Price Is Down on Industry’s Worth : Music: Country legend, who appears at Crazy Horse in Santa Ana tonight, says record companies, radio stations “don’t take the time to develop talent as they should.”

Ray Price, one of the most successful country singers of all time, thinks the music industry has changed dramatically--and not necessarily for the better--since he was regularly topping the charts,

A member of the country class of the ‘50s that also produced such legends as Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Johnny Cash and others, Price believes that the days of such superstars-for-life are in the past--Garth Brooks notwithstanding.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t think there will be any more superstars the way there were before. The new ones come and go too quickly,” he said recently by phone. He plays the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana tonight.

Price places the blame not on the artists but on the way record companies and radio stations today pursue the commercial success at the expense of the music.

“They don’t take time to develop the talent the way they should,” he said. “They sign 15 or 20 artists and if one starts to create some excitement they get behind him and the others are told to hit the road.”

Price can attest to the value of long-term commitment. It was six years after his first recording in 1950 before he landed a No. 1 hit, but after that he scored more than a dozen over the next 20 years. He ranks as the No. 6 country artist of all time, according to Joel Whitburn’s “Top Country” listing of Billboard’s country singles charts since 1944.

Price is especially frustrated by his own lack of radio play, due at least in part to the overwhelming amount of attention country radio pays to artists of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

He has a new album, “Sometimes a Rose,” but he believes that most radio stations consider him too old for their playlists.

“We have great crowds at our shows,” he said. “It’s a mixed emotion for me. I have a record out and I want to get played, but I can’t get it played. Yet I go to the town that won’t play it, and I have a big crowd at our show. It’s as though those people don’t count.”

But then, Price has always been more interested about what the people think than what the music industry thinks. That’s what prompted him to walk away from a winning formula to try something entirely new. In the 1960s, he abandoned the swinging honky-tonk style that had brought him such mega-hits as “Crazy Arms” and “City Lights” in favor of lush orchestration and an uptown pop approach. It was an experiment that wasn’t intended to send shock waves through the country Establishment.

“I thought we needed more people to listen to country music,” he said, “and I was just trying to make it a little more palatable. I didn’t worry about offending people until I got into it, and then I found out I’d made a bunch of people mad. I just had to stay with it, though. Once I’d taken the step, I had to stay here.”

Although he was blackballed by a segment of the music business, Price continued to push at the boundaries of country. He took another daring step in 1970 when he recorded a tune by a new and startlingly different young songwriter. The writer was Kris Kristofferson and the song was “For the Good Times,” which not only became a gigantic country hit, it went to the Top 20 on the pop charts as well. Price considers the success of “For the Good Times” one of the most satisfying of his career.

“ ‘For the Good Times’ saved me from what you might call destitution,” he said. “They had punished me so badly for changing styles that I was down to the last end of it. I was branded a renegade. I was the beginning of the Outlaw movement, you might say.”

In fact, if it had been up to the music executives, “For the Good Times” might never have happened. Columbia Records released the other side of the record, “Grazin’ in Greener Pastures,” as the single. Price, however, knew that “For the Good Times” had the potential to be a classic.

“My wife and I spent six months promoting it and screaming that they were pushing the wrong side,” he said. “ ‘Grazin’ on Greener Pastures’ went to No. 1 so it was hard to convince them to go with the other side, but I had to tell them that ‘For the Good Times’ was the greatest thing I’d ever done.”

Finally, when Wayne Newton released “For the Good Times” as a pop single, Columbia decided to promote Price’s version. It went on to sell 11 million copies. In addition to discovering Kristofferson, Price has boosted the careers of many of country’s other great songwriters. Willie Nelson and Roger Miller were once members of Price’s band, and Price also had a publishing company, Pamper Music, that included on its roster Nelson, Miller, Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard.

Asked what he looks for in a young writer, Price replied: “I hear something I like. I look for something more than ordinary lyrics. I’m listening for someone who can say the same thing other songs do, but in an entirely different way.”

His advice for young artists starting out in country music today included a warning that seemed born of hard, sometimes bitter experience. “Be careful what you wish (for) because it may come true.”