As this LP charges up the country charts, Waylon Jennings's admirers are hoping it may be the one that crosses him into the pop market. He belongs there: His style and material go beyond the standard country menu, and his concert work with acts like the Grateful Dead and Roger McGuinn has been well received.

This LP is another on which he's used his fine road band, the Waylors, and both recent and long-time fans will like it, once they get over the initial disappointment that it doesn't live up to the promise of his live shows. Jennings's craggy hollow-mine-shaft voice is still expressive and mournful, but where he sometimes seemed angry on Honky Tonk Heroes, here he seems wearily resigned. The production is a bit laid back too. There are few solos by the Waylors and if Heroes was a bar album, than This Time is an after-hours, mellow-out partner.

As usual, the subject matter is basic: bar / drinking songs, songs about the West and outlaws and women. Four of the ten songs were written by corproducer and singer Willie Nelson, but Jennings has a way of making any song his own. His version of "It's Not Supposed to Be that Way" has sorrowful depths that Nelson's only hints at, with nice harp work by Don Brooks.

Two tracks especially stand out. "This Time" is a Waylon composition (wish he'd write more) and it defines his macho image pretty aptly. Where the Stones once sang, "This may be the last time, I don't know ...," Waylon simply says, "You're gonna have to toe the mark and walk the line — this time will be the last time." But Waylon can also get inside tenderness and sorrow — especially on Lee Clayton's nearly perfect "If You Could Touch Her at All." Jennings creates some kind of cosmic click here, as he sings "Right or wrong a woman can own any man / She can take him inside her and hold his soul in her hand ..." with just the right wonder and sorrow to touch you with a shared truth. A moving performance, although I wish that Ralph Mooney's sweet-and-sad singing steel guitar were a bit more up-front.

An album that grows on you, and a fine companion to Heroes — if not quite the one we've all been waiting for. (RS 165)

TONY GLOVER