TV REVIEW : A MUDDLED ‘WELCOME’ FOR VETS

“I myself had gone through about 20 years of pain, and I finally faced that pain,” said John Fogerty, addressing the Vietnam veterans being honored at Saturday’s “Welcome Home” concert in Washington.

“I looked it right in the face,” continued the rock singer, presumably referring to the creative crisis that gripped him for a long period. “You can’t change it. That’s what happened. So I’m tellin’ you guys, that’s what happened. You got the shaft. You know it and we know it. It’s reality. So drop it.” After telling the vets that they could write him letters to help get it off their chests, Fogerty concluded: “Get on with it, buddy.”

That blunt advice marked the only time that the participants in the concert--televised nationally on Home Box Office Saturday night on a tape-delayed basis--didn’t coddle the veterans, and it came as a bracing tonic amid the prevailing blandness.

The show was well-meaning, certainly, and few would argue that Vietnam veterans don’t deserve some special compensation to address their special problems. But it’s not as if this is a new issue--the Forum in Inglewood was the site of a similar (if smaller-scaled) concert sponsored by the same Welcome Home organization more than a year ago. Los Angeles hosted a downtown parade and concert a couple of months ago.

Because it didn’t add a lot of information or emotion to the issue, Saturday’s event lacked a dramatic center. It also lacked any sense of occasion: Staged at Capital Centre in Landover, Md., the show looked like any basketball-arena rock concert.

And as a television show, it also lacked a pace that would encourage you to stick with it as it spilled over from its scheduled three-hour length (it finally clocked in at four hours-plus). With its speeches, documentary features and appeals for donations, it was more like a telethon that you’d drop in on now and then. The emcees included John Ritter, Peter Fonda and Jon Voight.

The musical lineup was apparently intended in part to be a statement and in part to draw viewers. It ended up an incoherent combination of those two impulses, short on both telling musical commentary and big drawing power.

Some of the acts’ connection with Vietnam was merely that they had hits during the war years. At least James Brown did USO tours in Vietnam. Artists like Crosby, Stills & Nash and Richie Havens were closer to the political fires of the era, and Stevie Wonder is strongly identified with social causes. Some of Fogerty’s songs--especially “Who’ll Stop the Rain”--relate to the Vietnam experience.

But Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram? Anita Baker? There’s nothing wrong with them as performers, but they don’t have much connection to this event.

Most of the performances looked like typical televised pop music, interspersed with typical bopping audience shots. The one exception to the generic look came when John Sebastian played “Taps” on the harmonica and the camera caught some somber faces looking inward and backward.

At the other extreme, the sentimental schlock of the sequined Neil Diamond’s “America” opened the show on an embarrassing note. (The second most embarrassing moment came when Anita Baker’s career accomplishments were likened to the role of minority soldiers in Vietnam.)

Few of the name artists went to the core of the event’s purpose. It was left to an unknown veteran from Wisconsin, Jim Wachtendonk, to show up their performances as meaningless filler with a song called “Hurting More,” about the apparent effects of Agent Orange on him and his family.

And when Richie Havens (joined by actor Louis Gossett Jr.) sang “Handsome Johnny,” his venerable account of a soldier marching into battles from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam, he added a verse saying, “We won’t let him go down to El Salvador.”

That was the only time anyone addressed what should have been a key and obvious issue: If a spirit of challenge and dissent isn’t fostered again right now, there could well be another concert like this for a new set of troubled veterans down the road.