Off the Charts : Rick Shea Plays Country That’s a Cut Above the Top 40 to a Small Audience

The rising tide of country music does not lift all boots.

Rick Shea’s lizard-skin pair remains planted on the sawdust-covered bottom rung of the Southern California bar circuit, where he has scraped for a living for almost 15 years.

From where Shea stands (and tonight through Saturday he and his band, the Losin’ End, will be standing at the Briar Patch Saloon in Garden Grove), the commercial breakthroughs of Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus and other heroes of “new country” radio are not only far, far away, but musically irrelevant.

If anything, the Covina resident says, the soaring popularity of country’s recently minted, hot-selling heroes has made things harder for him as he plies the Southland’s circuit of country nightclubs: Country’s newest fans want to hear the radio hits they know.

Shea’s idea of a country hit is something Ray Price or Bob Wills recorded in the days before color TV, let alone the Nashville Network.

For him, a really great bar gig is one that allows him to dispense with playing achy-breaky beats fit for line dancing (“it looks like you’re playing for an aerobics class” he says of the country dance fad that’s kin to the hokeypokey), and concentrate on a 50-50 combination of time-tested classics and his own originals.

If Shea doesn’t fit the current musical fashions that have found mass appeal, he is a talent that country fans who appreciate less chart-minded styles might well enjoy.

He is an assured singer whose voice holds firm and sturdy while registering the hurt that comes with hard-won experience. His guitar playing is nimble and satisfyingly twangy--making him an in-demand sideman for other bands when he isn’t fronting his own group of accomplished, seasoned players.

As a songwriter, Shea tries to avoid cliches, striving to populate his lyrics with interesting characters and ground them in settings drawn with an observant eye. He has a penchant for spinning action-packed, darkly dramatic yarns that sometimes make his songs only slightly less bloody than your average Clint Eastwood Western.

Shea also has a look and manner that hold up well under the spotlight (not that the clubs he plays in always have spotlights). He’s a low-key sort, with a lanky build draped in blue denim. At 39, strands of gray show in the shoulder-length hair that rides out from under a white cowboy hat and frames a face bearing some resemblance to Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.

Nevertheless, the commercial country wave flowing out of Nashville and packing such dance clubs as the Cowboy Boogie Co. in Anaheim hasn’t washed up any new treasure for Shea.

“What I’m sellin’ they’re not buyin,’ ” he said in a recent interview. “I’ve played (the Cowboy Boogie) in other people’s bands, because when the bank balance is low, I’ll take what comes up if I don’t have anything else. It’s just packed full of people, but it’s not a fun job. (The dance crowds) are just as happy, or more happy, having recorded music. So it ain’t that gratifying.”

On his own band’s circuit, which includes monthly stops at the Briar Patch and the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano, Shea will sometimes accommodate newer fans who insist on hearing newer music.

“I feel I’m there to entertain as much of the crowd as I can. I’m not being hired to do the Rick Shea Show yet. I’ve even sung ‘Achy Breaky Heart,’ in a couple of places where people were going crazy to hear it.

“But if you’re trying to establish an identity for yourself,” he added, “there’s no way to do it if you’re playing Top 40 songs. I feel I’ve bent over, integrity-wise, as far as I can. These days, I’m trying to straighten up, if anything. I’m in this to make some dough, but I have to get something more out of it.”

Playing to a bar audience at the Swallows last week, Shea stuck to his identity and his roots, with a couple of dignified concessions to patrons’ demands for line-dance music.

Listening to him, you could get a pretty good education in country music--a far better one than country radio allows. Shea played a small trove of classics, including numbers by Jimmie Rodgers, Buck Owens, Bob Wills, Ray Price and Lefty Frizzell.

He played some of his own more danceable, romantic stuff, including a wistful Spanish ballad composed by his mother-in-law. An attentive bandleader, he made sure that his players--fiddler Dennis Fetchet, drummer Rhys Clark and bassist Calvin Davidson--got to shine instrumentally or, in Davidson’s case, to sing two good originals of his own.

When the audience wanted to do a line dance called “The Electric Slide,” Shea obliged with a cranking rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.”

But it wasn’t the kind of Rick Shea Show he has in mind, one in which people would know him by his records and come to hear him play his own music.

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Other than a few years as a community-college English major and a few years spent working construction, Shea has devoted most of his adolescent and adult life moving slowly toward that goal.

Growing up in San Bernardino, where his family settled when he was 11 (his father was an officer stationed at Norton Air Force Base), he joined dance bands that played surf instrumentals and rock ‘n’ roll classics. He found his musical direction when he began to hear such rock bands as Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and the Grateful Dead tap country roots.

Shea’s current band, the Losin’ End, is named after a song on the first Neil Young & Crazy Horse album, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” which he cites as “a landmark” in his move toward country music. Soon he was listening to country radio and absorbing the tradition.

