POP MUSIC REVIEW : GQ-ROCK COMES TO THE WILTERN WITH PALMER

Even in the ‘70s, when casual was cool and pop stars were supposed to look the same way on stage that they did on the street, Robert Palmer was a man who knew how to dress himself. The dapper singer also had a way of surrounding himself with gorgeous women, which got him pegged as a debonair womanizer.

His pervasive image was as sort of the sophisticate’s Englebert Humperdinck, a popular singer who obviously enjoyed publicly flaunting his image. If anyone ever tossed any undergarments on stage at a Palmer show, though, you can be sure they were of the Gucci variety.

That image has carried through, with his blessing, to this day. His latest videos feature an amusingly superfluous array of bouncing bodies, and the band at his two weekend concerts at the Wiltern Theatre was filled out with female musicians probably picked as much for the statuesque silhouettes they cut in breathlessly tight dresses as for their musical prowess.

Now that he finally has a No. 1 hit, with “Addicted to Love,” the image doesn’t seem about to change. His supremely funny lyric has him gloating a bit over how he’s about to step in and take advantage of a woman’s overwhelming craving for affection.

From that description, it seems as if Palmer ought to come off as unbearably crass, but, beneath the surface, his material has never really been all that sexist or exploitatively sexy--and even though he coolly keeps his distance from his audience, he still comes off as a likable fellow.

He knows that a wink is as good as a nudge, and a smirk is as good as a leer, and much of the sleek veneer of what he does is really a knowing smoke screen for the smarts at work in the music.

In Friday’s show, Palmer never exerted himself enough to let his suave guard down--except when he did a little of his trademark laughing/hiccuping, which drew wild cheers--but nonetheless presided ably over a brisk, breezy and versatile 95 minutes.

His fairly recent entry into the realm of stardom hasn’t caused him to toss out his more eclectic influences, happily, with a middle section of Caribbean and even jazz-flavored material sitting quite well alongside the pre- and post-Power Station funk exercises.

No transcendent musical moments in any of that, mind you, but Palmer has assembled a unit of four men and four women that can effectively put its gloves on the grooves of both urban America and the distant tropical isles that Palmer favors. (The men do carry a much larger share of the weight than the women--this isn’t the Revolution.)

Though he’s very much a singer and not just a sex symbol, Palmer’s no vocal gymnast, and his frequent sharing of stage center with female vocalist B.J. Nelson--in what a lot of times were all-out duets--was a decent and surprisingly modest move.

The mellower, more exotic material in the middle was heightened with the help of especially noteworthy lighting and set design, which turned the stage into something different with each new song (at probably a fraction of the cost of the Simple Minds’ Traveling Megawatt Show a few weeks back, which tried to make the stage look different every 10 seconds).

And, oh yeah . . . nice suit.

The guys in the opening band Bourgeois Tagg are all terrific musicians, and boy, they’re not gonna let you forget it. There’s tremendous promise in the Sacramentonians’ style, which is sort of a meeting point between “progressive rock” and the funkier side of “new music.”

But they constantly undermined their strengths by forgetting about dynamics and all playing at full blast at all times, trying too hard to look like they’re having fun besides. I’ve never so much wanted to tell a bass player to just calm down.