‘Cold Hard Facts’ Jolt Country Rules : Albums: Chris Gaffney of Costa Mesa challenges Nashville conventions with songs that give a twist to what normally sells on radio. As a result, he’s paying : a price.

Trying to be different in the world of country music is like trying to be different in the average schoolyard: As the price of individuality, you might have to take some lumps.

Chris Gaffney, a singer and bandleader from Costa Mesa, likes to add his own twists of style and imagination to the usual country sound--which makes him suspect in the eyes of Nashville Establishment types looking for music that conforms to familiar, ready-to-market patterns. In fact, Gaffney has a memo of rejection from Nashville to prove it.

The memo came last month from a talent scout for one of the major country labels, who listened to Gaffney’s new album at the behest of some of the singer’s West Coast boosters in the music business.

“He needs to get together with some writers that have more commercial writing experience,” the scout opined in a note that Gaffney, who maintains a wry sense of humor about himself, decided to keep for his personal archives.

“Please remember that in country music we depend ENTIRELY on country radio to sell our product. If the music isn’t commercial enough to be played on radio, it doesn’t do anybody any good.”

The memo says a lot about the shriveled artistic ambitions and the smug, play-it-safe attitude that dog the music industry. It says nothing about the quality of Gaffney’s excellent album.

Issued in January by ROM Records, a small Los Angeles label, “Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts” is a vibrant album full of catchy, eminently hummable songs. Gaffney’s music burrows into honky-tonk traditions, then veers into such stylistic byways as Louisiana zydeco and Mexican folk music, both of which afford a forum for the singer’s sprightly accordion playing. All of this comes across with an uncommon zest of performance and freshness of lyrical style.

The difference between Gaffney’s songs and the output of the more “commercial” songwriters laboring in Nashville’s hit factories is that nearly everything the so-called professionals produce is a variation on something we’ve already heard before. Gaffney’s music is full of detailed, personal observations and offbeat, challenging phrasings that can take a few hearings to sink in fully. Listening to it must have been a bewildering experience for a memo-writing music mogul focusing narrowly on the status quo.

Gaffney and his longtime musical partner, keyboards player Wyman Reese, sounded undaunted by the kiss-off missive from Nashville during a recent interview at Gaffney’s house in a quiet Costa Mesa subdivision.

“It just thickens your skin a bit,” said Gaffney, 39, who has worked in a Newport Beach boatyard by day for the last nine years while trying to gain a foothold by night as a honky-tonk contender.

“I think what we do is fairly right-down-the-pipe country, but if you (mess) around with the lyrics any, they think you’re a smartass. Maybe we just have to hammer them over the head with it for a couple years. We’re getting more acceptance (since the album’s release). Now that things have started poppin’ a bit, everything is possible.”

Gaffney is a wiry man with tousled hair, a goatee and sharply angled eyebrows that give his face an ironic cast. As he speaks in a laconic, drawling voice, the penchant for wordplay evident in his song lyrics spills into his conversation. Like the boxers he loves to watch on TV, he is always looking for an opening for a wry verbal jab.

His best verbal sallies come out in such songs as “Glass House,” a sad honky-tonk ballad that is an open tribute to George Jones. Gaffney--a flexible singer whose voice can sometimes bear a resemblance to Levon Helm of the Band--assumes the distinctive high nasal twang and heartbroken plaintiveness of Jones’ style as he tells the story of a relationship on the rocks.

“Now my life barely imitates art,” muses the song’s bereft protagonist, in one of those wonderful, double-take lines that spins off all sorts of meanings.

On one level, the verse is a nice inside joke for country aficionados: After all, the entire song is an open imitation of the art of George Jones, whom Gaffney lists as a key influence, alongside Bob Wills and Ray Price.

On another level, it raises interesting questions about the relationship between country music and its audience. So much country music is art imitating life, with songs focusing on what goes on in barrooms, bedrooms, truck stops and other down-to-earth, everyday situations. Yet many listeners, in a case of life imitating art, will measure their own experience against the stories and emotions they glean from a favorite song.

In any case, Gaffney conceded, a line about life barely imitating art isn’t what you’d expect to find in a typically transparent country lyric.

“I don’t know if George (Jones) would ever sing something that cerebral,” Gaffney said. “He might look at ‘life barely imitates art’ and say, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”

Not that Gaffney can’t tell a straightforward story when he wants to. “The Gardens” is an effective evocation of a Latino neighborhood living in fear of drive-by gang shootings (Gaffney said the song is taken straight from a slice of violent street life he witnessed while living in Hawaiian Gardens). Such familiar country characters as divorced daddies, jilted lovers and furtive adulterers also weave their way through the album, brought to life by Gaffney’s gift for the telling, offbeat detail.

Gaffney’s wife, Julie, has one complaint: “He won’t write a song about me. I’ve asked him, I’ve begged him. I’ve gotten down on my knees.”

But if Gaffney finds no songwriting inspiration from his marriage, that may be for the best. His songs tend to spring from life’s trials and embarrassments (albeit with an eye toward the humor in those situations), rather than from its moments of bliss.

“I just never write songs like that,” Gaffney said of his wife’s request for a commemorative song of love and devotion. “Am I that gruesome? I’m not really a professor of doom.”

Gaffney was born in Vienna, where his father, a career Army pilot, was stationed. He did most of his growing up in Arizona and Orange County, graduating from Western High School in Anaheim, where he split time between playing in rock bands and devoting himself to track, football and Golden Gloves boxing.

During his early 20s, he got involved with country musicians during a stay in Canada and began playing music in the tradition of Wills, Price and Jones. By 25, he was writing songs of his own.

Aside from a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a high school history teacher, Gaffney said: “I never thought of anything other than making it in music. Every other job I’ve had has been a means to get by” while devoting himself to writing songs and playing in bands.

Gaffney said his first serious band was the Phantom Herd, which he and Reese formed after they met in 1977. That band fizzled after a time of popularity on the club circuit in Newport Beach; Gaffney and Reese resurfaced with the Cold Hard Facts in 1984. The band--which also includes Gaffney’s brother, Chris, on bass, drummer Tucker Fleming and guitarists Danny Ott and Rick Shea--has had little presence in Orange County, playing mainly in Los Angeles clubs like the Palomino and the Music Machine.

Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts began reaching out to the wider world in 1987 with “Road to Indio,” a mini-album on their own custom label, Cactus Club Records. “Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts” gives them a fine calling card for major label attention, no matter what Gaffney’s memo from Nashville may say. In what figures to be the band’s most important show to date, it will travel to Austin, Tex., to play March 17 at the South By Southwest Conference, a music-business gathering where bands can bid for the attention of journalists, radio programmers and record companies.

“We’re just hoping to get somebody bigger interested,” Reese said. “It’s the next step. Radio doesn’t seem to know it, but people are ready to accept anything if it’s good.”

Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts and Jim Lauderdale play Friday at 10 p.m. at the Breakaway, 11970 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles. Admission: $5. Information: (213) 397-5078.