POP MUSIC REVIEW : AFTER OPERA, MORRIS PUTS ON ARIAS

It’s been said that you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.

Hogwash.

Just look at singer Gary Morris, who left the field of country for three months last fall to take a leading role opposite Linda Ronstadt in Joseph Papp’s contemporary production of Puccini’s opera “La Boheme” in the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Now back on the country circuit, this former good ol’ boy from Fort Worth, Tex., showed up Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana shorn of the thick black beard that once made him look like a grizzled Old West outlaw. If his new clean-cut look wasn’t enough, Morris and his five-man band were also decked out in tuxedos, with Morris sporting white tie and tails to boot. Looks like the Grand Ole Opry has given way to Grand Opera.

In the first of his two sold-out shows, Morris even included one number from “La Boheme,” which he jokingly referred to as “my first, and probably my last, encounter with opera.” (In reviewing Morris’ performance in the opera, Times Music Critic Martin Bernheimer wrote that he projected “the ingenuously natural manner of an overgrown flower child, solid dramatic instincts, and a burnished, wide-open tenor that he can effectively reduce to the tenderest of pianissimo sounds.”) Exhibiting the control and range of a classically trained tenor, Morris proved with his opera offering that he probably sings Puccini better than Pavarotti sings Hank Williams.

Equally effective was his solo rendition, for which he backed himself on acoustic guitar, of the gospel standard “Amazing Grace,” a perfect showcase for a singer’s dynamic and melodic range.

Unfortunately, during the bulk of the 75-minute set, which was drawn from his three albums and included one new song from a forthcoming LP, Morris and his band treated just about everything else as a Wagnerian opus. “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” his 1983 hit that on record was a delicately rendered ode to unsung heroes, became an overblown exercise in bombast. Apparently the group forgot that it was in a 275-seat club, not the Metropolitan Opera House.

Although Morris has an undeniably fine voice, he demonstrated more technique than emotion. Too often, he stood outside his material and respectfully delivered the notes in the correct pitch and tempo rather than plunging headlong into each song, wrestling with it and turning it inside out until even mundane lyrics sound special--precisely the ability that makes George Jones the Caruso of Country.

For without that kind of heart-wrenching feeling--like jazz that “ain’t got that swing”--country music don’t mean a thing.