On the Brink Again : Linda Ronstadt has put the Neville Brothers on a course toward fame--a destination that’s eluded them since the ‘70s

Aaron Neville and his three brothers have been telling it like it is for decades now. And fans have been telling friends, and those friends told more friends--but it took a friend in high places, Linda Ronstadt, to help turn the word-of-mouth trickle about the Neville Brothers into a torrent.

Predict that they’re gonna be huge, though, and you might be accused of being the boy who cried wolf. Together or individually, the brothers have been poised on the apparent brink of the big time many times before now--even before Aaron Neville had a Top 10 hit in 1967 with “Tell It Like It Is,” an R&B; ballad of unforgettable poignancy.

Since Art and Aaron hooked up with brothers Cyril and Charles to form their family band in the late ‘70s, they’ve had a series of breaks--a management contract with industry heavyweight Bill Graham, a slot on the Amnesty International revue with U2, an acclaimed album with hip producer Daniel Lanois--none of which turned out to be the big break.

If this really is the Nevilles’ time, as many say it is, there are two good reasons: the coming together of world beat and Ronstadt.

“We’re lucky that the world is changing in its appreciation of Third World music,” says Graham. “Even though they’re from New Orleans, that music, you mix the Cajun and the Latin and the soul. . . . When I say Third World, in the last 10 years, the feel of our country has changed tremendously because hundreds of thousands of Third World people live here now. . . . And the fact that Aaron has had such a wonderful success with Linda hasn’t hurt either.”

Indeed it hasn’t.

The success Graham speaks of was in the series of balladic duets that prime fan Ronstadt recorded with Aaron Neville last year for her million-selling album “Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind,” including the smash hit “Don’t Know Much.”

Ronstadt has now taken the Neville clan out on tour as her opening act, with Aaron joining her for the appropriate duets in her segment of the show. The tour hits the Universal Amphitheatre this week for seven nights--on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, next Sunday, Oct. 16 and 17--and one night at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa on Oct. 20.

So far, audiences on the tour--many of which, primed for Aaron’s soothing, angelic voice, might be unprepared for the Nevilles’ propulsive sound--seem to like the gumbo as well as the bubble-gum.

Charles Neville, the group’s saxophonist and prime spokesman, notes that sometimes Ronstadt’s older fans in the front rows look a little baffled when the brothers do their first up-tempo number. “But once Aaron begins to sing, which is with the second number of the set, ‘Brother’s Keeper,’ you can see them saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is what we came for.’

“Another good thing is looking at some of their faces when they realize which one of us it is that has that voice. . . .”

Aaron Neville, 49, is the most physically imposing of the four brothers, looking more like an NFL linebacker than a sweet-voiced songbird. It’s his overwhelming size that makes the video for “Don’t Know Much,” in which he and the nearly dwarfed Ronstadt get very cozy, a little surprising--although the ability of the video’s steamy interracial romance to shock middle America probably shouldn’t be underestimated.

“Yeah, it started rumors,” says Aaron with a laugh, about the video. “Nothing like that happened. We were just friends.”

On the video shoot, he and Ronstadt needed a little coaching to get less “friendly” and more sexy. “The producer called us together and told us if we weren’t gonna make it look real, there was no sense in doing it. So I guess that was the idea, to start rumors, huh?”

Neville and Ronstadt first met in 1984 when she was in New Orleans for the World’s Fair.

“Me and my brothers were playing at Pete Fountain’s club and somebody told me she was in the audience, so I dedicated a song to her and called her up on the stage to sing some doo-wop,” he said.

“Later she told the press she felt like Cinderella at the ball because she got to play with her favorite band and sing with me. I asked her for her autograph and she wrote ‘To Aaron, love, and I’ll sing with you any time, any place.’ ”

He took her up on that offer about a year later, asking her to come join him at an annual benefit for the hungry and homeless held in New Orleans.

“The first song that we both agreed upon and liked was from both of our Catholic backgrounds, the Ave Maria,” he recalled. “We harmonized on it, and it sounded so sweet we started talking about trying to get together to do a record. Over the years it evolved and (finally) we got together.”

For someone whose strong, clear, high voice is the most recognizable of the Nevilles’, Aaron is a man of few words in person, his surprisingly low and undistinct speaking voice talking only reluctantly of personal matters.

Asked about any lingering bitterness over the barren years in the record business, he says: “I ain’t got time for nothing like that. That was yesterday and you can’t be holding things in your heart. You gotta make room for good. . . . There’s a couple times in my life I wasn’t too optimistic, but my belief in my spirituality, I guess, gave me an incentive to keep on, you know.”

The Neville Brothers’ latest album, “Brother’s Keeper,” features several gospel-oriented songs, including “Jah Love” (co-written by Cyril and U2’s Bono). Many of the album’s lyrics came out of a book of poems Aaron had been compiling since 1980, which seemed to mark a turning point in his own personal battles against drugs and other demons.

“I feel like God inspired me, so I write a lot about him,” says Aaron.

The socially aware, religious and compassionate component of this album and its predecessor--the Daniel Lanois-produced “Yellow Moon,” the group’s biggest commercial breakthrough to date (400,000 sales)--might seem almost at odds with the partying New Orleans spirit once associated with the group.

Says Charles, “There’s one or two tunes on each one that are more or less a good dancing party tune, but even with those tunes, there’s a message in with the party.

“We all really feel a heavy spiritual influence in our lives, that through the kind of lives we’ve led and things we went through, we survived and still do what it is we really love to do, and we have this collective gift. . . . We feel really blessed and that the gift should be used to acknowledge its source, rather than just use it to try and make money.”

Making money has always been an iffy proposition in the Nevilles’ long and varied career.

Other projects the brothers have worked on individually or collectively have often steered well clear of popular commercialism. Seminal funk and soul groups the Soul Machine (formed by Cyril and Aaron) and the Meters (headed by Art) never caught on big.

When the brothers finally got together in 1975, it was first as the Wild Tchoupitoulas, who dressed in Mardi Gras outfits and played regional music heavy on the celebration and voodoo vibes.

Even now, other labors of love take up much of the brothers’ time outside the group. Art has reformed the Meters as a part-time outfit. Charles has just released his first album with an eclectic band appropriately dubbed Charles Neville & Diversity.

Cyril’s side project is the Uptown All-Stars, who play “New Orleans second-line reggae.” And Aaron will enter the studio in December to begin work on a solo album to be produced by--surprise--Linda Ronstadt, about which he says little other than that, yes, it will include at least one duet.

The Neville Brothers are diverse enough, it seems, to handle just about anything but compromise.

“We feel that being true to ourselves musically and being true to our spirits is the best thing to do with the music,” says Charles.

“It’s definitely what makes it special to me, the fact that of all the years of our playing live performances--and we’ve played New Orleans funk and New Orleans rhythm & blues, which is a combination of jazz, doo-wop, gospel, blues, Caribbean, African, all of the Deltas--we see the impact that it has at the gigs on the audiences.

“And then when it’s happening, we feel what it does to us. We know this is something that is worth something. And it should be recognized.”