John Mayall's Recognition Catches Up to Him : Pop music: With a new album and a new version of the Bluesbreakers, the veteran is beginning to get attention that had eluded him in the past.

By JON MATSUMOTO

March 14, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

John Mayall has been better known for the musicians he has played with than for his own considerable skills and accomplishments as a key pioneer of the ‘60s British blues movement.

Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie and ex-Rolling Stone Mick Taylor are just a few of the noteworthy figures who refined their chops while playing in Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in the mid- to late ‘60s. While many of these former sidemen went on to achieve pop stardom, their bandleader and mentor continued to play his beloved blues in relative anonymity.

Mayall, who plays tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, has recorded nearly 40 albums in his 30 year career. Most of them are commercially obscure; none has gone gold.

Yet at age 61, this father of a 3-month-old says he feels as if he has reached a creative peak with his latest edition of the Bluesbreakers--a perception that his new album, “Spinning Coin,” does little to undermine. It’s a passionate and fresh sounding exploration of the blues.

“I couldn’t feel better about my music today than I do,” says Mayall, who sings and plays harmonica, keyboard and guitar. “Maybe it was meant to be this way. After a lifetime of playing, there comes a maturity and an understanding of the music that perhaps wasn’t there before.”

In any case, Mayall is beginning to receive the type of recognition from the mainstream that often eluded him in the past. A year ago he received his first Grammy nomination, for “Wake Up Call,” in the best contemporary blues album category. Friday night he performed on “The Tonight Show.”

But perhaps most rewarding for Mayall--a native of Manchester, England, who has been based in Los Angeles for more than 25 years--is his sense that his younger fans are attracted to the quality of his new music, not just his past ties and accomplishments.

The early Bluesbreakers, he notes, “represented a very important part of musical history, and one can’t ignore that. But at the same time (that early history) is becoming less and less of a selling point to people who have just reached the age of appreciating music and the first thing they’ve heard is ‘Spinning Coin.’ That’s their starting point, and, to a certain extent, they couldn’t care less what went before it.”

Mayall was 30 when he released his first Bluesbreakers album, “John Mayall Plays John Mayall,” in 1964. Prior to the British blues boom of the early ‘60s, the Korean War veteran had been a successful typographer and graphic artist (he later would design some of his own album covers).

In 1966 he produced what some critics regard as his finest work, “Bluesbreakers--John Mayall With Eric Clapton,” a landmark album that features some of Clapton’s most electrifying playing and that solidified his standing as Britain’s foremost guitar hero. But the budding rock giant was only in Mayall’s band a year before leaving to start the groundbreaking power trio Cream.

The Bluesbreakers lineup seemed to be in constant flux during the ‘60s, a condition that tested Mayall’s keen eye for new talent. Mayall says his band’s ever-changing membership was understandable and not at all unusual in that creatively dynamic era.

“The bands I’ve had have all had natural life expectancies. People would get to the stage where they would want to try things on their own and branch out. You’ve got to remember that during those early years of changing around, most of the musicians were little more than teen-agers at that point in their careers. They hadn’t really discovered the ultimate path that they wanted to take. In those early years, everybody was changing bands. It wasn’t just in my band.”

In 1969 Mayall migrated to Los Angeles and continued a process of experimentation that had begun a year earlier with the challenginjazz / rock album “Bare Wires.” He produced an all acoustic album called “The Turning Point” in 1970 and in 1972 released “Jazz-Blues Fusion,” featuring trumpeter Blue Mitchell.

The ‘70s were a prolific decade for Mayall--he recorded 15 albums. But the ‘80s were far less so. Without a record contract, he didn’t release a single album in the United States between 1981 and 1985.

Despite his lack of widespread commercial success, Mayall says he never has been tempted to do an overtly pop record.

“If you’ve never learned to read or write music, the only thing you can do is play the way you feel. That’s all I’ve been doing. That’s the only choice open to me.”

He claims his status as a new father hasn’t dimmed his passion for his music or for touring (he also has an 11-year-old son by his wife, Maggie, and four grown children living in England). Ten years ago he devised a super-efficient touring system that lets him perform 120 shows a year and still spend about two-thirds of his time at home with his family.

“We don’t have tour managers or roadies. We just bring our equipment. We have the individual promoters supply the drum kit and amplifiers. So we travel really light, (and) we can cover distances that other groups with more equipment couldn’t possibly.

“This last year we played in Helsinki, the next night in Tel Aviv, the next night in the middle of Italy somewhere, and the following night was in Sweden. A larger group couldn’t even consider something like that.”

* John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Packet of Three opens the show at 8 p.m. $17.50. (714) 496-8930.