Blues Straight From the Heart, Not a Script : Walter Trout and Robert Lucas go beyond R&B; form and tradition in their new albums.

Two new albums by Orange County blues musicians illustrate how expansive and pliant a form the blues can be.

Walter Trout, a veteran of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, has a strong, pure-blues base but branches out from it into an array of roots-related forms.

Robert Lucas shows a mastery of acoustic, Delta blues (the original, most basic blues style) that is almost astonishing coming from a middle-class, suburban white guy still in his 20s.

What Trout and Lucas have in common--other than being highly qualified for national recognition--is a fundamental understanding that it’s not enough to observe the forms and traditions of the blues. Blues comes alive when it speaks about personal experiences and emotions, and it’s spoken well on the two albums reviewed below. The rating system ranges from one star (poor) to five stars (a classic), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.

WALTER TROUT BAND

“Prisoner of a Dream” (Electra Denmark import)

****

Something was rotten--though not in Denmark--when Walter Trout couldn’t find an American label to release his excellent 1989 debut album, “Life in the Jungle.” It would really be a tragedy if this even-stronger follow-up goes overlooked.

Recording again for a label in Denmark, where he has headlined in concert halls and performed at big pop festivals, Trout has made an album that stands up with the best that contemporary, rock-oriented crossover blues can offer--and that includes the likes of such successful names as Jeff Healey, Robert Cray and even the deified (but lately not so divine) Eric Clapton.

“Prisoner of a Dream” confirms Trout as a complete performer. He sings with a fine, rangy voice that is unstintingly soulful. When words alone won’t do, he can take off on his guitar, playing solos that drive a song’s core emotion deeper still (Daniel Abrams’ Hammond organ playing is another asset in that respect). Most of the words and melodies on the album are Trout’s own: He wrote or co-wrote eight of the album’s 10 songs and did a good enough job of it that the originals don’t pale beside outside material from Robert Johnson (“Love in Vain”) and Bob Dylan (“Girl From the North Country”).

Stylistically, Trout ranges from the storming, Claptonesque title song that opens the album to the starkly plaintive, solo-acoustic folk number that ends it. In between, he pays tribute to Little Feat’s Louisiana funk, Carlos Santana’s Latin blues, dips into the tradition of dire, funereal blues lamentation in a searing, epic-scale elegy for Stevie Ray Vaughan, and plays some basic, ripping rock ‘n’ roll that bears the imprint of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Trout has a special gift for sad, stately ballads--”The Love That We Once Knew” has the grace and scope of a good Bob Seger weeper, and the Dylan song comes across with moving sensitivity and grandeur.

On such numbers as “Victor the Cajun,” dedicated to members of Little Feat, and “Sweet As A Flower,” dedicated to Santana, Trout seems at first to be a bit too faithful in his homage (“Flower” is a near-rewrite of Santana’s version of “Black Magic Woman”). But he never loses sight of the need to inject a personal touch. “Victor” celebrates a Louisiana chef who likes to lay on the hot sauce, and Trout sings it with such zest that you’re sure he’s just downed an inspirational forkful of crawfish etouffee. “Flower,” far from a genre exercise, offers a telling portrait of a man whose hesitant tryst with an alluring younger woman spurs him to meditate broodingly on his advance into middle age:

It’s hard when you grow older, and you’re longing to be young.

And your song of innocence is a song already sung.

You can sing it to the sunrise, never to the setting sun. On that song, and throughout the album, Trout turns his blues into a form of poor-man’s psychotherapy, which is indeed blues you can use. It makes for richly rewarding listening.

Trout plans to stock a supply of import copies of “Prisoner of a Dream” at Music Market in Costa Mesa when he returns in April from a European tour.

(Mail-order address: Electra Denmark, Jydeholmen 15, DK-2720 Vanloese.)

ROBERT LUCAS

“Usin’ Man Blues” (Audioquest)

***

There is something almost supernatural about Robert Lucas’ singing. It’s as if this roly-poly Orange Countian were a spiritual medium, registering the voice of some long-dead, long-forgotten, bracingly talented Southern bluesman who never received his due in life, and was returning from the hereafter to claim it now.

