Shots From a Smoking Gun

By JAY COCKS

No nonsense here. The blues have no tolerance for fancy language or extravagant rhythms. This is music in hard focus and precise form, haiku for voice and guitar. "All my love's in vain," Robert Johnson sang, and whenever that feeling comes around to anyone, it is always to a blues accompaniment.

Everyone knows the feeling, but not everyone listens to the music. Blues are too nasty and too raggedy to make it onto the pop charts unpasteurized. B.B. King and Muddy Waters have the names, but Eric Clapton's elegant revisionism makes the hits. For someone who plays and sings the blues as righteously as Robert Cray, it might be expected that he would become just another dimly remembered performer, hunkered down, playing the shellac off old 78s by forgotten Mississippi bands. That is not the way of it, though. In this, and in much else, Robert Cray has a different way about him.

Cray, 33, heard Clapton before he had completed his classical blues curriculum, and the music on his fifth and newest album, Strong Persuader, a collaboration among several songwriters, has the cool and sexy finesse of prime Eric, even as it does the grand masters proud. "I try to keep my ears open to all kinds of things," Cray says, and that receptivity is now paying off. His guitar playing, as precise as a laser beam, and the tormented romanticism of his songs have helped land a major-label record deal and a heavy dose of attention.

Cray sang with Tina Turner for her HBO special, due out this winter, and recently showed up in St. Louis for Chuck Berry's 60th birthday party, a concert extravaganza that featured such luminaries as Keith Richards and Linda Ronstadt and was filmed for theatrical release next year. Cray sang two Berry classics, Come On and Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, and admits, "That was a real kick. But it was also intimidating."

Cray's presence on the bill highlighted his own drift into rock, in abundant evidence on the Strong Persuader album, where the blues give no quarter but are suddenly danceable. "Lyrically," as Cray hears it, "the songs are blues stories in the sense that they relate with lost love, sneakin' around, cheatin' and things like that, but the music isn't traditional blues music. We're stepping out into new territories. Smoking Gun almost sounds like a rock-'n'-roll song." On the album's opening cut, hard-edged guitar and lyrical economy set up another variation on jealousy and revenge: "Maybe you want to end it/ Had your fill of my kind of fun/ But you don't know how to tell me/ And you know I'm not that dumb/I put two and one together,/ And we know that's not an even sum./ And I know just where to catch you with/ That well-known smoking gun."

If that sounds like traditional blues territory, the next two songs (written by Album Producer Dennis Walker) find fresh ground. I Guess I Showed Her is the lament of a prideful lover who took his leave too soon ("Room 16 ain't got no view, but/ The hot plate's brand new./ I guess I showed her"), and Right Next Door (Because of Me) is a reflective apology sung by the kind of guy who usually doesn't say he's sorry: "She was right next door, and I'm such a strong persuader./ She was just another notch on my guitar./ Now she's going to lose the man who really loves her./ In the silence I can hear their breaking hearts." The sound of Strong Persuader is not the only thing that is different; not even the main thing. Cray offers a uniquely supple narrative that he wields as easily as his '64 rosewood-necked Fender Stratocaster guitar.

The man does not look far for inspiration. "The material that we call the blues," he says, "relates to my personal life." He has never married, but once lived with a woman for seven years and helped bring up her daughter. Back then he was a rover, but, he insists, "not anymore. I slowed down. It doesn't do anything but get you in a lot of trouble." Watch Cray in performance and it is easy enough to see how he could still get in harm's way. He has a voice that sounds as if he gargles with Old Grand-Dad and a sly smile that looks like an open invitation. The grin does not come easy, but upon arrival it is ! bright enough to beam ships through a fog. All that fits nicely. The blues, after all, have always been music about trouble that is only going to get you into more of the same.

Gospel was the music Cray heard first and most. Born in Georgia to a career Army man, Cray lived in West Germany and all over the U.S., settling for a time in Tacoma, where he went to high school. His father could handle a little guitar ("Three chords and a few blues licks," his son says. "Nothing to be scared of") and played lots of gospel tapes at home. The sweet, lofting sounds of the Five Blind Boys and the Dixie Hummingbirds complemented services every Sunday at the local Baptist church. Even so, Cray considered becoming an architect -- a desire that survived only three courses in mechanical drawing and one encounter with an old Muddy Waters record. Enter the blues. "It's so beautiful, the guys really believe in what they're saying," says Cray. "There's no fear at all to go for it."

He went for it. By 1974 Cray was playing backup for Blues Ace Albert Collins, who had appeared at Cray's high school graduation party three years before, and organizing his own band. It was soon performing 250 nights a year in bars from Vancouver to San Diego. Sometimes parents would come by to check out how the boys were doing. "My father and (Bass Player) Richard Cousins' mom are loud people," Cray says fondly. "You can hear them in the audience: 'Do it, son! Play that guitar! Pop a string! I'll buy you another one.' "

Cray and the band released their first album in 1980, an event that was followed six months later by the collapse of the record company. One of the producers founded a new label, which handled the next albums, and now with Mercury/ Hightone shepherding Cray into the mainstream, things have stayed solid. "We've always stepped out of bounds," Cray says, "simply because the music we were playing didn't have a lot of commercial appeal." After Strong Persuader, that's starting to be history.

With reporting by Wilmer Ames Jr./New York