Grand Funk had “We’re an American Band.” Bachman-Turner Overdrive had “Takin’ Care of Business.” And the Gravel Pit have “The Ballad of the Gravel Pit,” their own contribution to the annals of songs about the wild life of a rock-and-roll band on the road.

Featured early on their new Mass. Avenue Freeze-Out (on Q Division), the “Ballad” is one of their catchiest songs yet and definitely their funniest. And it turns out that the Gravel Pit’s road life is a good deal less glamorous than Grand Funk’s or BTO’s were. There are verses about singer Jed Parish trying (and failing) to pick up chicks backstage; about bassist Ed Valauskas selling the T-shirts; about drummer Pete Caldes being the cool one. Then there’s guitarist Lucky Jackson’s initial meeting with Figgs leader Mike Gent (sung roughly to the tune of “Sweet Emotion”): “Some long-poem writer with a name like a Gent/Asked Mr. Jackson for 25 cents.” It’s proof that you can’t go wrong with a good Aerosmith joke.

Listening to that song, you might think the Gravel Pit — who play a two-night release party at T.T. the Bear’s Place this weekend — are proud to join the tradition of all-for-one road-dog rock bands. But that hasn’t been the case, at least not over the past year. For the first time since 1993, when they moved here from New Haven, the well-liked quartet haven’t been playing out wherever and whenever possible. “When we made Silver Gorilla, we were coming off 52 gigs in the past year,” Parish explains when we all sit down at the Middle East. “This time we were only coming off 15. So I was a little nervous that we weren’t the crack tour band we’ve been in the past decade.”

In fact they’ve been more visible lately with side projects. Parish played a bunch of solo gigs, started a Web site (www.jedediahparish.com), and released an album (Bloodsucker Blues) with all the songs that were too dark or weird for the band. Following up on that meeting with Gent, the other three members joined with him to form the hard-rockin’ Gentlemen. And Valauskas is playing with five bands at last count; the other three are Kay Hanley, Crème Brûlée and Bill Janovitz’s Crown Victoria — all of which he’s had time to join since his day job at a local dot-com fell through. “They’re all good bands, and it’s fun to have something to do.”

So are the Gravel Pit on the verge of being phased out? No, but they don’t plan to go back to doing it full-tilt, either. They did all the touring and the shmoozing two years ago, when Silver Gorilla was a local hit and “Favorite” was virtually the only local song by an indie band to be in regular rotation at both WFNX and WBCN. But the roadwork wasn’t fun, and it didn’t get them a record deal, so the hell with it.

“My main issue with the last tour is that some of the shows weren’t that good,” Parish explains. “If we could go on the road and the shows would either make us money or be great rock-and-roll nights, then great. But we had a lot of gigs that didn’t make us a better band, lost us money, and pissed us off.” It didn’t help, he adds, that the band would show up in suits, their chosen stage garb, and get questions like, “Are you guys the Mighty Mighty Bosstones?” Even some of the local shows proved less than memorable, like the WBCN River Rave gig at the Tweeter Center last year. “I was miserable at that show,” says Valauskas. “I remember that you could see people running down the hill when we played ‘Favorite’ and then going away again afterward.”

They’re equally jaded with the major labels, who made overtures when “Favorite” was a hit but beat a predictable retreat afterward. “If your band is called Anal Aggression, everybody knows what that’s going to sound like,” Parish notes. “But if you have to say, ‘Well, our band rocks, but it’s also kinda poppy, and there are some slow songs’ — where are they supposed to put that?”

For those who know these guys, that’s an easy one: you call them a rock-and-roll band. Especially on Mass. Avenue Freeze-Out, which makes good on their promise to deliver a louder, between-the-eyes set after Silver Gorilla, which was their most textured pop effort. They changed producers — from Mike Denneen, himself a keyboard player, to former Letters to Cleo bassist Scott Riebling — and the sound has shifted quite a bit. In the past it’s always relied on the guitar and keyboard (usually the garage-model Vox organ) playing in tandem, but this time Jackson’s guitars leave the keyboard in the dust. With Mike Gent adding a second guitar on some tracks (and Parish occasionally picking up one himself), it’s tempting — but still accurate — to say it sounds like a Gentlemen album with Parish doing the singing.

