TOGETHER AGAIN : Carlene Carter and Country Music Find Each Other

Carlene Carter plunks herself down for a lunch appointment and cheerfully announces that she has just left the scene of a “domestic crisis,” the domicile in question being her own.

The crisis has to do with diet supplements, boxing trunks and credit cards.

The body-slimming supplements--for which this slender, fine-boned, Dove bar-loving country singer would make a very good advertisement--have been ordered in quantity. The credit-card limit has been reached. And, therefore, the Everlast trunks (the ones most prizefighters wear) cannot be ordered.

Seated at a Beverly Hills hamburger joint, Carter says this does not sit well with Howie Epstein, her record producer and sweetheart of five years. He wanted the world-class boxing trunks, but it’s impossible to charge them, and now he’ll have to wait.

While this inside tidbit may not put Carter’s money-management skills in the best light, it does illustrate what a good country performer does in reaching out to the public. It’s a funny little tale of everydayness that shows Carter as just-folks, willing to open up about the small intimacies of ordinary living. At the same time, she is enough of a show woman to invest it with a bit of drama by casting it as a domestic crisis.

Take those elements--openness, humor, the folksy touch, a sense of drama rising from the every day--and you have some prime ingredients for the creation and winning presentation of country songs.

It doesn’t hurt that this story and many others spill from Carter in the most natural way, flowing in a friendly Tennessee twang that can be a little smokey and rough but also delightfully musical. It may be the Platonic ideal of a Southern accent, and you can’t help being charmed, just as you can’t help being taken by her singing, which is founded on a comparable duality.

Carter, 38, possesses one of the sassiest female voices in pop, one that fits well with her longstanding stage image as a robust fun lover with a wild streak as long as her skirts are short.

She is also a ballad singer of great tenderness. Listening to “Unbreakable Heart,” from her current album, “Little Love Letters,” one hears some of the sweetness, vocal purity and vulnerability of a Karen Carpenter.

Carter, who plays Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, benefits from a special confluence of nature and nurture.

She is a third-generation member of what was literally the first family of country music. The original Carter Family featured Carlene’s grandmother, Maybelle Carter, her great-uncle, A. P. Carter, and his wife, Sara. Emerging from Poor Valley, Va., in 1927, the trio served as a bridge between the old Appalachian folk tradition and modern country music. Its repertoire included such standards as “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

Carlene’s father, Carl Smith, was a honky-tonk singer who scored dozens of country hits in the 1950s and ‘60s. (She was raised Smith but took the Carter name when she started recording.) Her mother, June Carter, continued the Carter Family tradition with her two sisters. June Carter also co-wrote, with Merle Kilgore, one of country music’s greatest songs, “Ring of Fire,” and since 1968 has been Johnny Cash’s wife.

While Carlene grew up singing with the family group, and toured for a time with Johnny Cash and the Carter Family, by her early 20s she had struck out on her own, both in pursuit of a musical style and in taking her own hard-knocks route through life.

Her arrival as a strong presence on the country scene came belatedly, in 1990. She had spent most of her previous recording years based in London, working with some of Britain’s best rock musicians, including guitarist Dave Edmunds, Graham Parker’s band, the Rumour, and then-husband Nick Lowe.

From 1978 to 1983, Carter made five albums, which for the most part fully revealed her country roots yet were marketed as rock releases. Unable to get past cult-artist status and confused about her musical direction, she dropped out of the recording scene for several years.

Her career revival began in 1988, when she hooked up with Epstein, best known as the bassist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. They began working on songs at Epstein’s house in Beverly Hills. The result was her 1990 comeback album, “I Fell in Love.”

The record was a critical success that yielded two country radio hits, “I Fell in Love” and “Come on Back,” and established Carter as a mainstream country contender. She was nominated for a Grammy as best female country singer and for an Academy of Country Music award as best new female vocalist.

The story line at the time was that the prodigal daughter had returned to her family roots after years carousing with those British rock ‘n’ rollers (and Carter had established a reputation as a willing carouser). But Carter says it was less a case of her music changing than of the Nashville Establishment broadening its own definition of what country music could be.

