Tour de Four : Pop music: Ry Cooder and David Lindley team up with two of their kids at the Coach House for a test run before leaving for Europe.

It’s not easy being a Ry Cooder fan. The payoffs are great, given that he’s one of the most soulful and distinctive guitarists on Earth, having absorbed the warmth and nuance of nearly every American music form, along with those of several other cultures for good measure.

But as bountiful a rain as a Cooder concert is, fans are more accustomed to drought. He rarely tours, and when he does, it typically is in Europe or Japan. If memory serves, he’s made only one Southland performance under his own banner in the past decade. He may appear unannounced at a Chieftains concert here or John Lee Hooker performance there--as he has in recent months--but otherwise, Cooder has been in short supply.

So why is he, with scarcely a week’s notice, popping up Sunday at the Coach House with longtime musical accomplice David Lindley and their respective offspring Joachim Cooder and Rosanne Lindley?

They are preparing to embark on a European tour, and Sunday’s show, Cooder says, is “a shakedown cruise. We’ve got a lot to learn and to tighten up, so we’re shaking it down so we can shake it down , you know?”

Unlike most musicians, who need to tour for a livelihood, Cooder has an active career scoring soundtracks--including “The Long Riders,” “Trespass,” “Crossroads” and “Paris, Texas”--and he’s long been on record as disdaining the oftentimes hellish road life away from hearth and home.

Even his tour a few years back with the amiable supergroup Little Village--with John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner--was “horrendous, a true nightmare,” he said by phone from his Santa Monica studio Wednesday.

Cooder, however, was gushing about the prospects of the new tour.

“This, I think, is different,” he said. “This isn’t like some horrible death march to Bataan, where you find yourself just out there hanging from the yardarm. This is family .

“It just has to do with another kind of dynamic and another kind of idea about playing music, for its own sake,” he said. “And I’m hoping that will pay off emotionally for us. It should. If we can’t make this work and have fun, then nothing will ever be fun. It’s got to be fun ‘cause I can’t stand ever doing that other thing anymore.”

He and Lindley are musical soul-mates, if ever there were, from their soaring mastery of the slide guitar to the way each explores exotic sonic cultures--from Madagascar to Hawaii--with an ear for the heartbeat rather than just the tourist trappings of those cultures.

The two have been crossing paths since the ‘60s, when both came up in the folk-music scene centered at Los Angeles’ Ash Grove club. In the psychedelic era, Lindley played with the wildly eclectic Kaleidoscope while Cooder surfaced in Captain Beefheart’s first Magic Band.

Both moved into studio work, and Lindley, after accompanying Jackson Browne for several fruitful years, followed Cooder into a solo career. They first recorded together on the 1980 “The Long Riders” soundtrack and have collaborated off and on ever since.

Lindley’s daughter Rosanne had her own band, the Casual Girls, for a few years and last year performed with her father at the Coach House. Cooder’s 16-year-old son, Joachim, backed him and Lindley on hand drums when they toured early in the decade.

In performing with their kids, Cooder doesn’t think they’re breaking any new ground.

“You know, if you go back to the 1800s, parlor family music was the main form of entertainment. Companies did a tremendous trade in pump organs, mandolins and things because people used to sit at home and play, singing church music and whatever else they knew.

“It’s really where music is organic on that level, because in that kind of context you’re sharing something,” he said. “It must’ve been incredible to sit around for an evening or on the weekends like that. We don’t do too much of that nowadays. Everybody’s scattered running around or watching TV or doing what they do.

“I always thought, ‘I wish I had somebody to play around here with. Drums would be great.’ Lo and behold, that’s what happened,” he said. “And growing up with David, Rosanne became involved in music, because when music is what you do around the house, that’s what your kids hear and come to understand.

“You have to have a cool time making music--it just isn’t worth it otherwise--and if you can do it with your kids, that’s about the best thing because families really do connect in non-linear ways that you can’t package or promote. I think it’s great. I think everybody should do this.”

Playing music is something that necessitates approaching one’s kids as equals, he said.

“If you were [an authoritarian parent], you couldn’t do this. I never told Joachim how to play drums. I never told him to play drums, never even thought he would. But when he was 6, he started, so I said, ‘Hey, let’s play,’ and we would sit at home and play music, and then he said he wanted to play onstage with me. So it was a nice evolving thing.

