POP MUSIC REVIEW : Gregg Allman Band Comes Back With a Bang in Fourth of July Gig

Gregg Allman’s return to record-making last year was a mixed blessing.

His comeback album, “I’m No Angel,” showed that the distinctive, huskily emotive blues voice that had helped power the hugely successful and influential Allman Brothers Band was still intact.

But for the most part, the album was a forced attempt to fit into the ‘80s mainstream. The musical arrangements were slick, the blues content was attenuated, at best, and the improvisational venturesomeness that characterized the Allman Brothers at peak form was absent.

After spending most of the decade slugging it out on the bar circuit, a situation unimaginable in the early-to-mid-’70s, when the Allman Brothers were one of the preeminent acts in rock, Allman seemed to be trying to minimize risks and maximize contemporary acceptability, only to reap tepid results.

There was nothing mixed or tepid about the Gregg Allman Band on Monday night. The 250 or so fans who skipped the Fourth of July fireworks in favor of Allman’s early set at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano got to see one of the most explosive displays of all.

There was special reason to cheer as Allman and band declared independence from ‘80s trends and returned to tough blues and jazz-like instrumental explorations. What’s more, in the course of his 75-minute show, Allman launched three new songs that had almost as much sparkle and sizzle as the string of splendid skyrockets he appropriated from the Allman Brothers’ chest of time-tested incendiaries.

Like the Allman Brothers’ best performances, this success was a team effort. Dan Toler, the stocky guitarist, has clearly come into his own after spending 10 years playing in the shadow of former Allman Brothers guitar mainstay Dicky Betts. Toler first emerged as second guitarist in a Betts side project, Great Southern, then followed Betts into a revamped, unhappy Allman Brothers lineup that gave its last gasp in 1981.

Toler offered no grimaces, body contortions or other histrionics. He merely supplied every substantive quality one could ask from a guitarist: economy (even though Toler had ample solo space in which to stretch out, he didn’t waste a note), a crisp tone, a keen sense of dynamics and the ability to burn like a kitchen fire.

Tim Heding’s electronic keyboards added a touch of jazz-rock fusion, but he also was capable of bluesy banging. Bassist Bruce Waibel and the two-man percussion team of David (Frankie) Toler (Dan’s brother) and Chaz Tripy achieved the cascading rhythms that characterized the early Allman Brothers.

Several years of bar-slogging behind Allman has made this band a tightly meshed, imposing unit. When saxophonist Benny Wallace stepped in to provide free-wailing solos and sax-guitar tradeoffs on such older Brothers standards as “Hot ‘Lanta” and “One Way Out,” it became even more imposing.

Allman himself was the match that touched off the fuse. He led the way early in the show with a raspy, roaring vocal on “It’s Not My Cross to Bear,” focusing a bluesman’s magnifying glass on the emotional flashpoint where anxiety turns into ferocity.

“Just Before the Bullets Fly,” the title song of Allman’s forthcoming new album, was a fine, contemporary blues with an affirmatively chunky rhythm conveying the confidence of a well-tested survivor. “Demons” offered more straight blues with a bright, brassy swing, and the other new song, “Fear of Falling,” was the sort of soulful, direct ballad of troubled love at which Allman excels.

By mid-set, with his band in peak form, Allman seemed less like a bandleader than an equal, thoroughly pleased participant. He shared smiles and approving gestures (like blowing on his fingers after one of Toler’s blazing guitar bits), and spent much of the time leaning inward from the stage-left perch where he sat behind his old-fashioned, warm-toned Hammond B-3 organ. It was as if Allman wanted to be as close as possible to the fine heat radiating from his musicians.

It was a hot July for Allman 15 years ago when the Allman Brothers Band and two other real Monsters of Rock--the Band and the Grateful Dead--drew 600,000 people to the Watkins Glen Summer Jam in upstate New York. If Monday’s show in a far-from-packed nightclub was indicative of the quality of his new album, Allman deserves to regain a prominent place in rock.