High and Dry--Er, Damp--in the Texas Rain : Country: Late-night TV, too little sleep and weather that conspires against you are the name of the game on the road from New Orleans to Austin in a Plymouth Voyager.

More than any other stop, New Orleans had shown Chris Gaffney and his band mates what a tunnel-vision life the road offers. Here was a city teeming with sights, history, great food and greater music, with scarcely even time to figure out the map before the band members had to leave. Perhaps wisely, guitarist Danny Ott didn’t even try to see the city, opting instead for the luxury of sleeping more than four hours straight. And for Gaffney, it was pitifully little time to share with a daughter he hadn’t seen in a year.

But after a well-received gig at the city’s legendary Tipitina’s club, the musicians piled back into their Plymouth Voyager and started the 440-mile drive from New Orleans to Austin, Tex. The first part of that road shows the bad side of what happens when a culture becomes chic: Every sign reads, “Cajun cafe,” “Cajun gas,” “Cajun cones,” “Cajun donuts.”

Most of the members of this formula-crunching country band hadn’t spent much time on the road before this tour, but they’ve taken to it well, sleeping sitting up or killing time insulting each other the way only friends can.

Somewhere among the press generated about singer, accordionist, guitarist and songwriter Gaffney appeared an account of his employment in a boatyard, pumped up to something on the mythic order of “scraping the barnacles from his chiseled features, Gaffney toils straight from the docks to all-night honky-tonkin.’ ”

His bassist brother Greg, who, being younger, still endures a good deal of filial abuse, offered his own version of the Gaffney legend: “Following an afternoon of providing comic relief at an upscale Newport Beach boatyard, Chris Gaffney settles in for a difficult night of TV.”

Chris does indeed watch a lot of the tube. He can tell you practically every move Aunt Bee has ever made on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Keyboardist Wyman Reese, who co-writes some of their material, said, “I can tell what commercials Chris was listening to when he wrote certain lines.”

John Lennon also wrote with the set on, but it’s almost creepy the way Gaffney revels in the trivial.

“When you talk with him it rarely gets any deeper than beer or the sports page,” drummer Tucker Fleming said, with some frustration, “but it’s so obvious there’s something more in there.”

Gaffney clearly doesn’t enjoy talking about his music, deflecting most serious questions with a joke. One feels a mite dense anyway asking about his songs, because everything there is to know about them is right there in the music. It’s got warmth, it’s got ache, it’s got the release of a Friday night, and it leaves no question he and the band mean every note of it.

But asked where his music will go from here, Gaffney would only say, “The next album will be a stretch. It’ll be a De Niro stretch: I’m going to gain 80 pounds for it.”

At Austin’s Continental Club, the band kicked up its usual fury on stage, aided at points by Texas accordion honcho Ponty Bone and an unidentified fellow who played his rub-board with a Freddie Krueger-like bladed glove. It was a good gig, but in the band’s nightly post-show tally, they decided it was a draw, not a decisive win.

“It reminded me too much of Hollywood,” Reese said. “They’ve heard so much music in this town they’re jaded.”

A heavily accented waitress had recommended the motel across the street, saying she’d thought it was fine when she arrived in town. Perhaps she’d come straight from a Romanian orphanage, for the place was dismal. The unvacuumed carpets looked as if previous tenants had gone to the trouble of vomiting over every inch of them. Fixtures were broken and the cockroaches ran better than the water did. The sheets looked as if Rob Lowe had wintered there, and a Polaroid that Gaffney found on the bathroom floor didn’t make the bed seem any healthier.

Too exhausted to sleep, Gaffney, Fleming and Ott watched TV, using a pair of pliers to change channels on the damaged set. There seemed to be a feeling that, after the endless drive and the deflating gig, there needed to be something more, some last instance, some epiphanic laugh to close out the day.

Instead, the 3 a.m. TV offered a dry panel of media psychologists, a Mexican soap opera and a channel that only showed a telephone switchboard as callers ranted on for two minutes apiece on whatever galled them. Their speech was almost like radio static--garbled, wacky, verging on syllabic delirium. There was an unpleasant realization that the only difference between the band’s entourage and the callers was that they had the energy to dial a phone.

Obviously somewhere better in his slumber, sleep-talking Greg in a clear voice ordered, “Yes, I’ll have a cheeseburger and small fries.”

Fat Texas raindrops were hammering the ground when the band arrived in Houston the next afternoon. As the gig was to be a downtown outdoor “Party on the Plaza,” it looked as if they had just made the drive for nothing. The promoter was an optimistic sort, though, and when the rain stopped, she had the band carry its equipment up to the plaza stage.

So when the rain started again--windblown oceans of it with thunder rolling in between thehigh-rises--within seconds the band and equipment were as soaked as they could get, which didn’t stop the downpour from trying for another 40 minutes. Despite futile attempts to cover it, the gear was thoroughly rain-thrashed, with Gaffney’s accordion bellows taking on the consistency of a jellyfish.

At this point, the band members looked only slightly more pathetic than flea-dipped cats. Their drive for naught; the largest show of the tour (audiences of 3,000 are common for the plaza shows) reduced to a puddle; themselves thoroughly soaked; their sorry, travel-crumpled cigarettes turning into papier-mache in the rain. And, as the show’s crew struggled to save the sound system, the promoter remained adamant that the show would go on. Reese chose this time to suggest, “We should call this the ‘Honey, You Were Right’ tour, and this could be the logo”--he composed his face in a look of downcast, hangdog chagrin.

Gaffney, meanwhile, was trying to stir the promoter’s understanding of what happens when you place a person between 117 volts and a pile of water. “Yeah, I’d do a real exciting show,” he told her, “but it would last about a second.” Greg had a suggestion worthy of Spinal Tap: Why not set the musicians up in the one dry place on the plaza, the Porta-potties. “The doors would open up, and there we’d be, high and dry.”

If you don’t like the weather in Texas, they say, wait an hour. For all its drenching misery, the evening turned out beautifully. The skies cleared, though it was still humid enough to make one feel aswirl in a not especially savory bouillabaisse. The stage rig was dried with industrial hot-air guns. The promoter relented and rented a stageful of new, dry equipment. The word went out over the radio, and a few thousand people turned up to hear the bands play.

With a Joe Ely song or two ramrodded in for good measure, the band played with a vengeance through Gaffney’s accordion-crazed story songs, full of skewed visions of hard experience and wobbly cantina nights.

When the band members came off stage in their own personal drench after an hour, Gaffney laughed, then resuscitated a running-gag reference to those county fair clowns who egg you on to waste your quarters trying to dump them in the drink with errant throws of the softball: “Yup, just call me Bobo, the Dunkin’ Clown. I’m high and dry!”