SHELBURNE - The driving force behind one of Canada's most unique rock bands ever - the Crash Test Dummies - has been charged with possession of marijuana after a small amount in a plastic bag was allegedly discovered in his pocket while he was loaded into an ambulance a few weeks ago near Yarmouth.

Crash Test Dummie Brad Roberts said he really felt like one when his '89 Cadillac crashed and burned on a remote Yarmouth County road Sept. 28.

He was subsequently charged by Yarmouth RCMP highway patrol under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and is scheduled to appear in court Dec. 19.

The 36-year-old artist with an unusually deep bass-baritone voice has spent the past few summers in Argyle where he and his girlfriend, Angela VanAmburg, have a vacation home.

"When I'm not either on the road, or making a record or vacationing in Argyle I live in New York, said Roberts in an interview this week.

But his most recent vacation could have cost him his life.

"I flipped my Cadillac over into a culvert on a (winding) . . . wet road. Going a little too fast around a bend. Just touched gravel and the next thing I knew, boom," he said.

"I looked down at my arm. It was dangling. I thought well, I gotta get my ass out of this car right away so I kicked the window out 'cause the electric window thing wasn't (working).

"I was literally upside down in a culvert . . . I pulled myself out. Then this fellow, James Stevens, just pulled up and helped me out the rest of the way.

"And then it blew up. It melted to nothing," he said about his car.

"I came this close to dying. I could have been trapped and burned alive," said Roberts.

"My body was pretty cut up and I looked terrible and I had a broken arm that was extremely painful . . . but I got away with my life and I got away extremely lucky not to have anything worse happen," he said.

That accident by the way, which happened Sept. 28, is still under RCMP investigation.

Roberts is on the mend and working on a new CD at Feswick Productions in Shelburne, an out-of-the-way recording studio with an impressive clientele.

But this project is different.

"It's very country," said Roberts.

"What I'm doing here is this. I have some friends in Argyle who play various instruments and we decided to get together just for fun, to have a casual band, play cover songs and that kind of thing.

"Dave Morton brought a stand-up base, Danny MacKenzie plays the drums, Kent Greene brought over a guitar. It had a certain distinctive sound, these three people playing together on those instruments," said Roberts.

"Kind of a nice, old-fashioned country twang, especially with the stand-up base.

"So I started writing songs just kind of for us," he said.

"I thought, 'you know these are good enough to record,'. . . So I gathered up the boys.

"I wrote all the songs, I sing all the songs. It's basically my project but these guys have inspired it," he said.

And it's mostly acoustic music Roberts is recording at Tim Feswick's Shelburne studio.

"There's electric guitars but it's all twangy country electric guitars. There's no (heavy) metal guitars or anything like that," he said.

The project is on schedule but must be finished this week.

"As long as we get the record finished by dumping day we're set 'cause half the band are lobster fishermen," said Roberts, using the local vernacular "dumping day," to mean the start of lobster season.

"I'm going to be right down on the wharf in Lower Argyle checking it all out.

"I'll go out on a run with Dave but I'm a Prairie boy. I don't know how to work in a lobster boat," he said.

Roberts doesn't know what the CD will be called but there's lots of time. It won't be released until 2002.

The album will be somewhat of a departure from previous work done by Crash Test Dummies.

"Our first record was country influenced but this is like full-on twangin' country music and it really has a lot to do with just living out here and living like I'm in the Dukes of Hazard or something you know, flipping Cadillacs and shooting off .22s and drinking beer."

Roberts also talked a bit about his entrance into rock music. Being a loser in high school who couldn't get girls to notice him was a big factor.

"The only way to get chicks was going to be to play the guitar because I couldn't play hockey.

"I've got a love affair with music, the chicks were an added bonus. They're the icing on the cake but they were definitely a motivating factor in the early years when I was a gangly, loser teenager," he said.

The Crash Test Dummies evolved from a Winnipeg bar band and toyed with a couple of other names that nearly made the cut, like Skin Graft to the Chemotherapists.

The band's most popular song? "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm is by far the biggest hit. That