POP MUSIC : A Rough Country Road : It’s only natural that John Michael Montgomery grew up to be a honky-tonk hero. But the transformation from small-town singer to big-time country heartthrob has been tough for a ‘nice guy’

John Michael Montgomery was in the center of country’s spotlight just 24 hours ago, a swaggering Kentuckian in a black-and-red leather jacket on national television from the Universal Amphitheatre. He was named the Academy of Country Music’s best new male artist and singer of the song of the year.

Now he’s sitting cross-legged in a small, austere trailer dressing room behind the stage at the county fairgrounds in Pomona--waiting it out in the echoing sonic backwash as Marty Stuart, Doug Supernaw and other country colleagues perform.

It will be a few more hours before Montgomery finally plays for a chilled crowd at the end of a long day at “Fanfest ‘94,” a country-music expo that’s running a little behind schedule.

“The down time in this business is tremendous, and I don’t like a lot of down time,” says country music’s top rookie of 1993. “It’s like I’m caught in this little trap.”

Another day of down time has Montgomery in mind of some of the less pleasant surprises he’s encountered in his rapid transformation from four sets a night at a Kentucky nightclub to big-time heartthrob balladeer.

“My dad taught me (to) always respect the people out there that put you where you’re at, and I always try to do that,” he says earnestly. “But I guess maybe I hope that they understand when I say ‘no’ to them. . . .

“There was a time that taught me a lesson. I was signing autographs . . . and my head was actually bobbin’, I was so tired. I got up and waved to the crowd and said, ‘Sorry, I got to go,’ and I got booed by the rest of them. I mean they booed me, and I was like gosh . That makes you feel like (expletive). That’s the side that people don’t understand. These people put you where you’re at, but you just have so many things expected of you.”

Montgomery appears genuinely hurt.

“It bears on my mind quite a bit,” he confides. “It’s part of it that I just didn’t realize.”

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This is much on Montgomery’s mind as he prepares to open for Reba McEntire on Friday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre and Saturday and next Sunday at the Universal Amphitheatre. In fact, he won’t stop talking about it.

Friends say he’s shy, but that doesn’t mean he’s a laconic country boy. There’s nothing slick about him; he takes questions seriously and handles them the way he might track a deer in the hills back home. He takes his time, circles repeatedly, retraces his steps, and finally brings it down from sheer exhaustion.

“I’m a guy that (if) somebody wants my attention, I give it to ‘em,” he says.

By all accounts he’s as genuine as he appears.

“He’s a very sensitive man,” says singer-songwriter Victoria Shaw, the co-writer of his first big ballad hit, “I Love the Way You Love Me.” Shaw recalls a recent Montgomery show in Arizona in which she was watching from the wings when he started her song. Suddenly he came over and brought her onto the stage.

“He sang the rest of the song to me just face to face, with his arm around me,” she says. “In the middle of the song, I thought, ‘God, his eyes are very watery,’ and at the end of the song, tears were running down his face. He said to the audience, ‘That song touches me every time I sing it.’ ”

“He doesn’t like all the hoopla,” says Rick Blackburn, president of Atlantic Nashville, the label that signed him in 1990 and has released his two albums. “I had to talk him into doin’ the Letterman show. He’s real timid when it comes to that. He likes to perform, and be able to go to the Burger King and Wal-Mart, and it irritates him some that he can’t anymore.”

You can see why Montgomery, 29 and single, would raise a fuss at the shopping center. Even in his casual clothes--leather baseball cap, black T-shirt, jeans and fringed jacket--he cuts a striking figure. He is tall and athletic looking, with wide-set eyes and dimpled cheeks. Top it with a cowboy hat, and you’ve got a ‘30s-vintage Western matinee idol.

It was his look, not his musical instincts, that set the tone of Montgomery’s recording career.

When Blackburn visited the Austin City Saloon in Lexington to check out Montgomery, he found a rocking performer singing material by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels and Bob Seger.

“He wasn’t doin’ any kind of power ballads at all,” Blackburn says from his Nashville, Tenn., office. “I thought, ‘As good lookin’ as he is, if he can sing some power ballads, that’s sure gonna make it interesting, because that market is open. If we can take him one on one with the female audience out there, maybe it can work.’

“So we found that song ‘I Love the Way You Love Me,’ and ‘I Swear,’ ‘Rope the Moon’--stuff like that. He was open to it. Now he’s got a niche. In a way he’s sort of like a Michael Bolton of country, I guess.”

That’s probably the last niche Montgomery expected to occupy when he was literally growing up with country music.

His father, Harold Montgomery, was an aspiring country singer, and with his wife, Carol, on drums he played wherever he could in the area around Nicholasville, Ky. Eventually the kids--John Michael, younger sister Becky and older brother Eddie--joined the act.

“Our family, it was a totally different lifestyle,” Montgomery says. “We all lived around this big cravin’, and that was music. We had musicians come over to our living room every night to play and practice. As a kid, at 2 and 3 o’clock in the mornin’, I was allowed to sit there and watch ‘em play, and get up the next mornin’ and go to school.

“That’s what they lived for, to be able to go out and play on the weekends. They would not work a job if it meant that they had to give up their music. If it meant takin’ a cut in pay and goin’ somewhere else and us livin’ somewhere that wasn’t too nice, then that’s what happened.”

It was tough going financially--that was the main factor in his parents’ divorce, Montgomery says. But the music took, and Montgomery went out and became a fixture in local honky-tonks. He wasn’t exactly an overnight success, working the clubs for several years before Atlantic Nashville signed him.

His debut album, “Life’s a Dance,” came out in late ’92 and went to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts. “Kickin’ It Up” came out last January and duplicated that feat. The two albums have yielded a string of hit country singles, including “Life’s a Dance,” “I Love the Way You Love Me,” “I Swear” and the current “Rope the Moon.”

Reviewers, though, have suggested that his significance is commercial rather than creative, citing formulaic material and a limited vision as a vocalist.

“The critics--a lot of ‘em say I played it safe or whatever. Well, I grew up singin’ hits off the radio, and that’s the kind of songs I want to sing--hits that other people are gonna play in bars that might influence another guy out there one day.

“It’s gonna make me feel proud one day for them to say the same thing about me like I say about Merle Haggard or I say about George Strait or I say about Bob Seger or I say about the Eagles.

“I know a lot of critics like it out in left field, something different from the mainstream, but where I come from we never played music that was way out in left field in the clubs, and I’m just gonna put out music that I know is gonna reach out to the public, get on the radio.”

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Montgomery’s road manager knocks on the door and tells him that it’s time at last for him to get ready for his show, a good five hours after he’d inched through the rush-hour traffic from Beverly Hills.

“I wish I was a genie or somethin’,” the singer says. “I could snap my fingers and I’m at the show and ready to go. ‘Cause that’s the only thing I really look forward to.

“I grew up with it all my life. When I don’t get any more awards anymore and I don’t do any more concerts, I know that back home somewhere or another I’ll be goin’ somewhere, and I’ll probably pick and sing, playin’ my old hits from yesterday. It’s just somethin’ that you never give up doin.’ ”