If you took the odd, fuzz-bass riff and E-bow guitar synthesizer groan out of the mix, Carter’s 1980 album, “Musical Shapes,” a critics’ favorite, would fit with today’s commercially successful hybridization of country with rock and pop, albeit with fuller-blooded performances and better songwriting than almost all of the current competition.

At the time, though, Carter didn’t consider herself country. Actually, she didn’t consider herself anything but a singer-songwriter.

“I definitely wasn’t country enough for the country market then,” she said. “If you listened to country radio then, nothing I did fit in.” By the late ‘80s, though, “I started listening to it and familiarizing myself with what was going on. I felt, ‘It’s not that different from what I do. Maybe there’s a place for me now. I don’t have to compromise myself to fit in.’ ”

If Carter was born to be country, she was taught to be eclectic. She cites mom June Carter as her most important early musical influence.

“She taught me my first things on the guitar and the piano, and she exposed me to so many different kinds of music growing up. She taught me my first boogie-woogie thing on the piano when I was 5 years old and instigated my love of music.”

Carter recalls her mother bringing home Bob Dylan’s first album in the early ‘60s and announcing, “This young man is really special.”

By the time she was 12, she says, Johnny Cash had bought her her first electric guitar and amplifier.

“I was slogging away to the Yardbirds.”

At 15, Carter got married to her high school sweetheart, and at 16 she was a mother. This was not the result of a wild streak or a rebellious attitude, she says, but a way of reconciling surging hormones with the traditional morality of her upbringing.

“I was very religious,” she said. “No way did we believe in having sex before marriage. So when I started having these normal teen-age tendencies, I got married real quick.”

She was racing through adolescence, having left high school after her sophomore year, taken an equivalency degree, then quickly enrolled as a music major at Belmont College in Nashville. By age 20 Carter had been divorced, remarried and had her second child. She was working while pursuing her studies, giving piano lessons to children at $5 per hour. But she was also writing songs and performing, which led, in 1977, to a record deal with Warner Bros.

Carter left college a semester short of earning her degree in classical piano. Soon after, she married Lowe, the respected British rocker who produced her early albums.

“I was always in a hurry,” Carter said. “I grew up quick because my family was away a lot, and I took care of my sister. Then in my 20s, I went through my teens, with these wild abandon things.”

Today, Carter rolls her eyes at the thought of having been thrice married and a mother of two before she had reached her mid-20s. She says she brought her children up not to follow her own rushed timetable in growing up.

“I said, ‘Just know this: Birth control only works if you use it.’ I think they both saw how hard it was to raise kids and be so young.”

Daughter Tiffany, 22, is about to put her graphics degree to use with a Los Angeles video company. Jackson, 18, plans to begin pre-med studies at Pepperdine.

Carter learned the value of a lively stage style by watching her grandmother, her mother and her aunts at work in the Carter Family band.

“My mom is a great entertainer. She said she made a great career out of not being able to sing very well. They always conducted themselves with grace and a lot of energy, and a real lot of humor.”

Carter says she never had much trouble with the energy part.

“I just had this horror of standing there on stage in a high-neck granny dress. I always wanted to jump around the stage and sing loud.”

She recalls receiving only one explicit bit of familial advice about stagecraft: June Carter and Johnny Cash told her not to cuss in front of an audience.

“I (heed it) now, but I didn’t used to,” Carter says blithely. “They said, ‘It would embarrass your grandmother,’ because they knew that would work on me. I’ve made so many faux pas in front of my mother.”

That includes a club date years ago when she was mortified to have June Carter turn up unexpectedly on a night she had gone onstage in a T-shirt that read “Picasso Sucks.”

“Thank God she didn’t have her glasses on. I don’t think she could read it.”

By the mid-1980s, Carter was having a hard time reading her own musical direction.

In 1983, she had put out a synth-pop album called “C’est C Bon” that she regards as her worst, although she says it was fun at the time to dabble with lots of keyboards.

