POP MUSIC : Will Justice Be Served? : Ten years ago, Maria McKee and her golden voice appeared headed for stardom. But things went sour. Now, after a long escape to Europe, she’s back to try again with a new album and a survivor’s sensibility

Take One: The scene is 1983. A young singer named Maria McKee is declared one of the most striking talents to emerge from the Los Angeles rock scene since the ‘60s--a passionate performer with the vocal purity of Linda Ronstadt, the intensity of Janis Joplin and the seductiveness of Chrissie Hynde.

McKee’s band, Lone Justice, is signed by powerhouse Geffen Records, and everybody expects the debut album to sell a million copies and the group’s leader to become a major force in rock.

Only something goes wrong.

When the album comes out in 1985, sales are disappointing and tensions lead to the breakup of the group. After two more albums, McKee moves to Dublin, Ireland, to think about her future. The record industry, for the most part, writes her off.

Cut .

Take Two: The scene is 1993. Maria McKee, just 28, is back in Los Angeles. With some of the old Lone Justice gang by her side, she makes another Geffen album--and the excitement returns. The album offers flashes of the old winning spirit (see review, Page 68), giving her a second chance at keeping her appointment with stardom.

This scene is still a work in progress.

*

Maria McKee is enough of a star on the Los Angeles rock scene to turn heads in clubs, but Musso & Frank isn’t the Roxy--and McKee slips unnoticed into a booth at the landmark Hollywood Boulevard restaurant just after 8 p.m. Most eyes are on the local newscaster catching a bite before his late-evening broadcast or the veteran character actor sitting at the counter.

McKee is comfortable with the anonymity. Her new album, “You Gotta Sin to Get Saved,” is finished, and this evening is one of the last chances she’ll have to relax before she leaps full-gale back into the rock ‘n’ roll world that overwhelmed her eight years ago.

“It was just too much,” she says, reflecting on her feelings after the first album failed to live up to industry expectations. “Everyone was acting like it was do-or-die time, and that was terrifying--the world watching you, and you are supposed to be the great white hope.

“At some point, I became numb. I think I had sort of a small nervous breakdown . . . but it was a very happy-go-lucky kind of a breakdown. I didn’t want to deal with anything for about six months. I was living in Park La Brea with my mother, watching old movies 24 hours a day.”

McKee’s hair is its natural dark brown again, not the blond of the old days, and she is no longer a bundle of nervous energy.

During interviews in the mid-’80s, she was eager and innocent--sitting with eyes closed and holding on in the front car of a rock ‘n’ roll roller coaster that seemed headed straight to the top.

McKee still has a sparkle in her eyes and a killer smile, but she acts like a young woman now, not a perky UCLA cheerleader candidate. She looks back at the mid- ‘80s through the eyes of a survivor.

Lots of singers have gone from great promise to rejection without a second chance. They either become branded as “losers” or they self-destruct.

“I have never done drugs, because I saw other people go through so many problems that I knew better, but I saw the pressures that can cause people to turn to it,” she says, reflecting on the tensions during the Lone Justice days.

“I was a perfect candidate. And I eventually found my own drug: spending money. . . . I had money because ‘A Good Heart,’ a song I wrote when I was 18, was recorded by Feargal Sharkey and it was No. 1 all over Europe. At one point, I would spend $100 a week on fresh-cut flowers and I’d eat in fancy restaurants three times a day. . . . I was 21.”

It wasn’t a great surprise to McKee when critics and fans cheered her in Los Angeles clubs. She had been impressing people with her singing for as long as she could remember--around the house, in church, in school. It’s something that came naturally, and she loved the attention.

Her main question as a teen-ager was what type of music should she sing. She loved everything from rock to Judy Garland ballads. She also enjoyed acting and thought maybe she could combine the two.

By the time she arrived at Beverly Hills High School, McKee had settled on a theater arts career. But she got detoured. She didn’t fit in with the other kids--and she began looking for a connection elsewhere.

“At that school, you were either a rich kid who was totally into whatever was happening at the moment in music, or you were from the other side of the tracks, like me, and you didn’t fit in,” she says. “You probably had a single mother who was breaking her back to make the rent so that you could live in a 90210 address.”

McKee related more to the rock ‘n’ roll she heard in such clubs as the Starwood and Madame Wong’s. She sang briefly with a band led by her brother, Bryan MacLean, who had been in Love, a prized L.A. rock group in the ‘60s. But she wanted her independence.

