It’s Not Church Music : * Leader Jim Heath describes Reverend Horton Heat’s sound as ‘Latin heavy metal as played by a rockabilly band.’

The raw rockabilly sound of the trio Reverend Horton Heat has already hit the mu sic business big time, as far as singer-guitarist Jim Heath is concerned. He says he hasn’t had to work a real job in at least five years.

Now the Dallas trio is even riding to its gigs on a private tour bus, courtesy of label Interscope Records, retiring the old van that once carried Reverend Horton Heat to as many as 225 gigs a year.

And last week the band was in Chicago with producer Alain Jourgensen (front man to the post-industrial rock act Ministry), finishing work on a new album due in April.

So far, the high-powered neo-rockabilly band has managed all this without musical compromise. In spite of all the attention that has come since last year--all the press, the tour with Frank Black, the gigs in Russia, the possible role in the upcoming Lollapalooza Festival tour--that manic Horton Heat sound remains as always, something Heath is proud to say “doesn’t sound like we’re trying to get a record deal.”

“This is what we do,” explains Heath, who grew up in Corpus Christi, Tex., listening to the old Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis records of his elder cousins. “This is our baby. We’re not going to give it up and go back to college if we don’t get a big record deal.”

Of course, the band does have a record deal.

Reverend Horton Heat released two albums on the Seattle-based Sub-Pop label before being discovered by critics and becoming the focus of a record company bidding war last year that ultimately landed it at Interscope.

With the new album essentially finished, and tentatively titled “Liquor in the Front,” the trio is embarking on a tour that will lead them to the Country Club in Reseda on Saturday, and keep them on the road for much of 1994.

Expect to hear at least a handful of the new album’s selections, which Heath describes as “like Latin heavy metal as played by a rockabilly band. Melodic, but still hard.”

“It’s going to have a little bit more Latin influence than our other records,” Heath says. “All my first bands had Chicano, Mexican American people in it. It’s finally coming out in our music, and it’s kind of neat.”

The album is also expected to be the band’s first to include Horton Heat versions of outside material, including pungent renditions of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and Scott Joplin’s rag “The Entertainer,” both recorded on a lark.

“It’s just a little splice of us being drunk, basically,” Heath says of the brief Joplin track.

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The Country Club show will also lean on the longstanding repertoire of the band that critic Chris Morris of the Los Angeles Reader terms “energetic and more than a little warped; they put a soulful twist into the oft-moribund conventions of neo-rockabilly.”

How all this came about is more difficult to explain. Heath never intended to call himself Reverend Horton Heat or lead a band by that name. It was someone else’s idea.

About six years ago, Heath, attempting a solo career, was desperate to win some gigs and earn enough money to move out of his room above a Dallas nightclub.

“The rats were so fat that they couldn’t even walk right,” he said. “And the roaches were so huge I had pet names for them, and they hung out in their own little area of my place. It was real disgusting.”

But the club’s owner had faith in Heath, even if he insisted on calling him Horton. (“He said I just look like some guy who should be named Horton.”) And the owner soon offered the starving rocker a weekly Monday night gig, if only he would streamline his surname into Heat.

By the day of the first show, this friend and club-owner had added Reverend, printed it up on fliers all over Dallas, and got it listed it in the papers.

When Heath stepped on stage, the crowd was chanting, “Reverend! Reverend! Reverend!”

He put up with it. But he doesn’t seem to mind the name now, as long as he can play his music. “It’s fun. That’s what everything that you do has got to be, or why do it?”

Where and When What: Reverend Horton Heat, with the Flat Duo Jets and Big Sandy.

Location: The Country Club, 18415 Sherman Way, Reseda.

Hours: 8 p.m. Saturday.

Price: $10.

Call: (818) 881-5601.