McKEE AND LONE JUSTICE--TAKE TWO

Fender’s in Long Beach has the dark, drafty feel of an abandoned waterfront warehouse, but Maria McKee is such a captivating singer that you barely notice the ballroom’s dingy surroundings once she begins singing.

But even McKee’s talent wasn’t enough a few weekends ago to keep you from picking up on the changes around her since her band, Lone Justice, made its debut record almost two years ago.

Gone: all four of her bandmates in Lone Justice.

Gone: the group’s original manager.

Gone: most of the country seasoning that was one of Lone Justice’s most endearing and distinctive features.

Make no mistake. Parts of the new “Shelter” LP, due in stores this week, are the things legends are made of (see adjoining review). Haunting is used too frequently in describing the effect of pop songs, but you could define the word for someone by playing “Wheels,” a tale of romantic isolation that McKee sings with lovely, delicate nuances. And McKee reaches an intensity of emotion in the spiritually tinged “Inspiration” that is almost eerie.

Yet there are other moments in the album that are quite mainstream. It’s easy to mistake the title track, which has been released as a single, for something Stevie Nicks might release.

All this change of personnel and shift of musical focus may lead to concern among fans who embraced Lone Justice the first time around.

Is McKee falling victim to rock ‘n’ roll commercialism at the age of 22? Is she being manipulated?

Asked about this, McKee said firmly: “I don’t ever do anything I don’t want to. . . . I’m not a puppet. I wouldn’t be able to go out there and do what I do if I were a wimpy person.

“I’ve known exactly what I’ve wanted since I was 12 years old. . . . I’ve been trying to put a real good band together since I was 15 and I finally have a group I feel comfortable with. We’re all focusing on the same thing. I couldn’t be happier with the band and the music. We also get along great offstage.”

Big things have long been predicted for McKee. The most exciting combination of raw talent and commercial potential to emerge from the Los Angeles rock scene since Tom Petty, she was, in her early shows around town, as enthralling a singer of country songs as Emmylou Harris and as authoritative a singer of rock songs as Chrissie Hynde.

And McKee delivered. Lone Justice’s debut LP sold a respectable 200,000 copies in 1985, and she finished in a tie with Aretha Franklin in the best-female-singer balloting that year among Rolling Stone magazine critics.

Now, McKee and Lone Justice--the new band--are back with a second album and a national tour, opening for the Pretenders.

At the Fender’s show, McKee continued to reflect her country instincts in songs from the first album, but there is generally more focus in the new material on mainstream rock textures and gospel flavoring.

Why the change?

McKee seemed comfortable with the question as she sat in manager Jimmy Iovine’s office at A&M; Records in Hollywood. Curled on a sofa, she said:

“I love music so much that I don’t want to limit myself to any one style. I don’t want you to think I’m fickle, but I go through phases. I listen to gospel, Cajun, T. Rex, Iggy Pop, Springsteen.

“If we had made a record when I was 16, it would have been filled with the kind of stuff Otis Redding and Janis Joplin were doing. When we started Lone Justice, though, I was into rockabilly and then we moved into country. But it’s a growing process.”

McKee was less comfortable discussing the personnel changes in the band.

The old lineup was co-founder Ryan Hedgecock on guitar, Marvin Etzioni on bass, Don Heffington on drums and Tony Gilkyson on guitar. Their places have been taken by guitarist Shane Fontayne, bassist Gregg Sutton, drummer Rudy Richman and keyboardist Bruce Brody.

McKee said Etzioni, who wrote three songs on the first album, made it clear from the beginning that he eventually wanted to head his own band--and that he eventually left to do so. She described the parting as “completely amicable,” a point Etzioni confirms.

Hedgecock’s departure, she suggested, was due largely to the fact that he recently got married and wanted to move to New York, where he remains involved in a business capacity with Jimmy Iovine. Iovine produced the group’s first album and began managing the group after Lone Justice severed ties last year with its first manager.

There appears, however, to be tension surrounding the replacement of the other two Lone Justice members.

Heffington said: “I wasn’t too excited about some of the changes in direction. I felt there had been a lot of compromises made.”

Gilkyson (who recently joined X) added in a separate interview: “If I had tried to stay on, I (think I) would have been fired. I don’t think I was in complete agreement with their management and the people who were directing their music. I don’t think it was a band decision anymore.”

Talk like that invariably leads to suspicion that Iovine--the superstar producer who has worked (as producer or engineer) with such major artists as Petty, Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Patti Smith and Simple Minds--is pulling some strings.

Iovine shakes his head in frustration when the issue of manipulating McKee is raised.

“My main goal has been to let the project grow at a normal pace . . . so that she can experiment if she wants to,” he said, sitting on the steps outside his office.

“The one thing I didn’t want to do was try to (define) her direction. She’s young and still developing and I wanted to make sure she had time to develop. That’s why I asked Steve Van Zandt to co-produce the album. He’s one of the most uncompromising people I’ve ever met in this business.”

About working with Iovine, McKee said in a separate interview: “I have a lot more freedom as an artist because Jimmy backs me up. He completely supports my feeling.”

McKee feels the new musicians did a lot to help inspire her musically.

“I don’t want this to sound weird or immodest, but I am real confident about my singing,” McKee said. “I recognize that it is a gift from God. It’s my job to decide what to do with the voice--the songs.”

Where McKee wrote most of the lyrics, the music was a collaborative process--seven of the 10 songs co-written by Sutton, Fontayne or Van Zandt.

She suggested the greater spiritual emphasis in the lyrics of this album--songs like “Inspiration,” “The Gift,” “I Found Love”--is due to the fact that she wrote all the lyrics, unlike the first album. Does she see a danger in becoming perceived as a gospel artist?

“I don’t see myself as a gospel artist,” she said. “I am a rock ‘n’ roll singer who happens to be a Christian. But to say I am a gospel artist would be like calling U2 a gospel group instead of a rock group.”

About her themes, she said: “I try to write about personal subjects, but in a way that is universal. ‘I Found Love’ could be a love song if someone wanted to look at it that way, a gospel song if someone wanted to look at it that way. The main thing I am trying to do in my music is be uplifting.

“I am not going to be so presumptuous as to say that I expect people to walk away from the album or the shows and say, ‘There is hope after all.’

“But I do want people to be moved. I’ve seen Bono (the lead singer of U2) do it with 20,000 people. There has been a complete hush over the audience at his shows. There is a real sense of joy. And that’s the way I want to touch people, too.”

St e ve Hochman contributed to this article.