But Lucas’ voice is his own--not only free (as far as we can tell) from meddling spirits, but from that hobgoblin of contemporary blues traditionalists: an impulse toward slavish imitation. And a striking voice it is: forceful, but never forced, coming across with a husky but supple tone that has the texture of cool, dark, loamy soil.

On this follow-up to his self-financed debut album, “Across the River,” Lucas again works within the acoustic Delta blues tradition, performing solo, or, on a few of the 15 CD tracks, with deft backing from a folksy string band.

Half the songs are Lucas originals. On the best of them, he uses the blues to confront, with some anguish but also a sense of humor, the issues of his daily life. “Usin’ Man” is the song of an insolvent musician forced to bum off girlfriends, buddies and parents just to survive. Lucas has been there--and he conveys both the pain and absurd comedy of the situation.

The same goes for “What Happened to My Shoes,” which starts as a funny take on an overeater’s compulsion (“I hit every buffet smorgasbord in town / They see me walkin’ in, they know I’m gonna shut ‘em down”) but cuts to the pain of it, too: “I took down all my mirrors, just a little one to shave / Don’t want to look no more, Lord, I’m really not that brave.” Add to that a trenchant damn-the-bottle number (“Moonshine”), the nervous, driving riffing of “If You See That Woman,” and a zesty but spooky instrumental, “Dancin’ With Mr. Jones,” that sounds closer to Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli than to Sonny Boy Williamson, and you’ve got a first-rate crop of original songs, each built around a memorable melodic hook.

The album’s chief failing stems from Lucas’ inability to push himself away from his musical buffet platter in time. With 15 tracks spanning just under 60 minutes, “Usin’ Man Blues” falls into some slow-going stretches. Had Lucas pared away three or four songs and 15 or 20 minutes, he would have had an effective, cohesive, well-paced album instead of an overstuffed smorgasbord of a collection.

Lucas’ harmonica playing is as assured and spontaneous as his singing, but his slide guitar work falls off a bit. While certainly a competent player, Lucas often sounds as if he is laboring to keep a steady tempo and stay in control (since the album was recorded live, without overdubs, he was under pressure to play it right). Going up against the ghost of Robert Johnson, he doesn’t find his own exciting analogue for the brilliance and rhythmic idiosyncrasy of Johnson’s guitar work. No one is asking the impossible--matching Johnson--but Lucas fails to make the guitar a source of special vibrancy.

Still, about two-thirds of “Usin’ Man Blues” is special enough. The album also benefits from a fine packaging job by the fledgling Audioquest label. The front cover, which mimics a creased and torn, sepia-tinted photo, captures the ghostly, throwback tone of the album, while the smiling, sweaty back cover photo portrait points to the pleasure in the here-and-now that Lucas brings to his music.

(Available from Audioquest, P.O. Box 3060, San Clemente, Calif. 92674.)

* Robert Lucas plays a solo show Friday at 8:30 p.m. at Coffee & More, 6210 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Admission: $2. Information: (213) 494-6825. His electric band, Luke & the Locomotives, plays Saturday at 9 p.m. at Heritage Brewing Co., 24921 Dana Point Harbor Drive, Dana Point. Admission: $1. Information: (714) 240-2060.

STRYPER GOES HOLLYWOOD--Stryper has struck a recording deal with the new, Disney-owned Hollywood Records label, according to Ron Stone, co-manager of Orange County’s best-selling hard-rock band.

The collapse of Stryper’s former label, Enigma Records, late last year “left us in limbo for several months,” Stone said. It also hamstrung the band’s efforts to reach a broad public with “Against the Law,” the first album of material that stepped away from the evangelical Christian message of Stryper’s previous work.

Hollywood Records has bought Stryper’s back catalogue of albums, Stone said, and will release a best-of compilation within the next month or two that also will include two new songs.

GANG GEARING UP: National Peoples Gang is about to release a new single, “Freedom Fighter,” and embark on its first national tour since guitarist Michael Glines replaced founding member Chad Forrello last year. The Orange County band will warm up for its five-week tour with two gigs in Long Beach: tonight at Toe Jam, a new 16-and-over club at 730 E. Broadway, and Wednesday at Bogart’s. This Great Religion opens both shows.