POP MUSIC REVIEW : Eddie Money: Easy to Digest, Forget

Since Eddie Money has been serving up an unvariegated diet of mainstream, meat-and-potatoes rock ‘n’ roll for about 11 years now, it wasn’t surprising that his performance at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim on Thursday evening came off as somewhat processed and microwaved.

With the debut “Eddie Money” album in 1977, the ex-cop/singer from the Bay Area seemed a budget version of Robert Palmer, offering a similar throatful of husky blue-eyed-soul but bypassing the challenging exotic twists of Palmer’s music.

Having since experienced career shallows, Money now (as he has confirmed in recent interviews) is even more of a good company boy, essentially recording what his label tells him in the radio-ready manner they specify.

That compliance carried into his 19-song show, making it easy to enjoy but easier to forget. While he and his five-piece band (including longtime guitar sidekick Jimmy Lyon) performed competently and with a requisite amount of rock-star shakes, the show seemed precooked, a notion reinforced by the occasional use of taped rhythm tracks and background vocals.

Money was all over the stage throughout the show, shedding jackets, high-fiving audience members, blowing adequate sax from a variety of heroic postures and ending nearly every song with an arms-spread “love me, huh?” gesture. But despite all the motion, his voice never broke sufficiently free from the recorded versions of his songs to convince that there was much emotion behind it.

While that lack of presence scarcely mattered on such persuasive pop-rockers as “Let Me In,” “No Control” and “Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” more vocal-reliant numbers such as “Baby Hold On” came off as lifeless. He was stronger on the anti-drug “Dancing With Mr. Jitters” (Money is on a much-publicized comeback from cocaine and alcohol addiction) than on most numbers, but even that close-to-home lyric seemed to be lacking in vocal conviction.

Ivan Neville’s opening set was impressive not so much for what the young singer-keyboardist-guitarist is now as it was for the tremendous potential shown in his music. Although there was clearly room for improvement in both the material and delivery of his 40-minute set, there was a freshness and passion at work that promise good things.

Unlike his father Aaron Neville’s legendary songbird falsetto, Ivan’s lower voice shows touches of Huey Lewis, Terence Trent D’Arby and Bruce Hornsby, but with a distinctive raw edge that should save it from middle-of-the-road pop play lists.

Some songs, such as the opening “Up to You,” seemed ill-defined, but others carried an invention and pop punch suggesting that Neville, like Bob Marley’s son Ziggy, may find a mainstream pop success that has been denied his father.

In contrast to Money’s overt showmanship, Neville rarely moved from the microphone, but he provided more than enough action with his voice. Both the gritty “Money Talks” and the pop-bent “Not Just Another Girl” proved forceful throat-shredders. His most powerful concert song, “Out in the Streets,” opened and closed with a churchy call-and-response.

The New Orleans native is a veteran of Bonnie Raitt’s band and has spent considerable time sitting in with his father’s and uncles’ band, the Neville Brothers, perhaps the funkiest group ever to stroll the planet.

It’s strange, then, that the biggest debit to Neville’s set was that his four-piece band didn’t swing very much. Several of his songs Thursday were diluted by an inability of Neville and company to lock into the sort of grooves that propel the tracks on record.