Marc Ford Has No Desire to Fly Crowes’ Coop : Pop music: The Santa Ana resident says he is comfortable in his role as guitarist for Atlanta-based band and feels no compulsion to move on.

For Marc Ford, flocking with the Black Crowes has meant flying at a grueling pace--and finding that he likes it that way.

In the Orange County band, Burning Tree, Ford took Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton as key inspirations and established himself as one of the most dynamic and charismatic young guitarists ever to come out of the local rock scene. Those qualities weren’t lost on the Black Crowes’ leaders, Chris and Rich Robinson, who got to know Ford when Burning Tree opened for their band during a 1990 club tour.

Last November, having completed 19 months of touring and sold about 5 million copies of their debut album, “Shake Your Money Maker,” the Atlanta-based Black Crowes found themselves with a vacancy in their lead guitar slot. They hired Ford, whose debut album with Burning Tree had showed a great deal of promise but had reaped scant sales.

Speaking over the phone recently from a hotel room in San Antonio, Ford said he was feeling weary--not surprising for a musician who had played a concert the night before, jumped on a bus for an all-night ride, and faced the same routine on the night ahead. With occasional breaks, the Black Crowes have been at it since June, when they flew to Japan, Australia and New Zealand to begin a long, open-ended touring cycle for their current album, “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion.”

On this tour leg, at least, the road will bring Ford home for a short spell. The Black Crowes alight in Los Angeles this week, playing Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at the Greek Theatre.

“On my days off, I think I’ll try to get home and do some laundry,” joked the guitarist, whose wife, rock singer Kirsten Konte, and their 3-year-old son, Elijah, recently moved to a new apartment in Santa Ana that is still hardly more familiar to Ford than the hotel lodgings that are his usual routine.

On his first visit to the new digs (the family previously had lived in La Palma), Ford said: “I kept waking up, going, ‘What hotel is this? Where am I? What are you doing here?’ It’s a strain (being on a prolonged tour), but what can you do?”

When he joined the Black Crowes, Ford knew he was signing up for a long, hard hitch on the road with a band that has been praised for its raw energy, but criticized in some quarters for not putting its own stamp on a style that draws heavily upon the Faces and early-’70s vintage Rolling Stones.

At the time, Ford talked about serving a finite tour of duty. In an interview last November, Ford said he expected to play on the band’s second album, complete a touring cycle that could last two years, and then resume his own career, writing and recording his own material as he had in Burning Tree.

But, after about a year in the Black Crowes, where the Robinson brothers do all the songwriting, Ford says he is comfortable and feels no compulsion to move on.

“I wanted to feel it out and not have any plan at all,” he said of his attitude on first joining the Black Crowes. “But it’s going great, and I’m probably going to be playing with them for quite a while. I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything. I’ve got a long future ahead of me,” with time enough later on to resume writing and performing songs of his own. “My ego isn’t that big that I have to do that sort of thing.”

When he joined the Black Crowes, Ford didn’t have the luxury of a leisurely orientation. He and the rest of the band--vocalist Chris Robinson, guitarist Rich Robinson, drummer Steve Gorman and bassist Johnny Colt, plus sideman Ed Hawrysch on keyboards--took three days to prepare, then went into a Georgia studio and recorded the bulk of “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion” in eight days.

“When you do it that way, there’s a spontaneity that you can’t get by nailing parts down” in advance, Ford said. Working so fast meant pressure--especially for a new member--”but it was a good pressure. I didn’t feel threatened at all. When you’re under that kind of strain, you do things without even thinking about it. It’s just complete instinct.”

On the album, which has sold more than a million copies, Ford’s main task was playing solos, while Rich Robinson provided rhythm guitar. But Ford said that since then they have developed a partnership that allows greater interplay.

“When I joined the band, I said to Rich, ‘I really want to make the two-guitar thing work together,” instead of dividing the labor into traditional rhythm and lead roles (Ford had been the lone guitarist in Burning Tree’s power-trio format).

“It has developed musically, and the band sounds totally different than it did when we recorded the record. We’ve got a ton of new songs that we’ve been coming up with at sound checks. We don’t sound check with songs we know--we just start jamming on things.” Some of those new bits pop up unplanned during concerts, Ford said.

“We’ve got a jam during ‘Thorn in My Pride’ that has been clocked at up to 18 or 19 minutes. We stretch things out, and the songs kind of mutate. We’ll go by the seat of our pants. We’re trying to spread the borders and make it fresh all the time. The band is playing so well, I think it’s inspiring everybody to keep going and move forward.”

The Black Crowes and the Jayhawks play Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at 8 p.m. at the Greek Theatre, 2800 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles. Friday is sold out. $20 to $26. (714) 740-2000.