POP REVIEW : TAKING THE STRAIT AND NARROW WAY

Who ever heard of a country singer with a fresh, pointed crease in his jeans?

Meet George Strait, one of the hottest male country singers to emerge in the ‘80s.

Strait, who headlined two shows Saturday night at the Wiltern Theatre, is a likable Texan in his early 30s with such wholesome good looks, firm posture and freshly pressed cowboy shirts that he appears to have stepped right out of the Western-wear section of a mail-order catalogue.

This guy could play “Superman” if Christopher Reeve passed on the role. The surprising thing is that Strait hasn’t adopted the stage name George Strait-Arrow.

The problem is jeans look best when they have been lived in--and country singers are most effective when they convince you that they have experienced every heartache, passed out in every honky-tonk and thumbed their way down every back road they sing about.

For all Strait’s recent success, his vocals too often sound as if they, too, have a fresh-pressed crease.

Strait may have spent years in honky-tonks, but there is such a derivative edge to his singing that he must have spent most of that time listening to Merle Haggard or George Jones records on the jukebox--not drowning his sorrows at the bar over some lost love.

When Strait reaches for the soulful or ironic twists in songs like “Unwound,” one of his earliest and best records, or “You’re Something Special to Me,” one of his most recent numbers, he usually ends up in the shadow of those two models.

Yet, Strait displays little vocal identity or authority of his own when he steps away from those influences. There is no sense of the radical, extreme or hungry edges that you find in the work of the most compelling country singers.

Adding to Strait’s problem in building a strong identity is that he doesn’t write his own material--and his choice of outside songs has been uneven. He has moved between the clever wordplay of songs like “Unwound” (a novelty about the woman he had claimed to have wrapped around his finger just coming unwound) to the synthetic romanticism of a bland country love song set in, of all places, Marina del Rey.

So what does he have going for him?

The Texan did convey more personality on stage than he generally does on record. Besides the good looks, which drew plenty of shrieks from some female fans Saturday, Strait connected strongly with the rest of the audience with his charming, low-key manner that, mercifully, stayed clear of the rural, hayseed side of the “good ole boy” country imagery.

And he kept the show moving nicely by mixing his early and recent hits, and leading his Ace in the Hole band threw some fiddle-spiked dance-hall numbers between the many ballads.

The most endearing thing about Strait is his naturalness. His style seems to have evolved from a genuine affection for those singers.

In fact, he is so upfront about his roots that he even sang “Lefty’s Gone”--a tribute to Lefty Frizzell, a country singer who was a major influence on Haggard. And you get the feeling the guy probably wouldn’t hesitate to record a tune called “Merle and George Are Still Here.”

Opening act Randy Travis, whose bittersweet “1982” single has been racing up the country charts, is a young singer who is even more strongly in the shadow of Haggard and Jones. There were times during his well-received set that you felt you were at the national finals of the Merle Haggard Sing-Alike Contest.