. . . And Now It’s David Minus David

David Baerwald is nursing an ice tea under an umbrella at a Topanga Canyon cafe on this scorching summer day; he looks as if he should be nursing an ice pack as well. It’s a serious hangover. “Dave and I decided to finish off a bottle of whiskey over at his house last night,” he explains, “but it finished us off instead.”

The drinking buddy in question is David Ricketts, Baerwald’s former partner in the celebrated but short-lived duo David + David. Their one and only album, “Boomtown,” was an instant critical favorite in 1986, and the single “Welcome to the Boomtown” even made the Top 40.

For one bright and shining moment, they were Southern California’s golden boys, these retiring, cynical sorts who were out of focus on their own album cover.

With “Boomtown,” singer/lyricist Baerwald emerged as a primary colorizer of Angeleno Angst, writing about materialism and love gone sour in the sun with the bitter twists of a Randy Newman but also the populist sympathy of a Bruce Springsteen. He was a chronicler of the downside of the dream--a dream that, ironically enough, came true for David + David.

“You’ve got to remember, all that stuff that happened to us was a total fluke. Everything happened by accident, the way we got signed and the way the record took off. It was a complete shock to our systems. We were like babes in the woods.”

Once they began to fall out, it might not have been any big deal to the two Davids--they’d never counted on a successful recording career as a duo in the first place--had it not been a big deal to A&M; Records, which had a vital interest in a second David + David album. The hopeful cajoling from outside didn’t help bring them together as they tried tensely and in vain to collaborate again.

“It’s not a good way to make music, with a bunch of people breathing down your neck. The whole reason to do it is gone then. Unless (the record company) were completely out to lunch, which God knows is possible, they must’ve known that all was not totally well in Dave-land.”

They finally found out, as all negotiating efforts fell apart. Now David is minus David: Baerwald has just released his first solo album, “Bedtime Stories.”

None of its material would have sounded out of place on “Boomtown.” Certainly Baerwald’s cynicism about the possibilities of love among the ruins remains intact. His skepticism about the efforts of do-gooders, from the left wing to Bernhard Goetz, is surpassed only by his skepticism about the value of the entertainment industry in American life. As he sings in “Liberty Lies,” which looks both at social problems and the Pollyanna-ish solutions offered for them:

It’s like I’m walking through Rome

Tenements all torn apart

Instead of Nero

We got Madonna

She’s fiddling with herself

This quasi-apocalyptic satire sounds remarkably close in tone to a screenplay he’s been writing with actor Sean Penn. Based loosely around the “Boomtown” LP, the Baerwald/Penn script has a straight central story--set around self-obsessed characters trying desperately to make it in the modeling industry--surrounded by bizarre futuristic details, including a literal right-wing war on drugs.

Penn called the singer after first hearing “Boomtown” and suggested writing a movie around its characters. They’ve been working on it “off and on, in-between divorces and records and movies”--and near-nervous breakdowns.

Baerwald, 29, hasn’t been through a divorce himself, unless you count David + David. He and Ricketts, 36, are obviously on good terms now--”I think we’re actually better friends now than we ever were,” he says--but for a while the situation was tense enough that the differences, as they say in the divorce trade, seemed irreconcilable.

The trouble started, Baerwald says, when their only tour came to a close and Ricketts went off to produce an album for his ex-girlfriend, Toni Childs, for what was to be six weeks.

“Well, two years later, he was still in the studio,” remembers his partner, still acting the part of the neglected lover. “By that time I was really ticked off. I had all kinds of songs for another album.”

Tired of waiting for Ricketts, Baerwald planned a solo project, but was turned down by A&M; on the basis that it would “interfere with the marketing of David + David. . . . So I couldn’t do anything. I was forced to sit around for two years going gradually insane.”

In the creative process, Baerwald relies on collaborators like Ricketts or “Bedtime’s” producer Larry Klein to act as controlling supervisor while he becomes a loose cannon. “I have no discipline. I have the attention span of a gnat or Dan Quayle or something. I need help; I need a grown-up to pump into.”

Waiting for Ricketts, with no supervisors to channel his instincts, Baerwald slid into a depression.

“I was so infuriated that it was hard to communicate. I was so rankled by this feeling of imprisonment that I had. Because I had moved to this horrible little apartment next to the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, whose only attraction was that it was convenient in relation to Dave.

“That whole period was a descent into hell. Sitting around in that room, I started getting all these obsessions--weird fixations on cops and international terrorism and the drug trade and the educational system and television.”

Too much leisure time in a bad atmosphere left Baerwald dazed and jaded. He was dating a woman in the movie industry, associating with prime film stock by night; by day, he was befriending “alcoholic policemen” he’d met while his buddy Penn was working on the movie “Colors,” vicariously soaking up their experiences on the street. He became a queasy onlooker to both the most sordid and glamorous sides of Hollywood--”and I still don’t know which is which . . . frankly.”

Finally he moved out of the city “because everywhere I looked, I saw things falling apart. If we were sitting here at a table just like this, I would see you as slowly dying. I’d look at children playing on the street and think that soon they would also die. Everything seemed like a symbol of death.

“I started reading a lot of Genet and Beckett and Sartre, just because it seemed obvious that it was some kind of existential crisis that I was undergoing,” he says, chuckling. “I didn’t know what constituted identity. I’d lost an understanding of what the self is. I felt completely interchangeable with everybody, and everybody became interchangeable with each other, even though I knew intellectually that’s just not true.”

And how did he face off his existential conundrum? A 12-step support program? A religious conversion? Nothing any more inspirational to report than some heavy sublimation.

“I think I recovered a sense of identity to a certain level. Mostly, though, I just ran away. I thought, ‘Maybe when I grow up I can deal with it. These are questions that nobody can answer, so give yourself a break and don’t even try right now. Just write down what happens and put it in a form that’s understandable and sing it and move on and forget about it. Because otherwise you’re gonna go nuts.’ I mean, look at Samuel Beckett, man; what a wreck.”

As a result, some of the love songs on “Bedtime Stories” are much more up-front and less dark than those on “Boomtown,” without so many of the sly, bitter, Newmanesque twists that crept into even the happier sounding tracks on the previous album.

“Well, I was reacting against my feelings. I was using this record to cheer myself up. I wanted to do happy stuff. I wanted to find hope in that.

“Say a guy has been married for a long time and his marriage crumbles. And he sits around and the ashtrays fill up and mold grows on the beer can, and finally one day he just says, ‘I know I feel bad, but I’m gonna get up and I’m gonna clean this house and paint it and I’m gonna mow the lawn and put everything in its place.’ And even though he still feels like crap, the act of doing these things makes him stronger. That’s kind of what I was doing.”