A powerful Jones, page 2 Not that there isn't some real It Came From Nashville crud here. A few songs squeak past on archetypal groaners. "With hundred proof memories," Jones warbles at one point, "you don't think and drive." And a cut called "The Lone Ranger" is a paean to Coor's beer ("I had more Silver Bullets last night," the chorus jangles, "than the Lone Ranger") that's as canned and corny as the lacquered haircut -- a kind of Jimmy Johnson flying wedge --Jones has affected in recent years. Still, as cruddy as "The Lone Ranger" may be, at least it's jaunty, catchy crud. Like a masterfully tinny commercial, I've been utterly unable to shake it out of my head -- I wouldn't be surprised if it became a woozy late-summer radio favorite. Unlike Jones' autobiography, "I Lived to Tell It All" (the album) doesn't traffic in lurid details; it isn't a tell-all exorcism, and Jones the bricklayer isn't laying down any specific bricks. "I Must Have Done Something Bad in My Life" is a bluesy, deeply melancholy ballad that hints at spousal abuse (Jones has admitted he slapped around Tammy Wynette, among others), and "Honky Tonk Song" reprises an anecdote from the book in which Jones, stranded without a car, is so desperate for whiskey that he rolls regally into town atop a riding lawnmower. And that's about it. But whatever the 10 songs here lack in precise details, Jones more than makes up for it in emotion. His measured vocals have never sounded more assured, and he gives these songs complexity to burn. I never thought I'd be quoting Alfred Kazin to get across the burnished shadings in George Jones' voice, but "I Lived to Tell It All" puts me in mind of Kazin's comment in "On Native Grounds" that a great artist's work always has a "marginal suggestiveness" that "indicates those unspoken reserves, that silent assessment of life, that can be heard below and beyond the slow marshaling of his thought." Jones puts a similar kind of unspoken reserve to work all over "I Lived to Tell It All." The song "It Ain't Gonna Worry My Mind," for instance, is a spare, lovely and potent workingman's lament about faith in the midst of "troubled times" that John Hiatt should scramble to cover on his next LP. And "Tied to a Stone" is a similarly forthright, deeply compelling ballad about a man who reviews his mistakes after waking up to find that his wife's "side of the bed was cold." On these cuts and many others, producers Buddy Cannon and Norro Wilson have had the good sense to strip away the clutter and leave just a hint of instrumental sweetness to frame Jones' voice. That slight sweetness disappears entirely on several songs, notably a fine and gleefully mean-spirited critique of current country music called "Billy B. Bad." Jones spends plenty of time in his autobiography bashing the "musical mush" that's coming out of Nashville today, but on "Billy B. Bad" he gets more specific, ridiculing a singer who sounds an awful lot like Billy Ray Cyrus: "Didn't have much soul or country roots/But he sure looked cute in his cowboy suit." The song ends with a particularly nasty riff, that an over-the-hill Billy B. Bad has "just tested positive for Branson." Of course, Jones reserves the right to be completely contradictory: The song doesn't mention the fact that, in his autobiography, there's a photo of Cyrus and Jones standing next to one another, looking chummy and grinning. For the most part, though, "I Lived to Tell It All" is deliciously old-fashioned without rubbing your nose in country "purity"; it goes down like a Jones album from the late '60s or early '70s. I only wish, greedily, that he'd split the album's five rave-ups and five cry-in-your-beer ballads into de facto A and B sides, instead of spreading them across the LP. (The ballads would comprise a classic country "make-out" side.) That's how I split the songs up when I made a cassette copy for my Walkman. Confession: Listening to "I Lived to Tell It All" on the summer streets of Manhattan, or in the sweltering subway, I've found, is a wildly pleasurable (if somewhat disorienting) experience; it transforms New York's rude cacophony into a kind of casually southern-fried Fellini film. The easy grace in Jones' voice seems to pour up from the cracks in the pavement.