“And, of course, as far as family roles are, you’ve gotta forget all about that. I know that people have bullied their kids, making one play the banjo, and the other one the mandolin and all that, but if you want to have good time doing it, you gotta skip all that.”

Along with whatever it might do for family communication, Cooder says the generational team-up is doing exhilarating things for the music.

“Rosanne sings [the Depression-inspired] ‘How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,’ and it’s fabulous to me to hear another generation’s take on a song from that generation, extending that tradition,” he said. “And with Rosanne, we’re doing Staple Singers songs and all these three-part harmonies that really make the songs come alive.

“It’s so pretty, it’s such a hook, harmony singing,” Cooder said. “It gives a richness there so that the instruments don’t swamp the vocal aspect of the thing. What we have going is this kind of mini high-powered folk band that’s just wide open.

“Meanwhile, Joachim is playing this drum kit he put together with hand drums, strange parts and oddball things so it’s like a supercharged jug band thing. He’s sort of getting the total body workout on the set. And why not just the kitchen sink? That’s what most of this music needs. It doesn’t really need a standard drum set. It needs sound effects. That’s what we’re doing, me and David--we play for sound and for character rather than some sort of studied, preordained thing.

“And with all this going, it makes it possible to play freer,” he said. “You don’t have to supply so much of the rhythm yourself, so now me and David can solo more. I find myself able to express more the way I like to play guitar ‘cause I don’t have to tie everything down.”

While there are few stringed instruments that he and Lindley can’t pull a meaningful performance out of, Cooder is straying into some new territory this time.

“I’m gonna try to play accordion on ‘The Girls From Texas.’ Oh, ho ho, that’s a hard one. An accordion? Whatever. I’m willing to take a chance and walk the plank. That’s kind of where this tour can get real interesting for us, is if we take some chances and land running somehow. And if you crash, it’s all right too. I don’t mind crashing sometimes during this show. It keeps you interested.”

Cooder refers to the rich songbook they’re drawing from as “American heritage music.” “In other countries, you’ve had your traditional forms that have stayed the same, up until now when everybody’s got electric guitars. But, generally speaking, this country here is where people just made [stuff] up right and left and messed with it, and look what we all came up with? It’s really good.

“It lets us have a good time too. ‘Cause as musicians, we’ve gotta have some fun. We can’t just do business, answer the phone and score dog-food commercials all the time,” he said.

The irony isn’t lost on him that most of the audience he has found for his American music has been overseas. Except for the Coach House show and a similar gig the following night at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, the only shows planned for now are in Europe. Cooder did seem to be hinting at the idea of a U.S. tour, though.

“We’re gonna go around and see if we’re on to anything and if people are paying attention. There was a time when if you didn’t organize yourself, have a jean jacket and look like the Eagles, you couldn’t be heard here. Nobody’d pay any attention. I was out there trying to do my thing with Flaco [Jimenez] in the ‘70s, and nobody gave a damn.

“But, it’s the ‘90s now, and some time has gone by, so maybe we’ll be lucky. It’s clear to me that people are more interested now here and they’re looking at more things.

“I just recently in the past two years got two Grammys for these little world records I was messing with,” he said, referring to best world-music album nods for one collaboration with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure and the other with Indian slide guitarist V.M. Bhatt.

“And I’ll tell you, that came completely out of the blue. I thought, ‘No one’s ever gonna hear this. I don’t even care if they do.’ But the NPR guys picked up on it, and folks really liked it,” he said. “Who’d have figured it?”

Next month, Warner Bros. Records will issue “Music by Ry Cooder,” a two-disc retrospective of his long and largely uncompromising career. Like Lindley, Cooder generally doesn’t undertake musical projects that don’t intrigue him. And Cooder sounds plenty intrigued right now.

“Playing with David is like a great game,” he said. “When you grow up looking at music the way we have, you come to think of it as an elaborate hobby, so that you please yourself first and then the rest of it is gonna take whatever shape it’s gonna take. . . .

“You don’t look into it and see only a rapid succession of phone calls and lawyer deals and things,” he said. “You see something real in there. Otherwise, to me, it’s something I can’t personally contend with very well anymore. So I’m having a pretty great time with this.”

* Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Joachim Cooder and Rosanne Lindley play Sunday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $25. 8 p.m. (714) 496-8930.