In late 1982, she met Ryan Hedgecock, a young guitar player with an affinity for roots-rock and country sounds that, thanks to the Blasters and others, were energizing the L.A. scene at the time. They started doing acoustic shows together.

Marvin Etzioni, a singer-songwriter who had built a reputation on the scene, was impressed and encouraged them to do original material. He not only wrote songs with and for them, but also became part of the original Lone Justice lineup.

Soon, the rush was on. Geffen Records signed the group, which also featured Don Heffington on drums, in late 1983, and in-demand producer Jimmy Iovine, who had worked with Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith, produced the album.

The debut collection, a marvelous mix of country and gospel-edged rock, came out in the spring of 1985 and everything looked fine. What other young band is asked to open for Willie Nelson, Tom Petty and U2?

But there were problems.

Some fans--and radio programmers--couldn’t figure out whether Lone Justice was a rock band or a country band, which meant limited airplay.

Other fans--and critics around the country--doubted that anyone could be as good as all the advance word out of L.A. Even before hearing the record, much of the rock world dismissed Lone Justice as more industry hype.

In the end, the negatives proved too much. The album stayed on the charts almost six months, but the highest it reached was No. 56. The group’s version of Petty’s “Ways to Be Wicked” was released as a single but failed to catch on. Estimated 1985 album sales: 100,000--not bad by any means for the normal debut. But nothing about Lone Justice--or, more to the point, Maria McKee--had ever been viewed as normal.

“I was OK with the sales because my whole concept was slow growth anyway . . . which is what all my heroes had gone through--from X to Springsteen,” McKee recalls. “But everyone else . . . they didn’t freak out, but it was like, ‘This isn’t exactly what we had planned.’ ”

The result: immense pressure to turn the band into a bestseller.

By the time of the second album in 1986, Iovine had taken over management of the band, and Little Steven, formerly with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, came in as co-producer. But the biggest change was inside the band itself. As the 1986 tour began, only McKee remained from the debut album. The new personnel: keyboardist Bruce Brody, formerly with the Patti Smith Band; guitarist Shane Fontayne, now in Springsteen’s band; bassist Gregg Sutton, a veteran of the L.A. scene, and drummer Rudy Richman.

At the time, McKee tried to convince herself that the changes were for the best. In an interview at the time, she said: “I finally have a group I feel comfortable with. We’re all focusing on the same thing. I couldn’t be happier with the band and the music.”

Today, her tone is more somber.

Of that time, she says: “Marvin was gone, Don was gone, Ryan was gone, and it wasn’t Lone Justice anymore. The fact that the album was called Lone Justice is ludicrous.”

Though some of the early spirit was missing, McKee’s natural talent still shined. Yet the album--”Shelter”--and live shows failed to take her any further. “Shelter” stalled at No. 65 on the charts.

Lone Justice, R.I.P.

So what happened?

In hindsight, the biggest mistake was breaking up the original Lone Justice lineup. Even though McKee was the group’s prize element, the others brought to the band songs and a spirit that hasn’t been felt again until the new “Sin” album.

(The new collection contains three songs co-written by Etzioni, who is also in McKee’s new touring group--along with drummer Heffington and keyboardist Brody, from the second Lone Justice lineup.)

Back in the mid-’80s, however, the prevailing wisdom among A&R; executives around town was that McKee needed a stronger band and more of a rock focus to reach her potential--and that view was reflected in changes on the second album.

McKee and other members of the original group decline to point a finger at anyone for forcing those changes. They simply say there were tensions and disagreements about direction and songwriting, and that led to various members feeling unwanted and finally quitting.

“It wasn’t like anyone coming in with a sledgehammer and destroying a building,” Etzioni says in a separate interview. “It was a lot more subtle than that.”

Heffington, the drummer, looks back philosophically.

“The whole thing just fell apart,” he says. “It started getting confused during the making of the first album. I was under the impression we were going in to make a quick album, but we cut a bunch of things and it was extended and extended, and there wasn’t enough communication among the members of the group, unfortunately, to stop what was happening.”

McKee acknowledges that she lost track of her own artistic vision during the making of the “Shelter” album and now finds it difficult to listen to the work.

“I think I was trying to be something I wasn’t,” she says. “Maybe I thought that me being myself wasn’t good enough and that I ought to put this out because the first Lone Justice album didn’t do well or whatever. Maybe if I was somebody else, maybe people will like that . . . maybe that would work. And some of it was young . . . literary ego. ‘Yeah, I can rhyme all of these three-syllable words together and make it sound like some cultural statement.’ It was like I was in a fog.”

