MUSIC: CAN GARTH SAVE COUNTRY?

They lined up outside stores all over the nation in late November for Sevens, Garth Brooks' first CD in two years. Then they took it home and heard a swell set of 14 tunes from the sweetly pudge-faced Oklahoman who has sold 62 million albums--country music's one bona fide superstar. Sevens sold about 800,000 copies the first week, and it's not just his bosses at Capitol Records who hope Brooks keeps moving the product. Country needs a hit. Country needs...something. Like a lonesome cowpoke in some nasal old lament, it feels the redneck blues, and don't ask it why.

Country is the nation's most popular music format, with the largest number of radio stations and fans all over. But to many music consumers, country remains a quaint taste, one that registers only with the rare fluke hit (remember Achy Breaky Heart, the Macarena of the summer of 1992?) or novelty act (LeAnn Rimes, who was 13 when her yodeling debut album, Blue, rose high on the pop charts last year). Even in the core regions CD sales are flat, and a malaise--or at best, a wait-and-hope--grips the industry. Three of Billboard's top six country albums last week were greatest-hits collections. That's too much deja vu for a modern-music genre.

Some folks blame the big country-radio stations, whose playlists lull listeners. "The stations play the same 50 records every week," says Mercury Nashville president Luke Lewis. "I call it Prozac radio." The hope never dies for a purer, "alternative" country voice, but that's hard to find on mainstream radio. "A lot of program directors come from the rock format," says Holly Gleason, a premier Nashville publicist who has midwifed the careers of stars Patty Loveless and Collin Raye, "and don't have a feeling for the country tradition. Their allegiance isn't to the roots; it's to the research."

A few moguls are doing too well to worry. Mike Curb--the Californian who, in another life, produced hits by the Four Seasons, the Osmonds and Debby Boone (her version of You Light Up My Life was the '70s' top-selling single) and, from 1978 to 1982, served as Lieutenant Governor of California--has struck country gold on his Curb label with Tim McGraw (Indian Outlaw) and ridden Rimes to multiplatinum. Curb sees the payoff beyond the pain: "If a record is different, it's going to be harder to get it played. But you get a bigger return when you get it played."

It helps if you have a young star like Rimes. In the past few years country's familiar gents and studs have been pushing fewer CDs, and the ladies have been pushing them aside. Country would be in an even deeper funk if it weren't for Rimes and Shania Twain, the Canadian power thrush whose The Woman in Me sold 10 million copies. Their new albums--Rimes' You Light Up My Life and Twain's Come On Over, both of which have topped the charts--are more significant as product than as music.

The secret of LeAnn's success is three words: volume (a big voice), volume (three albums in 18 months), volume (saturation marketing by Curb). The new CD--12 songs of inspiration, from The Rose to God Bless America--rarely unleashes Rimes' gloriously freaky soprano; at times she sounds intimidated, like a child called on to sing before stern church elders. Only in an a cappella National Anthem does she let loose the trills and glissandi; but, really, is that a cut you'll want to play a lot?