Roger Clinton Gets That ‘70s Sound With ‘Nothing Good’

This may not be a good month for Clinton approval ratings--any Clinton’s. At least Bill and Roger might be singing the same tune: “Born Under a Bad Sign.”

The Albert King blues standard finishes off Roger Clinton’s long-awaited (sort of) debut album, “Nothing Good Comes Easy,” a project in the works since the presidential half-brother was signed to a record deal in late ’92.

What Fleetwood Mac’s anthem “Don’t Stop” was to that comparatively halcyon period in history for the Clintons, “Bad Sign” may be to the fall of ‘94, especially if a Haiti invasion remains unpopular and most especially after Roger’s reviews come in. The collection will be released Tuesday by Pyramid Records.

The younger Clinton, of course, has actually been involved in music since the mid-’70s, playing in Arkansas blues-rock bands most of that time up to the fateful moment the world discovered his, uh, faculty for R&B; at MTV’s inauguration ball.

On his first album, the tracks are absolutely state of the art . . . for the late ‘70s. Here, you think, is someone who hasn’t turned on a radio since the soft-rock heyday of Michael McDonald, Firefall and Ambrosia (though producer Scott Maclellan must be at least equally responsible for the Rip Van Winkle effect).

Christopher Cross, most of all, appears to have been a serious role model.

The title track, embarrassingly, even goes in for a bit of ersatz Steely Dan chord-changing, albeit with distinctly un-Dannish lyrics penned by the part-time motivational speaker himself: It’s my life to live / Gonna deal with what it is / Nobody’s gonna bring me down / Got my feet on solid ground.

Far be it from u s to want to be the ones to bring Roger down from the ground. Subterranean banality aside, how’s the singin’? The obvious gag would be that Clinton’s voice is flatter than a 17-year-old case of Billy Beer, but, in fact, carrying a tune is just about the least of his problems here.

The studio has afforded him a relatively smooth, inoffensive, affectless croon, bordering at times on falsetto, the sort that used to be heard on any number of white pop-disco records in the days when signing policies were a little more lax.

The key is finding a collection of songs that are none too vocally taxing. A few tracks toward the end of the album go for the more soulful approach, making more overt use of the Muscle Shoals players backing him up, but at least Clinton and his producer were smart enough not to go in for nearly as many R&B; affectations as in his bar-band days here.

Except . . . Did we say stuck in the ‘70s? Aw contraire , there is that rap interlude that pops up like a horror-movie jack-in-the-box in the middle of “Different Man.” To paraphrase Fleetwood Mac: Don’t . . . stop . . . thinking about a day job. On the plus side, Roger Clinton has never had anything to do with a failed S&L.;