By the age of 25 or 26, Shea was earning his living as a sideman in San Bernardino County bands. He also was beginning to develop contacts that would bring him into the orbit of tradition-minded Southland players such as Chris Gaffney (whose 1990 debut album Shea played on) and Heather Myles, whom Shea accompanied last year on a tour of Great Britain.

Shea wrote songs from the start, but he was 30 before he felt that he’d written anything worthwhile.

“Like any kind of writing, you just have to do it a lot,” he said. “There are classes and songwriting seminars you can take, but those are real commercially oriented. The focus is on stuff I’ve always considered kind of disposable.

“I go for the drama,” he said. “I don’t think everything has to be superficial love songs, like on the radio these days. People like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison deal with large, universal themes. That’s songwriting to me. You can continue to sing that (type of) song and not get tired of it.”

There’s no more universal theme than death, and Shea’s song list is big on mortality. “The devil’s at my door / He’s got a ticket to collect my soul,” he muses in the darkly driving (but also darkly humorous) “Foot in the Fire.” He paints a poignant deathbed scene in “Cradle Me.”

In “Potter’s Grave,” a song he hesitated to play for a time because he thought it might be too morbid, Shea’s narrator broods upon the likelihood that he will die impoverished.

Then there are Shea’s action shoot-em-ups, such as “Against My Better Judgment,” in which an innocent bystander makes enough comically wrong moves to implicate himself inextricably in another man’s crime spree.

“Guns That Blaze Like Thunder” is a violent melodrama that came to him while he was placidly going about his business at a bank. Meanwhile, his imagination was conjuring a less peaceful scenario in which a guy gets shot dead in a bank holdup.

“My life is not as interesting as those songs,” he said. “But as far as emotional involvement, you draw from your own experience. You try to remember, or imagine, the way it feels.”

Shea said he will be showcasing his original songs, rather than his dance-oriented material, when he starts a series of Monday night shows at the Fullerton Hofbrau on May 10. He also has an originals-based set scheduled for Sunday night at McCabe’s in Santa Monica.

*

Lacking contacts in Nashville, Shea figures that the best way for him to push his career beyond the local sawdust circuit would be to put out an album on an independent label, then hope for a nationally established figure to take an interest and record some of his work.

So far, his headway toward that goal has been modest. In 1991, he put out a self-financed, eight song tape, “Outside of Nashville,” that he sells at his gigs. Last year, “Foot in the Fire” was included on the latest installment of the “A Town South of Bakersfield” series, devoted to exposing unsigned Southern California country singers. The compilation album, issued by Restless Records, marked Shea’s first inclusion on a national release.

“It opens a few doors, but not as many as you might think,” Shea said. “In retrospect, it ain’t that much to point to.”

So Shea continues trying to make contacts, hoping more doors will open. Meanwhile, he tries to make ends meet with the help of his wife, Susie, who works in an insurance office. They live in a rented house with their two sons, ages 3 and 9.

One of Shea’s fans is Bruce Bromberg, a partner in HighTone Records. The independent label has issued some of the best, most artistically rewarding country music of the past few years, including releases by Dave Alvin, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rosie Flores, Gaffney and Myles.

“Rick’s a guy who I like a lot,” said Bromberg, who has become Shea’s friend and occasional songwriting partner. “He’s a hard worker, out there slugging it out. He’s a good writer, and every once in a while he writes a real good one.”

But a stream of sighs flows from Bromberg when he talks about the career prospects of Shea and kindred country artists such as Costa Mesa’s Gaffney. They may offer a mastery of tradition, accomplished musicianship, and original, imaginative songwriting voices, but they don’t have a ready-made niche in today’s marketplace.

Much as he would like to, Bromberg said, his label’s finances won’t allow him to put out either a first album by Shea or a follow-up to Gaffney’s superb 1992 HighTone release, “Mi Vida Loca.”

“We’re a small label, and we can’t do all we want to do,” said the label executive, who had his biggest success producing the albums and co-writing some of the songs that launched Robert Cray’s career.

“I’m so frustrated when you have artists who have something to offer, guys who are a cut above (being neglected), and you see people promoted on major labels who have nothing to offer,” Bromberg said. “It’s very depressing.”

Shea looks at his prospects with tempered hopes.

“I’m going through all the steps (on the career ladder), and it doesn’t look like I get to skip any of them,” he said evenly. “It’s like a carrot in front of you.

“Every year there’s a little more happening, or another contact” that keeps alive a sometimes flagging belief that the effort will lead to wider recognition. “This level is sort of doggin’ it out.”

* Rick Shea and the Losin’ End play tonight through Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Briar Patch Saloon, 12745 Garden Grove Blvd., Garden Grove. Free. (714) 530-4101. Shea and his band also will play at the Fullerton Hofbrau, 323 N. State College Blvd., for a series of Monday night shows beginning May 10. (714) 870-7400.