd. Date: Nov. 25, 8 p.m. Price: $15. Phone: (213) 480-3232.