Trippin' Through The Crossroads

By JAY COCKS

When it comes to country music, there is a choice of parties.

Hank Williams Jr. has a roarer going on over at a big spread near Nashville. It's really a video event, fired up just so there could be a raucous, celebrity-studded promo for Hank's hit tune, All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming over Tonight. And there it is, a real booze-and-barbecue bash, with lots of huggy-bunny country gals sashaying all around folks who dropped in, sometimes via limo, to pay old Hank Jr. their respects. There's Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Hank Jr. sings his song, roaming all around the large house and out into the yard, which appears to be the size of one of the smaller islands in the Pacific archipelago. The visiting celebs all make eye contact with the camera. Everyone looks to be having a helluva good time.

Rodney Crowell has a party going on too, and it's also for a video. Out on some piece of road in Wartrace, Tenn., he grabs his guitar and starts lip- syncing the words to I Couldn't Leave You If I Tried. He stops what little traffic there is. Drivers and passengers, none of them recognizable to anyone but their neighbors, climb out of cars, pickups and delivery trucks to join in the song. They all smile, mostly at one another, and dance around.

You can forget about all those snazzy houses and all those famous folks. Hank and Willie and Waylon and other "outlaws" of the '70s have suddenly become -- no, could it be? -- the older generation in country music. The Crowell shindig is right where the action in country music has moved: the crossroads. There has been a lot of traffic there lately, at the delicate junction where country meets its past, sizes up its future and -- probably most important -- guns its musical motor and goes off in its own direction. And Crowell, a wonderfully gifted songwriter and rambunctious performer, isn't even driving the fastest car in the pack.

Once all the records sold and hits charted and awards won are totted up, the slickest wheels on the road would belong to Randy Travis, 29, whose first album, Storms of Life, sold 2 million copies, whose second, Always and Forever, sold 3 million.. Travis' major career worry for the past year would appear to be that his new album, called Old 8x10 and just now in stores, might dislodge Always from the top of the country charts, where it has perched for almost a year. One million copies of Old 8x10 have already been ordered up by retail outlets, and reorders seem a solid bet. The record's blend of sweet vocals and straightforward sentiment should go down smoothly with Travis' growing number of fans.

Travis has some daunting stats going for him, sure enough. But all the commotion in country music right now is more than just a matter of numbers. Overall, its radio share has remained consistent during the past few years; it corners a mite above 10% of the national audience. And sales of records and tapes are fine, thank you: in 1987, country accounted for about 10% of the 5.6 billion musical dollars plunked down in the U.S.

! What makes country hot at the moment is something that can't be graphed or computed. But it can be heard, sometimes on radio stations that play rock or even -- shudder -- easy listening. There is a bumper crop of new talent around, making personal, adventurous, uncompromised music for a wider audience that is not bound by country's strict conventions. It could be that things haven't been so fertile since the '50s, with the coming of Johnny Cash and the brash flush of rockabilly. For sure, the pickings haven't been so rich since Waylon and Willie and Merle and Kris broke through more than a decade ago.

All those outlaws of the past decade, those rebels against the deep-shag songwriting of mainstream Nashville, have become the '80s Establishment. There is a new pack out there now. Travis and Crowell. Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. K.T. Oslin and the O'Kanes and the supercharged Steve Earle. They are shaking all the wrinkles out of the music and ironing it into a different shape.

Travis is the ideal -- indeed, the pluperfect -- symbol for this accidental movement, the soft-spoken, tall-sitting, sweet-singing eye of a most congenial storm. "People think country music is related to a bunch of rednecks drinking beer and fighting," he reflects, with the pleasing tang of a North Carolina accent. "They think it's all songs about drinking and cheating. But it covers a lot bigger area than that, you know." He pauses, as if taking a survey of the acreage he is trying to describe. Then, after a minute, there is a shrug and a simple, smiling, "Covers everything."

When he sings, it surely seems to. For his years, he has done a fair amount of living, not all of it above the law, and he has a voice that can really sidle around a lyric, sound smooth flowing and knowing at the same time. Forever and Ever, Amen, which topped the country charts for three weeks, is a straight-ahead tune, an up-tempo litany of undying devotion -- all right, it's almost corny -- but Travis pulls it from the brink of bathos with some hair- trigger phrasing and a very sly, very worldly tone of voice. This singer's commitment may be total, but it's got as much to do with carnality as idealism.

The heat is all in the suggestion and the styling, of course. On the surface, everything is on the up-and-up. If it weren't, Travis would not have scored the invitation last year to become the youngest male member of the Grand Ole Opry. The first time he set foot on the stage of Country Central, he recalls, "no stage, anywhere, it don't matter the amount of people in the audience, no stage has made me feel like the Opry, has scared me as bad. By the time I finished my first two songs and came off, I was literally to the point of shaking. Done gone all to pieces!"