“You can imagine that after doing that album I was really lost,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is not me.’ It was cool to find out I could do something like that, and Epic (her label at the time) wanted me to start another album. But I bailed. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I had the sense to know I was at the end of my experimenting.”

In 1985, Carter spent a year playing the part of diner owner Purdie Cupp in a London production of the musical “Pump Boys and Dinettes.”

“That was a good thing in my life,” she said of going through an eight-show-a-week regimen. “I was reckless as hell, and I learned discipline from doing that.”

Next, Carter spent two years performing with her mother and aunts Helen and Anita in the Carter Family act. She felt her prospects for a recording career dimming and bought property in Tennessee with the idea of starting a horse ranch. She would write songs to pitch to other performers, maybe do more theater and breed horses.

She says that K. T. Oslin’s rise in 1987-88 helped her change her thinking. Here was a woman in her mid-40s who sang twangy pop songs that reflected her maturity and experience, and she was succeeding in the country market with a hybridized style and unconventional themes.

“I was at the point in my life where I felt I was too old to start over again,” Carter explained.

Carter began working with Epstein, an old acquaintance she had met in the early ‘80s when Nick Lowe toured as opening act for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. What started as a musical partnership turned into a romantic one.

One of its first fruits was the song “I Fell in Love,” a wry but exuberant song that Carter wrote to celebrate the blossoming romance. It turned into the hit that established her in the country market.

Today, the couple share Epstein’s house in Beverly Hills, a modest-sized home in a spectacular ridge-side spot. The colorful cacti that Carter enjoys growing blend well with the Native American artifacts that Epstein has collected for years. Two fluffy cats and a young German shepherd serve as company.

*

Old photos of A. P. Carter and the rest of the Carter family adorn the living room bookshelf. At one end of the house is a recording studio the size of a small bedroom. It is there, not in the usual Nashville setting, that Carter’s career resurgence has taken shape.

Carter’s current album, “Little Love Letters,” didn’t take shape quickly or easily. She embarked on the most exhaustive touring of her career after the release of “I Fell in Love” and found she was unable to write songs on the road. So she and Epstein spent a year on the follow-up, recording more than 30 songs in search of material that was strong enough.

This album, like “I Fell in Love,” has been a moderate success. Its first single, “Every Little Thing,” hit No. 3 on the Billboard country singles chart last year, but the follow-up, the ballad “Unbreakable Heart,” failed to crack the Top 50.

“They just don’t want ballads from me,” Carter lamented. “They want me to do up-tempo, happy.”

She has obliged with the just-released new single “I Love You ‘Cause I Want To,” which finds her at her sassiest, augmented by an R&B-style; horn section.

For the first time in her career, Carter will turn to Nashville for guidance on her next record.

She and Epstein agree that, after doing two homemade albums together, a change of producer would be healthy. Carter and her record company, Giant, don’t want a repeat of the three-year gap between “I Fell in Love” and “Little Love Letters,” and Epstein is too heavily booked with production work for John Prine and a summer Petty tour to produce another record for her at this point.

“I’m kind of excited to see what kind of record I’ll make with someone who’s in the wheel in Nashville,” Carter said, although she admits to a bit of apprehension at not having Epstein--”my security blanket”--on hand.

“Little Love Letters” is off the chart, having peaked at No. 35 last year. But Carter still harbors ambitions that one more hit single can spur it past the gold (500,000 sales) mark. And she cheerfully admits being “real mad” that the album has been passed over for awards nominations. At the same time, Carter, who was ready not so long ago to abandon her recording career, maintains a sense of perspective.

Her primary motivation, she said, is “to be an entertainer, not somebody who topped the charts or won female vocalist of the year.

“You can have a big hit and not get rich. I would just like to be able to pay my bills, get my kids through college.”

And--who knows?--maybe charge a pair of boxing trunks, crisis free.

Who: Carlene Carter.

When: Monday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Where: Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana.

Whereabouts: Take the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway to the Dyer Road exit. From the north, go right on Grand Avenue, then take the first right, Brookhollow Drive. From the south, go left under the overpass, right on Grand and right on Brookhollow.

Wherewithal: $23.50.

Where to call: (714) 549-1512.