McKee moved to New York after the second Lone Justice album and concentrated on writing songs for her first solo album.

Iovine, who now runs Interscope Records but was still managing her at the time, encouraged the writing--seeing it as a crucial element in her career. And he felt she still had time on her side.

“Look at the great people in rock, and they’re usually in their late 20s,” he says, also in a separate interview. “That’s what I saw for Maria too. I knew she needed time for her songwriting to blossom.”

Though critics were divided over the solo album she released in 1989, McKee is proud of it, and the song titles reflect some of the confusion and doubts she was feeling: “Am I the Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way)?,” “Nobody’s Child” (which was co-written by Robbie Robertson) and “Panic Beach.”

Of them, “This Property Is Condemned,” offers the most gripping account of the lost innocence and disillusionment:

I remember better days

Lace in every window

And roses ‘round the gate

Now they’ve chased away all my friends

And they’ve locked me out

And hung a sign on the fence

That says this property is condemned.

*

The album failed to crack the Top 100 in the United States, and now McKee’s future was in doubt.

Distancing herself even more from the Southern California memories, she headed for Europe, where she was a cult favorite, and toured with Brody for some acoustic shows that were so intense that both she and the keyboardist describe them as cathartic.

“You’re dealing with a lot of fears and questions of identity,” she says of the period. “Fear of failing, fearing you aren’t good enough, fearing what you do isn’t appealing to people because it wasn’t successful the first time around. Maybe some low self-esteem that comes from a childhood . . . whatever it is that forms your persona and who you are and accepting yourself. A lot was going on.”

About that time, Brody says: “Everything was so personal on those shows we did together that people were sitting on the edge of their seats for an hour and a half. They hadn’t seen anything like it. I think Maria was basically giving too much of herself onstage. I don’t know why, but it was painful.

“She even said she might quit the music business altogether, but I never believed it. It’s too much a part of what she does. . . . With a voice like that, I don’t think she could stop.”

McKee remained active in music in Dublin. She recorded a song, “Show Me Heaven,” for the 1990 “Days of Thunder” soundtrack. The single went to No. 1 in England. She explored various musical directions, appearing as guest on numerous albums.

Gradually, she regained enough confidence to think about another solo album. Rather than move in any of the new musical directions, she focused again on the American styles--from country to soul and gospel--that she enjoyed as a teen-ager and musician in Los Angeles.

“I remember being in Dublin and going to the record store and buying oldies records so I could get all those songs . . . by Jimmy & Bobby Purify and Garnet Mimms . . . to put on one tape and listen to it at night, pretending I was listening to KRLA.”

As she headed home, she even came up with a tentative album title: “American Girl.”

McKee returned to Los Angeles last year and began working on the new Geffen album with producer George Drakoulias, whose credits include the Black Crowes and the Jayhawks, a country-flavored rock group that is a favorite of McKee’s.

She didn’t follow through on the album title, but she hooked up again with Etzioni and they started writing. Some of their songs, including “My Life Among the Outlaws” and “Why Wasn’t I More Grateful (When Life Was Sweet),” are reflections on the early days of the band.

In McKee’s homecoming show recently at the Troubadour, the room was filled with industry insiders and old fans who were curious about whether McKee still had the magic.

She was nervous at the start, but she slowly opened up. Whether updating an old Van Morrison song or singing her own exquisite country ballad “Only Once,” she seemed every bit as exciting as she had been a decade ago.

Gary Gersh, who is now head of Capitol Records but had worked with McKee in recent years at Geffen, warned about again setting up unrealistic sales expectations. “Bands don’t break overnight, no matter how good you think they are,” he says in an interview. “The Nirvanas and the Pearl Jams are the exceptions.”

Still, he was clearly moved.

“She’s now a woman standing on her own feet,” he says. “She knows what she wants to do. Even in the making of this record, we had big-time arguments and a lot of those arguments were about things like me saying, ‘Show me that this song or line means enough to you to fight for it,’ and she did. The Maria McKee of before was not ready to be a big star. The Maria McKee of today is.”

McKee too senses the differences.

“My expectations are very realistic,” she says. “I am a long-haul kind of artist. It is obvious by now that I am not an overnight-success story. I think the record company has finally come to accept that.

“I realize that if I had the kind of success that everyone had hoped for when I was 19 or 20 when I was in Lone Justice, I’d probably be a counselor at the Betty Ford Clinic right now. There’s no way I would have had the wherewithal to deal with it. It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but it’s probably for the best.”