POP REVIEW : EARLE SERVES UP TASTE OF THE SOUTH AT ROXY

Steve Earle seems very much his own man--a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll and, as someone much less interesting once put it, never the twain shall part.

Dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, with straight hair parted on the side and sideburns a little too long to be cool, Earle, who made his local debut Wednesday at the Roxy, is a plain sort of guy with a look that’s half hip and half hick. “Hello, Disneyland!” he enthused in the first of many amusing asides, reminding you that he’s from the Southern side of the tracks but also reminding you that he’s a good-humored and smart ‘un.

The down-to-earth Earle isn’t as galvanizing and exciting a figure on stage as, say, Joe Ely, who was the last country-rocker to be touted as a honky-tonk Bruce Springsteen. And the renditions of the songs from his current “Guitar Town” album tended to be just reproductions of what’s on the LP. But that says less about any shortcomings in the concert than it does about how well the record was recorded.

Earle’s music is so in line with the direction rock seems headed nowadays--grounded as it is in realistic, street-poetic, rural Americana--that he would seem a natural for mass success, if it wasn’t for a few minor cogs. You could almost read the minds of some of the music-biz folk as they mulled over those cogs during Earle’s show. It would seem so easy to make this Texan less of a tough sell to the masses if you could just convince him to drop a few things.

Listening to his songs, it was hard for anyone with a little business savvy to resist playing devil’s advocate (or executive’s advocate, if you will):

“Someday,” for example, is at least as compelling and palpable a portrait of small-town frustration as anything John Cougar Mellencamp has ever written, and it’d sound terrific on rock radio-- but you really oughta lose the steel guitar that comes in during the second verse, kid .

“Hillbilly Highway” has a wonderful electric guitar sound-- but you really oughta change the title, maybe to something like “American Highway,” you know?

And “Little Rock ‘n’ Roller” is a touching lullaby to a young son from a musician out on the road-- but maybe you could make it about a girlfriend instead of a baby, Steve, ‘cause you know rock ‘n’ rollers, they’re scared to death of babies!

But you can’t take the country out of Earle--and to its eternal credit, his record company apparently isn’t demanding any such concessions out of him.

Earle has tapped into a rich vein with his more topical songs, but the brightest portent for his future is that his most memorable songs are his most universal ones. He’s written at least one great breakup song in “Goodbye’s All We’ve Got Left” (in which he asks his estranged lover to write him a letter which he’ll “open up when I’m stronger/Another 10 or 12 years, maybe longer”). On the other end of the cycle, he has an instant classic of a come-on with “Fearless Heart,” a bit of unadulterated romanticism that received the loudest cheers from the crowd.

And, by the way, Steve, whatever you do-- don’t lose the steel guitar.

Opening the show, ironically, was Marvin Etzioni, who wrote some of Lone Justice’s best country songs but has shed most traces of that sound now that he’s leading his own outfit. Etzioni seems as at home fronting and writing for a Stones-style guitar attack as with the two-beat country he used to be so prolific at, happy to say.