In lots of ways, Jack Logan resembles your average Joe -- a fortyish, ex-swimming pool pump motor repairman who loves rock & roll, drag racing and beer. And in lots of ways he doesn't.| Take the eight or nine hundred songs he's written over the past two decades, for instance -- a mere fragment of which have found their way onto five albums. Or his talent as a cartoonist and illustrator (he draws a comic strip for the Athens, Ga.-based music 'zine Flagpole). Or, perhaps most impressively, the modesty and self-effacing charm that graces his person despite these obvious gifts.

"I'm always worried that it's never good enough," says Logan, whose new Capricorn Records disc, Buzz Me In, was released May 11. "I feel like I'm on this quest, like I'm always trying to write 'My Funny Valentine' or some classic standard, and I don't think I'm there yet."

Logan's quest to write classic songs was formally announced with the arrival of his 1994 debut, Bulk, an aptly named, double-disc collection of forty-two rough-hewn songs that had been culled from hundreds of home demos Logan and his musical cohorts had recorded over the years. Logan wrapped his warm, conversational croon around tunes that spanned the gamut of popular music -- from ramshackle roots rock to campfire folk-blues to sodden piano bar ballads. When it appeared, the album earned raves from just about every publication on the planet.

Were it not for the likes of R.E.M's Peter Buck and Peter Jesperson of Medium Cool Records, however, folks outside Athens, Ga., (near where Logan lives in Winder) might never have had the chance to hear Logan's songs about desperate lonely hearts and restless factory workers living in dead-end towns. It was Buck and Len Hoffman (manager of the now-defunct Dashboard Saviors) who alerted Jesperson to the motor repairman who just happened to write tons of killer tunes, usually in tandem with pals like Kelly Keneipp, a guitarist whom Logan had met back in high school when he was, as he puts it, "a record-head" immersing himself in albums by everyone from the Rolling Stones to George Jones to the Sex Pistols.

Logan and Keneipp are still brainstorming songs together, with Keneipp usually setting the musical stage on guitar or piano and Logan providing the characters and stories. "Thankfully, the people who have worked with me over the years try to set up little mood landscapes for me to walk through," Logan says. "And that's what I love about it and find exciting -- not knowing what kind of song I'm going to write or what I'm after."

The two friends (along with Keneipp's wife Nikki) recently began collaborating on another music venture: Backburner, a mail-order and Internet-based label they've started in order to distribute not only Logan's various side-project recordings but albums by friends and artists like the Rouch Brothers, a pair of Indiana farmers who took Logan under their wing back in the Seventies when he was just a shy rock & roll fanatic and turned him on to the concept of home recording. "I had never sung in public before and they were very kind to me and let me get drunk and sing," remembers Logan. "Here they were out in the middle of nowhere -- they were just these two farmers with four-track recording equipment, which I had never seen up to that point -- but they were writing *songs*. And I mean *lots* of songs. And it was a revelation, like seeing the big slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey."

Just like that, it all clicked. Logan knew how he wanted to spend the rest of his days, no matter what happened. "We haven't had any big financial success or anything, but we've done this for years as a hobby, so it's nice to know that we've reached out into the real world," Logan says. "But luckily, I'm old enough so that I am pretty much who I'm going to be. And I know how flaky this business is." Flaky enough, apparently, so that even the avalanche of great press that accompanied each of Logan's previous four albums couldn't persuade Restless, his now-former label, to release Buzz Me In, which sat in limbo for two years until Capricorn stepped in and saved the day. Even now, Logan isn't sure what happened. "I guess [Restless] was looking for a sure-fire radio hit," says Logan. "But if I knew how to write those, I'd do fifty of 'em a day and right now I'd be sitting on the island I own."

Logan confirms that he came to the Buzz Me In recording sessions straight from work at the motor shop and often laid down his vocal tracks while covered in grease. If all goes well with the album and tour that's about to get underway, that scenario likely won't be repeated: Logan, a lifelong muscle-car devotee (who, to this day, blames the Beatles for usurping drag-racing as the most popular youth-culture entertainment trend of the Sixties), has finally quit his day job fixing engines.

"I had to decide whether I wanted to continue in the motor shop business or take a little more of a stab at this music thing," he says, sounding very much like a man who's wrestled with a tough choice. Having made up his mind, Logan says he's ready to win the hearts and minds of the masses in beer joints and gin mills across the U.S.A. "I've played in front of ten people before on the road, so I fear nothing. I always feel like 'Hey, f--- it, we're here. There's free beer and food backstage, so let's have some fun. And hopefully, there'll be twenty people that show up this time out.'"

JONATHAN PERRY(May 12, 1999)