POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Flip Side of the Guitar Man : When Jerry Reed’s Hot, He’s Hot--But When He’s in a Rut, His Talent Gets Stuck in Familiar Refrains

Perhaps there should be something like a Farmer’s Almanac compiled on the subject of country musicians. Instead of saying how often you should water a plant, it could advise how often you should plant yourself in an audience to see certain performers, and maybe even suggest what phase of the moon most likely would produce a good show.

You could, for example, gauge when Jerry Reed is hot, and when he’s not.

Some performers come up with something fresh and new every time they cycle through the Crazy Horse Steak House; veteran singer/guitarist/raconteur Reed evidently is capable of going a long time without drawing on the waters of inspiration. His early show Monday night at the Crazy Horse wasn’t much different from his show there last September, except that it wasn’t half as good.

Actually, for someone seeing it for the first time, Reed’s show may have been a minor delight. Reed is anything but slick; he ambles around the stage like a bear who’s eaten a few too many fermented berries, dissembling and digressing at such length and breadth that it’s a wonder he ever gets around to singing a song.

Indeed, Monday he was onstage a good 10 minutes before he got around to his first number. “Here I am, back at the Crazy Horse for the 300th time,” he began. Then he launched into a tale of being stopped by the Highway Patrol, lurching through several other tales before it got to the punch line. All fine, entertaining stuff, if you hadn’t heard most of it a year ago.

However, in playing up his “Smokey and the Bandit” good ol’ boy personality, Reed nearly ignored his greatest gift--his guitar playing.

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As the 56-year-old stated at one point, “I been playing guitar since Hitler was a baby” (he went on to praise his fret-board mentors Merle Travis and Chet Atkins). Before his celebrity, Reed made his living as one of the hottest pickers in Nashville, with a distinctive “claw hammer” finger-picking technique that propelled his hits “Amos Moses” and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.” Recent recordings with Atkins show he’s still a formidable player, when he chooses to be.

“Can I pick ‘em?,” he crowed proudly at one point. But he wasn’t talking about notes; he meant his choice of band members. For a guy who plays so much guitar, he seemed perversely intent on seeing how little he could play.

That, also, was not so different from last year. But then, at least, he had opened his show with a dazzling solo acoustic display before launching into his standard shtick.

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When he finally got around to doing a song Monday, Reed traded some hot harmony lead lines with guitarist Bobby Lovett during “Guitar Man,” the 1968 Elvis hit that Reed wrote and played on. Reed also deigned to do some fine picking on his four-guitar arrangement of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

But other than that, he mostly left it to Lovett to copy the Reed style and licks. Lovett did a fairly miraculous job of that, and also played some ripping five-string banjo on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “The Orange Blossom Special.”

Reed, meanwhile, concentrated on his quips and jokes, such as one in which a father makes a deal to buy his son a car if the son will do his chores all summer and get a haircut. At the end of summer, the son has done all the chores, but keeps his hair, telling his dad, “You know, in the Bible it says Jesus had long hair.” “Yup,” the father replied, “And, you know, if you read that Bible a little more, you’ll read that he walked everywhere he went.”

The musical numbers as well as the jokes were recycled from previous tours: “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft),” “PMS, I Guess,” “Amos Moses,” “The Bird,” “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” with the usual tired old band-members-with-towels-on-their-heads-pretending-to-be-girl-singers routine. The only musical surprise was “Misery Loves Company,” a Reed composition that was a No. 1 hit in 1962 for Porter Wagoner.