CAN GARTH SAVE COUNTRY?

By RICHARD CORLISS

They lined up outside stores all over the nation in late November for Sevens, Garth Brooks' first CD in two years. Then they took it home and heard a swell set of 14 tunes from the sweetly pudge-faced Oklahoman who has sold 62 million albums--country music's one bona fide superstar. Sevens sold about 800,000 copies the first week, and it's not just his bosses at Capitol Records who hope Brooks keeps moving the product. Country needs a hit. Country needs...something. Like a lonesome cowpoke in some nasal old lament, it feels the redneck blues, and don't ask it why.

Country is the nation's most popular music format, with the largest number of radio stations and fans all over. But to many music consumers, country remains a quaint taste, one that registers only with the rare fluke hit (remember Achy Breaky Heart, the Macarena of the summer of 1992?) or novelty act (LeAnn Rimes, who was 13 when her yodeling debut album, Blue, rose high on the pop charts last year). Even in the core regions CD sales are flat, and a malaise--or at best, a wait-and-hope--grips the industry. Three of Billboard's top six country albums last week were greatest-hits collections. That's too much deja vu for a modern-music genre.

Some folks blame the big country-radio stations, whose playlists lull listeners. "The stations play the same 50 records every week," says Mercury Nashville president Luke Lewis. "I call it Prozac radio." The hope never dies for a purer, "alternative" country voice, but that's hard to find on mainstream radio. "A lot of program directors come from the rock format," says Holly Gleason, a premier Nashville publicist who has midwifed the careers of stars Patty Loveless and Collin Raye, "and don't have a feeling for the country tradition. Their allegiance isn't to the roots; it's to the research."

A few moguls are doing too well to worry. Mike Curb--the Californian who, in another life, produced hits by the Four Seasons, the Osmonds and Debby Boone (her version of You Light Up My Life was the '70s' top-selling single) and, from 1978 to 1982, served as Lieutenant Governor of California--has struck country gold on his Curb label with Tim McGraw (Indian Outlaw) and ridden Rimes to multiplatinum. Curb sees the payoff beyond the pain: "If a record is different, it's going to be harder to get it played. But you get a bigger return when you get it played."

It helps if you have a young star like Rimes. In the past few years country's familiar gents and studs have been pushing fewer CDs, and the ladies have been pushing them aside. Country would be in an even deeper funk if it weren't for Rimes and Shania Twain, the Canadian power thrush whose The Woman in Me sold 10 million copies. Their new albums--Rimes' You Light Up My Life and Twain's Come On Over, both of which have topped the charts--are more significant as product than as music.

The secret of LeAnn's success is three words: volume (a big voice), volume (three albums in 18 months), volume (saturation marketing by Curb). The new CD--12 songs of inspiration, from The Rose to God Bless America--rarely unleashes Rimes' gloriously freaky soprano; at times she sounds intimidated, like a child called on to sing before stern church elders. Only in an a cappella National Anthem does she let loose the trills and glissandi; but, really, is that a cut you'll want to play a lot?

Twain's prime asset is a dry, knowing voice; it could belong to the woman at the end of the bar who talks to you first. Whereas a teen type like Mindy McCready anguishes (in her songs What If I Do and If I Don't Stay the Night) over whether to say yes to a boy with greedy hands, Twain has been there and had fun. When she paired with rock producer Robert John ("Mutt") Lange (Def Leppard, Billy Ocean, Heart) for The Woman in Me, the result was clever, churning rockabilly: a catchy hook, a verse-bridge-and-chorus format and Twain's worldwise sass. It's a sturdy structure for a song or two, but, on the evidence of Come On Over, not for perhaps a dozen of the CD's 16. Even a plaint from an abused spouse (Black Eyes, Blue Tears) is suspiciously chipper. Halfway through, the set starts feeling less like Nashville than Levittown.

This isn't a question of purity. If country music is conservative, it is conserving trends of the Brill Building as much as of the Grand Ole Opry. Martina McBride, for example, is a country artist only because she records in Nashville; she lends her spectacular pipes to pop ballads that Streisand ought to be singing. One song on McBride's soaring new album, Evolution, was co-written by Cynthia Weil, who penned such '60s standards as Uptown and On Broadway.

There are enough local songwriters (4,500 in the Nashville Songwriters Association International) to stock the albums of McBride and the other terrific women singers. Patty Loveless' Long Stretch of Lonesome, a svelte set of songs, ends with Where I'm Bound, an I'm-gonna-die-and-I-feel-good-about-it hymn delivered with such plaintive artistry that the listener is ready to take the trip with her. Reading My Heart, on Lorrie Morgan's Greater Need CD, is about a woman lifted out of "a curious mood" by her thoughtful husband; it has a lilting melody to match its sweet sentiment. Lila McCann goes to appropriate vocal extremes in the songs on her album Lila: twangy revival-tent shouting in Down Came a Blackbird; flirtatious taunting in the perfect rocker Yippy-Ky-Yay, about a girl smart enough to hold a pretty boy at arm's length ("'Cause I believe in love like the Good Book says,/ Not the gospel according to You").

"I don't like artists," says the oldies-obsessed hero of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing. "I like singles." That is an unfashionable preference these days, except in Nashville, where even the biggest star is at the mercy of his material. Brooks usually co-writes many of his songs; on Sevens he worked on less than half, but he picked some great ones--storytelling songs that go places, from beginning to end, truck stop to heartbreak.

The album is plenty down home, with bits of western swing and sagebrush shuffle, and two "gonnas" and a "gotta" in the song titles. But the music has a lithe sophistication. In the gentle lament She's Gonna Make It, a man follows his ex-wife to work, seven months after he walked out of their marriage, and sees to his chagrin that "she's gonna make it/ And he never will." To elegiac fiddle strains, this lovely song addresses the rancorous passion of the male loser--the guy, once used to having it all, who has to watch it all go away.

The next song, I Don't Have to Wonder, has a church setting. Inside, a woman is getting married. Outside, her ex-beau--who could be the fellow from She's Gonna Make It--sits in his suit, tie and pickup, refusing to enter, imagining her happiness to italicize his misery. As she and her new husband drive off in their limo, the narrator heads to "that lonesome river bridge," takes her ring from his pocket and, "in less time than it takes a tear to fall," throws the emblem of their tarnished love into the water. His life sinks with it. He is left on the rim of suicide as Brooks growls over wedding bells and a mocking heavenly choir. A devastating domestic tragedy, in three minutes flat.

Country may not be breaking new paths, but there's enough good music around that a listener can be entertained and enthralled by these gifted women and one country gentleman. As Brooks sings in Take the Keys to My Heart, "I don't know where this road is gonna lead us/ But what a beautiful night for a drive."

--With reporting by Pat Harris/Nashville

With reporting by PAT HARRIS/NASHVILLE