Country Classicists

By JAY COCKS

The cops came to the door. Again. Seems like Houston's finest were always trying to get in the way of Clint Black's career.

Black played bass in his brother's band, and their folks encouraged them by cooking barbecue in the backyard and inviting friends over to eat, listen and dance. The boys would get to going so good that everyone lost track of time, until the police came calling. "Folks next door, they're complaining," one cop would say. "Must not have invited them."

Now that Black has become one of the hottest young men in country music, everyone's knocking on his door, and there are no complaints. His debut album, Killin' Time, has been at No. 1 for the past 29 weeks, and his second, Put Yourself in My Shoes, is due in November. The music is a lot more refined than his backyard material, and it doesn't come with ribs, but it's the freshest, pithiest country sound since Randy Travis.

Or Garth Brooks. As luck would have it, he came along about the same time. He's the same age as Black, 28, and he hails from roughly the same background (raised in Yukon, Okla., just outside Oklahoma City) and the same stretch of musical country. Black's tunes have a little more sadness in them, maybe more dimension. Brooks comes on easier, making a direct assault on the heartstrings, singing in a kind of simonized tenor suitable for both serenades and bust outs. His debut album, Garth Brooks, is No. 2, right behind Killin' Time, and has spent about half a year in the Top Ten. Last month Brooks pulled down five nominations from the Country Music Association, and Black landed four. That's a good year's work for both, and good news for Nashville.

Black and Brooks, along with such kindred voices as Vince Gill, Alan Jackson and Travis, are part of a kind of neoconservative musical move back to country basics. No outlaw image or firebrand tunes for these folks. They lay down melodies with a light country swing and a tinge of melancholy. They sing bedrock sentiments about home and hearth, loneliness and heartbreak and getting done in by the big time in the big city. "I consider myself % traditional," Black says. "And I'm new, so if I had to call myself something, it would be 'new traditionalist.'

"I have always come in through the back door rather than the front," Brooks reflects in his soft Oklahoma accent. "It always seems like I am standing outside of me, watching the whole thing go down, whatever I am doing." From that vantage point, Brooks would have caught a good show starring both his main competition and himself.

Black worked in construction for a while, plugged away hard at making a musical name for himself through the boom years in Houston and the Urban Cowboy vogue of the early '80s, when every citybilly wanted to wear snakeskin boots and ride a mechanical bronc. "Hundreds of western-wear stores popped up around that time," Black observes dryly. "But, musically, I couldn't hear a lot of difference."

Black's got a good ear and -- judging from his songs -- short patience for affectation of any kind. His lyrics bear down sharp but easy, perhaps because he came to country by a slightly different route. "When I was eight, I started collecting records," he remembers. "But it was the rock stuff that my older brothers had exposed me to. Then I got into Loggins and Messina, Croce, Buffett, Jackson Browne and James Taylor." He's had a total of one professional guitar lesson, and all it did was make him impatient. He just kept his eyes open around his hometown, where "there was always somebody with a guitar. I learned that with three chords I could transpose just about any song and play it." Now Black's traveling band reflects his informal and eclectic approach. "The guys," he says, "have played every kind of music imaginable, from jazz fusion to hard country, so we've got room to stretch out."

Brooks' story goes a little lighter on musicology and a little heavier on personal drama. Black, who writes or co-writes most of his tunes, seems to save himself for his music. Brooks, who co-wrote only three of the cuts on his new second album, No Fences, is more actor than writer; he knows how to put some spin on the standard bio. "Not knowin' nothin' about a lot of stuff, that's me," he says, before launching into a sketch of his college experience ("I was a javelin thrower; at least I wore a uniform that said I was"); his early years with music ("Stunk at everything I did. Music was the one thing I felt proud of"); his first encounter with Sandy Mahl, whom he would marry in 1986 (Brooks was a bouncer in a club. She threw a punch that went through a wall. But "I don't want anyone to think she's not a lady"); and his hungry times before breaking through, when he "went to Nashville expecting to see my name up on water tanks."

Other performers might talk a little about the bad times and all the frustrations; Brooks describes a scene that sounds like Jack Nicholson's famous freak-out in Five Easy Pieces. "Sitting in the parking lot of a damn fire station back in Hendersonville, Tenn., beating my head as hard as I could because I had snapped, and Sandy screaming at me to quit. I was crying, she was crying. I calmed down, and we went back home." Half a year later, Brooks signed with Capitol Records.

That's a good country ending for a typical kind of country story. What Brooks and Black share, along with a winning penchant for hit making, is a gift for finding something fresh in the familiar, something timely in the predictable and timeworn. In uptown kinds of music, that quality is called soul. Down home, it's just known as country. Pure country.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York