3 OF A KIND WHAT DO YOU CALL THE MUSIC THAT GUY CLARK, NANCI GRIFFITH AND RODNEY CROWELL MAKE?

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

As one might expect, Guy Clark, the laconic Texas songwriter, simplifies matters: ``Labels are just labels.''

In an industry that can hand out 100 Grammys for everything just short of spoon playing, trying to categorize Clark or Nanci Griffith or Rodney Crowell isn't easy. Oddly enough, the three singer-songwriters are playing under the banner of the Newport Folk Festival at UCLA's Royce Hall on Thursday.

While Griffith allows that ``folk is probably the closest description to what I do,'' when she describes her upcoming album (to be released in August), it doesn't sound all that folky.

``It's a two-way traffic circle,'' says Griffith. ``A combination of my symphony work and my usual eclecticness.''

Actually, ``eclecticness'' is probably the only label the three artists might fall under.

``I listen to so many kinds of music, it's no wonder that I don't have a category,'' says West Texas native Griffith.

Clark, who's also from West Texas, puts it this way, ``I'm trying to avoid (a niche). I just write songs that please me.''

And the best is pretty darn good. Clark - with his deceptively simple lyrics and melodies - is considered a songwriter's songwriter. For Griffith, he is the ``ultimate of songwriting heroes.''

Clark's latest CD, ``Cold Dog Soup'' (Sugarhill Records), is a spare collection of songs that sounds like it was recorded on the songwriter's back porch. Growing up in ``sort of pretelevision days,'' Clark says his family would read poetry and novels out loud after dinner, and his music reflects that storytelling tradition.

``They're just songs about stuff that I know about, or that touch me,'' says Clark. As for how to classify them, Clark only seems to know ``they're certainly not country or pop.'' For lack of a better description, he guesses they might be closer to folk music.

But while not being easy to categorize may make it hard to get airplay in the rigid world of formatted radio, this doesn't bother either Clark or Griffith.

``I do what I do and hope for the best,'' says Clark.

Griffith even sees an upside.

``We've all been allowed to run amok,'' she says, pointing out that in her career she has explored country, classical, rock and folk.

``I think when you have an artist that's an overnight success like a Britney Spears, they're not really allowed artistic development and free reign.'' And that, Griffith says, is why artists like herself, Tom Waits, John Prine and Clark, who don't easily fit into any one niche, are fortunate. ``We're allowed to do whatever we want to do. ... It really keeps the quality of work up.''

Thursday's show should be as laid back as you might guess.

``I don't even have a set list,'' jokes Clark.

The trio has done this acoustic show before on the East Coast, and Griffith expects that each will do some of his or her own songs and then do some numbers together, like Woody Guthrie's ``Do Re Mi,' where they will trade off lines.

It's a song that Griffith has recorded on ``Other Voices, Other Rooms'' (Electra), a 1993 album of songs by such artists as Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, the Carter Family, the Weavers, Gordon Lightfoot and Kate Wolfe.

While that album and a 1998 follow-up, ``Other Voices Too (A trip back to Bountiful)'' (Electra) with songs by Lucinda Williams, Richard Thompson and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, helped to spotlight a number of singer-songwriters, Griffith is a gifted artist in her own right.

Over her more-than-20-year career, she has turned out a number of critically acclaimed albums, including the 1994 album ``Flyer'' (Electra) - with members of the Counting Crows, Dire Straits and R.E.M. as guest artists - that explores the politics of love in her own unique storytelling style.

Her latest CD is 1999's ``The Dust Bowl Symphony'' (Electra), a symphonic retrospective of her career. She recorded the album with the London Symphony, she says, because she wanted to shape her songs with the ``colors I had always wanted to hear in them.''

And that also applies to what she calls her ``very schizophrenic'' career, meaning just when you think you've figured her out, she goes off in another direction.

Clark and Crowell - the latter has just released the critically praised, highly, personal album ``The Houston Kid'' (Sugar Hill) - might fit the singer-songwriter mode a little more neatly. But both of them have been writing - for themselves and others - for more than 20 years, and putting a label on their long, distinguished careers is doing them a disservice.

However, there is one thing we do know that the three have in common: They're all from Texas but have lived in the Nashville area for years because of the record business.

``But Texas is always home,'' says Clark, who makes frequent trips back to the state.

Well, that might explain why they're hard to pin down.

NANCI GRIFFITH, GUY CLARK, RODNEY CROWELL

Where: UCLA's Royce Hall.

When: 8 p.m. Thursday. At 7 p.m. there is a Center Stage discussion with Rene Engels, general manager of KCSN.

Tickets: $9 (for UCLA students) to $35. Go online at www.performingarts.ucla.edu. Tickets also available at all Ticketmaster locations. Call [phone] for information or to charge by phone.

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3 photos

Photo:

(1) no caption (Nanci Griffith)

(2) no caption (Guy Clark)

(3) no caption (Rodney Crowell)