“That’s inevitable,” Parish says. “And I definitely like the Gentlemen, but I can’t say I’ve been influenced by them. It just happens that the new songs we had were more rock. I mean, one of the songs has a breakdown that was already on the first Gravel Pit record, the second Figgs record, and the fourth AC/DC record. I can see that conspiracy theorists might hear my solo album and hear the Gentlemen and say, ‘Well, Jed doesn’t rock unless he has the other guys behind him’ — that definitely isn’t the case. But one difference is that the Gentlemen have a strict no-ballad rule, and I always insist on there being ballads on the records and in the shows.”

Not to mention that the Gravel Pit are a little harder to pin down. One of Parish’s darker songs, “Short Western Film,” gives the album an unsettling epilogue, much the way “Night Rally” did on Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model (at least if you own the UK version). And though Mass. Avenue Freeze-Out generally comes across as an upbeat and fun-loving record, it does have a handful of bitter songs about ex-friends and ex-lovers. There are in fact more relationship-themed songs than usual for the Gravel Pit — but don’t look for any personal clues there, because as usual the band picked the songs from Parish’s long-term catalogue. Some of the songs on Freeze-Out are new; others go back as far as 1992.

Parish thinks hard when asked how he’d distinguish his newer songs from the older ones. “I probably don’t dispense the wisdom as much as I used to. The main difference would be lyrical — when I write a song now, it’s usually politics, sex, death, relationships. But when I was 18, it was all about how the whole world was stupider than I was.”

ASA BREBNER. If you’re a nice guy in real life, the least you can do is be an asshole in some of your songs. That’s been the case for singer/guitarist Asa Brebner, who’s always been sweet and sensitive one minute, crude and sexist (but funny as hell) the next. His new Best No Money Can Buy (on Windjam) opens with “The Roses I Never Bought You,” a tender number about missed romantic opportunities. Two songs later, he’s offering this heartfelt sentiment: “I am just a civilized guy . . . You stole my woman, now you’re gonna die.” And how many sensitive songwriters would use a cover photo of themselves getting tipsy at a strip club?

“I like to mix up messages because it confuses people,” Brebner explains. “The title is really about being an amateur musician, which I still am after 20 years — you don’t get paid, so you’re the best no money can buy. The songs are either about that or about the good things in life that money can’t buy. But the cover is about exactly the opposite. It came from a roll of photos from a vacation in Costa Rica; the two women are strippers who sat with us. They’re very nice girls — at least I hope they are, or else they’ll see the album cover on the Internet and sue me.”

As for the split personality in the songs, “we all have different masks that we wear at different times to express different sides of us. I’m lucky enough to have songwriting as a medium, and those are different fragments of the whole that is me. Everybody’s had moments of vulnerability and loss, and everybody’s had moments where they feel like cussing people out. A song like ‘Too Many Assholes’ — I think anyone who’s driven on Route 128 has felt that way once or twice.”

Ironic titles aside, Brebner’s music does embody a lot of the best in grown-up rock and roll. His long-time band — guitarist Alan Devine, bassist Andrew Mazzone, and drummer Kevin Shurtleff (also of Scissorfight) — can play the hell out of anything he writes, easing back when he’s sensitive and shifting into Stones/Replacements mode when he rocks. “The woman who’s putting this record out [label owner Loreen Hurley] called this album my mature statement. So the next one will be either my second-childhood or my dirty-old-man album.”

Brebner’s gig at Lilli’s this Friday is actually a double-CD release: along with the new album he’s put out Time in My Way, a compilation from his three previous CDs. But the show will go back even farther in his career, with a guest set by Robin Lane & the Chartbusters, who’ll do their first proper reunion in about a decade (there was an unrehearsed one at the Abbey Lounge last summer). Brebner joined that band in 1979 after a spell in the Modern Lovers, and their two albums of thoughtful folk rock drew a fair share of notice at the time. Lane is now back in the area after a spell in LA; expect to hear “When Things Go Wrong” and plenty of other shoulda-been-hits.

The Gravel Pit play T.T. the Bear’s this Friday, June 22; call (617) 492-BEAR. Also this Friday, Asa Brebner and Robin Lane & the Chartbusters play Lilli’s; call (617) 591-1661.