POP MUSIC REVIEW : McCabe’s Comes Up With Second ‘Three Women’ Series of Singers

Hats off to McCabe’s and its unofficial “three women” series, which a few weeks ago offered the triumphant triumvirate of Victoria Williams, Exene Cervenka and Johnette Napolitano, and followed it up Friday with Cindy Lee Berryhill, Julie Christensen and Texacala Jones. The women on each bill have had little in common save their city, their gender and their rugged individualism--which is enough to justify a bill, no?

Leading off Friday’s triple-header was Berryhill, the only one of the three with a solo album out and the only one to perform alone. Berryhill’s folkie style was exceedingly casual, half-sung, half-spoken, jokey--perhaps too jokey, if you’ve seen her perform “Baby (Should I Have the Baby?)” again and again, still laughing at her own gags each time.

Still, Berryhill hits as often as she misses in her often spontaneous novelty song/raps. And the few times she got halfway serious without too many beat-poet pretensions creeping in made you want to hear her with a bit more of a straight face some time.

Christensen--of Divine Horsemen and recent Leonard Cohen tour fame--proved the least eccentric and most vocally gifted of the three. She’s also the most likely to do something really commercial and soulful someday, and she looked more like a lovely chanteuse at the Vine St. Bar & Grill (which, indeed, she has been) than an ex-punk band singer. Backed by jazzy piano and stand-up bass, Christensen blissfully tore through some bluesy balladry from her own pen, as well as from sources like Elvis Costello and Billy Steinberg-Tom Kelly.

Proving too grating at evening’s end for some fleeing patrons was the ragged-but-wrong country-folk of Jones, former frontwoman for Tex & the Horseheads. Jones and her fiddle/guitar/drums-backing trio played what could only be described as Appalachian drug music, with affection for tradition but messiness and the threat of danger in execution.