POP REVIEW : LINDLEY’S EL RAYO-X PACKS HOUSE

Immediately upon starting a solo career, David Lindley had an inadvertent brush with commercial success with his 1981 single “Mercury Blues.” But five years later, the musical gnome remains safely ensconced and apparently quite comfortable as a cult hero.

On Saturday, Lindley and his band El Rayo-X packed the 375-seat Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and turned in an invigorating 2 1/2-hour performance that fell only slightly short of their best shows.

It’s a crime that music as full of invention, character and easy accessibility as Lindley’s “world beat” melange of international melody and rhythm can’t establish a U.S. record connection--Elektra Records dropped Lindley after two albums--much less find its way on to the pop charts.

Perhaps it’s the way Lindley defies musical convention at every turn, just as he ignores the dictates of fashion. As usual, his outfit Saturday was the stuff of which Mr. Blackwell’s nightmares are no doubt made: a green and orange paisley shirt, brown and rust checkered slacks and white patent leather slip-ons with silver buckles, all topped by his mop of stringy, over-the-shoulders black hair.

But there was nothing haphazard about the impeccable playing from the current edition of El Rayo-X, and throughout the evening the quintet seamlessly fused distinct musical genres into new and revealing combinations.

An instrumental in which Lindley played an electric oud (a relative of the mandolin) managed to sound Oriental and Mexican simultaneously, while the band achieved a Jimmy Cliff-meets-the Spinners blend of reggae and lick R&B; in “Follow Your Heart.”

The one thing missing in the 18-song set, which was dominated by material from his two Elektra LPs, was that Lindley didn’t introduce some new rhythmic or instrumental texture discovered in a far corner of the world, as he so often has done in the past.

The closest he came was a new song by Bob (Frizz) Fuller, “Texas Tango,” an exhilarating Tex-Mex number full of delightful rhymes like “When I was driving through El Paso/That’s when my car ran out of gas-o.”

But even without any major musical surprises, Lindley’s superbly crafted and creative solos and the exquisite interplay among the other instrumentalists supplied enough minor revelations to prevent repetitiveness from seeping into the performance.

The veteran Orange County bar band the Bytes got a chance to showcase its original material in a 45-minute opening set, but only the bouncy, new-wavish “Livin’ It Up” and the calypso-flavored “Next To You” rose above the level of pleasant but forgettable mainstream pop.