POP MUSIC REVIEW : Gary Morris Gives Fresh Voice to His Repertoire : Instead of rehashing stale Top Ten hits at the Crazy Horse show, the performer makes it all seem new by using lesser-known songs.

Though Gary Morris has scored more than a dozen country Top Ten hits, he only sang a couple of them in his first 90-minute show at the Crazy Horse on Monday night. Was the audience disappointed? To the contrary.

When Morris pointed to a table and said “I’ll take one request,” a fan asked for “Sooner or Later,” a relatively obscure album track that Morris wasn’t even sure he could remember.

Unlike so many performers who make a living on the concert circuit by rehashing their same old hits, Morris has managed to keep his shows fresh by using them to explore his lesser-known material. During Monday’s 17-song set, he sang only one of his five chart toppers, “Leave Me Lonely.”

The song originally appeared on “Plain Brown Wrapper,” a bare-bones, almost acoustic album Morris recorded in 1987 as a reaction to Hollywood glitz (he recently had played blind singer Wayne Masterson in “The Colbys” television series).

The “Plain Brown Wrapper” spirit pervaded Monday’s show. Though he opened with several high-energy numbers including the funky “Texas Bound” and “That’s the Way It Is,” he soon downshifted for the spare, jazzy “Ain’t Got Nothin’ but the Blues,” another “Plain Brown Wrapper” selection. And after a few more songs, he dismissed his four-piece band and played the bulk of the set on his own, with just an acoustic guitar.

The low-key approach worked well for him. Morris’ greatest weakness is a tendency to over-sing, and Monday’s show was not totally without bombast (his singing of “Bed of Roses,” for instance, was far too melodramatic--and wasn’t helped by the swelling keyboards and whining electric guitar). But Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (yet another one from “Plain Brown Wrapper”) was accompanied by just a few acoustic guitar notes and some harmony singing by his band-mates, and the result was sublime.

By not going for Big Drama on practically every song, as he has in the past, he was more effective when he did. “Bring Him Home” (from “Les Miserables”) was a tour de force that ended the 17-song set at a climax.

The show would have been even more effective if Morris hadn’t complained constantly about sound problems. “You’ve made a thousand-dollar guitar sound like a two dollar guitar,” he sniped at the sound man at one point. Later he grumbled, “I’ve been going through sound hell tonight.” By repeatedly calling attention to the difficulties, he made sure that his audience ended up as annoyed as he was.