POP MUSIC REVIEW : Newton Loses Verve in Quest for Taped Perfection at Crazy Horse

With her early show at the Crazy Horse Steak House off to a bland start Monday night, Juice Newton stopped to tell the audience that the concert was being taped for the Westwood One radio network and that being on the spot wasn’t helping her to deliver a free-and-easy show.

“What we’re trying to do is something we don’t really do well, which is be perfect. I think it (attempting perfection) is a total waste of time. But we’ll do whatever they want, so they can make money,” Newton told her audience (and, depending on the Westwood One editors’ tolerance for sarcastic remarks at the network’s expense, future radio listeners).

But rather than heed her own misgivings and try to cut loose with her five-man band, Newton immediately embarked on an agonizingly slow, grinding rendition of “Angel of the Morning” that had all the verve of a funeral march. Newton’s phrasing on the refrain stretched and tortured the words until it was unclear whether her aim was to sing the chorus or to extract a confession from it.

The nice thing about concerts, as opposed to recording sessions, is that unpredictable things tend to happen. Sure enough, a couple of odd happenstances cropped up during Newton’s show, and they inspired a few moments that surpassed the mannered competence that characterized most of the 65-minute concert.

The first unforeseen event was Newton’s confusion over what key she was supposed to be in as the band chugged into “Tell Me True,” a recent hit typical of the confections she has been whipping up over the past seven years from a mix of pop-oriented country and light rock. Newton made a false start, shrugged it off, then decided to go ahead and sing the song’s opening in a higher-than-normal key, before dropping down to her intended register.

That imperfection provided a spark of spontaneity that thawed Newton for the moment and helped reconstitute her performance. She and her band gave the song a brisk treatment that featured some of their freest playing of the set, and they stayed in that free-swinging mood for “Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard on Me,” a song cut from the same lightweight but catchy mold as “Tell Me True” and several other Newton hits.

Newton’s other main genre is torchy pop balladry. She failed early in the show to probe for believable emotion in the all-out weeper, “Hurt,” in which a scorned lover tells a cheating partner that “I’m soooo hurt . . . but I would never hurt you.” While Newton’s singing was technically strong, as it was throughout the show, her innocent delivery took the words at face value rather than unleashing the far more interesting--and honest--feelings of bitterness and anger lying just beneath the song’s surface.

Later, a second unusual incident helped Newton find the sort of edge that could have helped “Hurt.” Another torch song, “Break It to Me Gently,” was proceeding unremarkably until an abrupt, awkward halt occurred for no obvious reason (had Newton forgotten the words?), then resolved itself in a bit of byplay between the singer and a couple of people who called out from the audience.

With her guard down (the quest for taped perfection having again been thwarted by an unplanned occurrence), Newton picked up from the interruption with her least restrained singing of the night, finishing the song with fine, all-out belting and a well-timed catch in her voice.

The next tune, “Cheap Love,” was the set’s spunkiest number, featuring some crash and drive in the twin-guitar work of Otha Young and Bill Anderson, and good backup singing from keyboardist Garm Beall, whose strong falsetto made one do a double take and look around expecting to find a previously hidden female harmonist.

By the end, though, Newton and band were back in their harness, finishing the show with a tepid “Queen of Hearts” and encoring with unconvincing rockabilly. If that is what being taped for radio does to her, her handlers should make doubly sure that she never gets in front of a television camera.

Better yet, she should just concentrate on playing to the live audience at hand. If it works for them (and, to be sure, Newton’s show was well-received by the Crazy Horse crowd), it will probably work for the folks at home.