The Opry is well known to be the citadel of country conservatism -- an ornery character like Earle, more rock oriented and bolder lyrically, might use the word conformity -- but Travis will pay homage to tradition. Earle will joke about his "heavy-metal bluegrass" sound, and share, with Crowell and Griffith, a high regard for the personalized regionalism of the Texas singer- songwriter Townes Van Zandt. Oslin sings with a voice that has as much Broadway in it as Biloxi, and Kieran Kane of the O'Kanes will talk about a hypnotic love song of theirs called All Because of You just like this: "The music sort of drifts off, gets real atonal and out of time, which is not normal in country music." Lovett, now he's not normal, with his spooky, funny tunes about ponies sailing oceans. But atonal, for Lord's sake. That's not normal, that's close to sacrilege.

And that's not for Travis. He speaks with reverence of the greats -- Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and George Jones, Lefty Frizzell and Jim Reeves -- but he has to be pressed to single out a contemporary. Even then, the answer doesn't come easily, and those he mentions -- like George Strait and Reba McEntire -- are straight, no-chaser country types. Growing up in Marshville, N.C. (pop. 2,011, right on the South Carolina border below Charlotte), Travis, with five brothers and sisters, got an earful of teen tunes, from Kiss to Clapton, Led Zep to ZZ Top. "My brothers and sisters, people I went to school with -- I mean all of them -- were definitely into rock 'n' roll. Sure, I heard it. I mean, if I was riding in a car with them, I didn't have a lot of choice. But it never really appealed to me that much." What got to Randy was his dad's collection of old country 78s, and even now Travis can recall the immediacy of the music and loving the sound of the voices before he could make full sense of the lyrics.

It was likely that love that kept Randy's rocking peers reasonably respectful of his musical interests. The family was Baptist affiliated, but Daddy Harold Traywick, a hard-tempered turkey farmer and horse trader, and Mama Bobbie, a textile worker, bent the church rules a little bit and had the kids perform at V.F.W. halls and Moose lodges, doing a country act as the Traywick Brothers. (Randy changed to his current moniker when he signed with Warner Bros. Records, which suggested that "Travis" might sound a little . . . well, fleeter.)

Travis packed high school in when he was 15 ("I didn't even finish the ninth grade"), but the year before, he had commenced a different kind of education when he was caught driving drunk and trying to outrun a cop. "I can't count the times I've been in jail," he says. "I never had to go to prison, but once, for ten weeks, I had to go to the Monroe jail every Friday night and leave Monday morning." Finally, at about age 17, Randy got busted for breaking and entering. Looking at five years in prison, he had some luck. In his more respectable moments, he had hooked up with a woman named Lib Hatcher, who ran a club in Charlotte called Country City U.S.A. She gave him a job, stood up for him in court, and the judge let Randy go with a warning: "Son, if you come back to my courtroom, bring your toothbrush."

Travis took up the guitar in a serious way instead ("I'm still not a great player, though. I just mainly play rhythm"). Hatcher remembers that he was "very, very shy. He would hardly talk to me, even after I hired him." He didn't have much to talk about, between guitar and all the handymanning and mechanical-bull handling she had him doing around the club, never mind the singing. He had won a Country City amateur contest, and settled in at the club for what was to be a five-year stay. "One day," says Hatcher, "Randy was rehearsing with the band, and his dad went home for something, I don't remember exactly why, but Randy stayed in Charlotte. He never went back home after that." The father-son relationship is still sometimes prickly. "Randy's father has not ever, not one time has he thanked me for what I've done," says Hatcher. "His mother has. She's a wonderful lady."

Lib and Randy shared a few things in common, including, it is often suggested, a strong romantic entanglement. "It is a great partnership" is as far as Randy will go to characterize the relationship. But Hatcher, fortyish, is as close to her boy now as she was way back in 1978, when she put up $10,000 for his first two singles, released by a local label out of Shreveport, La. They also shared a strong sense of Randy's destiny and in 1981 were already making the rounds and plugging songs in Nashville. Finally, in 1985, a Warner Bros. Records exec tuned in on what Hatcher had been hearing for a decade and signed Travis to a singles contract. His first shot was the lilting On the Other Hand, which flopped at first, but his second, 1982, made the Top Ten. Warner signed Travis for an album, which became the 2 million- selling Storms of Life, and On the Other Hand, re-released, went to No. 1. All of a sudden, Travis was on the fast track, with the pedal to the metal. Would a chorus of I Told You So sound too much like gloating?

"Over the course of ten years' trying, you learn a lot," Travis allows. "Even if you're not very smart, you can learn a lot." He has plenty to show for his efforts, like a new $500,000 whirlpool-equipped tour bus, which replaced the converted bread truck and delivery van that used to freight the musicians from gig to gig. He can also take off-road consolation in the property he just bought in Cheatham County, 20 miles out of Nashville, where he and Hatcher share a renovated century-old log cabin.

Since in the past year he's been off the road only for scattered five-day stretches, downtime is to be cherished. "I love to ride," he says, and he takes one of his three horses over his new spread, sometimes staying near the creek that runs around his cabin in a languid semicircle, like a lucky horseshoe. "Out in the country," he says, "now that feels like home. That is how I was raised, out away from everybody, and that is what I still like." Randy Travis knows his rightful place. And he stays hard by his roots.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York