He’s a Real-Life Family Man

As boy-meets-girl becomes less of a mandatory song theme in the post-baby boom era, the family unit is finally beginning to get its lyrical due--evident in the recent work of that great ‘80s triumvirate of rock singer/songwriters Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and John Hiatt, all three of whom have mused at length on the parent/child relationship.

Not that the three are likely to agree on approach. Costello is most likely to write about developing family enmity and distrust. Springsteen has a legendary penchant for telling long stories in concert about his uneasy bonding with his father as a teen in a slow, grave tone that borders on the self-mythological.

And Hiatt? No myth-making here. He’s every neighbor kid’s favorite goofball dad, trapped somewhere between “Father Knows Best” and hardened reality, caught between a rock and a Harriet. Unlike his aforementioned contemporaries, Hiatt is the only one to actually write about being a father (he’s one three times over). He used his sold-out appearance Thursday at the Wiltern with his band, the Goners, as a forum for some expertly comic soliloquies on parenthood and its discontents.

During “Slow Turning,” the title song from his latest album, Hiatt pantomimed having one hand on the steering wheel and the other around his honey, only to have his sweet nothings interrupted by the sound of the kids in the back seat “bangin’ like Charlie Watts.”

Another digression during “Your Dad Did” had Hiatt regressing back to childhood, sweating out those last moments before Dad arrived home in the ’54 DeSoto to be informed by Mom what munchkin mischief went on that day.

Springsteen gives good Angst , but let’s see him play a 6-year-old some time.

Not that Hiatt is about to become rock’s answer to Bill Cosby, or anything quite as disturbingly acquiescent to a terminal middle-class mind set as that. Hiatt has come through considerable personal tragedy in his life--tragedy that he once satirized with bitter, angry humor--before finding the apparently happy family life that he could mock in a less savage tone.

And though Hiatt seemed determined Thursday to keep his Angry Young Man days behind him--completely avoiding all pre-1987 material and doing his fair share of bug-eyed mugging, wincing and wise-cracking--he also made clear that he’s not entirely the giddy, untroubled man his current public persona might suggest.

In introducing “It’ll Come to You,” a tart-tongued ditty about skeletons in one’s closet, Hiatt joked about his own inability to keep fevered nightmares of the past--and “that girl”--from capping off idyllic days with the nuclear family.

More tellingly, explaining the gospel-ish “Is Anybody There?,” the singer implied that the roots of his former alcoholism aren’t necessarily cured just because he’s put the bottle down and discovered domesticity: “This is a song about being lonely down in the basement and then feeling kinda silly ‘cause your wife and kids are right upstairs . . . (and then) you sneak up on (the kids) and say, ‘So . . . what do you think of me?’ ”

If the material from Hiatt’s two most recent albums is his sweetest, most forthcoming and most affirming of traditional values, it’s also--musically--his most raunchy. That bode well for the promise of its live translation, and the Goners did not disappoint, reproducing their own work from the “Slow Turning” album with only slightly more consistency than they approximated the fireworks of veterans like Ry Cooder on Hiatt’s 1987 “Bring the Family” LP.

Hiatt himself seems to be in better vocal shape each go-round and proved once more that (with a little competition from Don Dixon) he may well be the best black singer in a white body in rock ‘n’ roll. There’s not a little Al Green in his occasional falsetto and a whopping amount of Mick Jagger in his gritty slurring--never more evident than in the encore rendition of the Stones-y “Paper Thin,” with backup singer Ashley Cleveland stepping out to play Merry Clayton to Hiatt’s Jagger.

The single glaring flaw: For someone who has behind him perhaps the greatest body of mainstream pop songwriting this decade, Hiatt’s refusal to perform anything recorded before last year seemed curious at best and an affront to longtime fans (many of whom go back with him a decade) at worst. One would hope such a decision stems from a possible discomfort singing songs written in unhappier days, and not from a desire to promote only the current record company’s product.

Louisiana accordionist Jo-el Sonnier and band opened the show with a galvanizing party mix of country, Cajun and blues-rock, far more fiery than his recent major-label debut album would have suggested.

LIVE ACTION: Chicago will be at the Universal Amphitheatre on Feb. 24 and 24. Tickets go on sale Sunday. . . . Also on sale Sunday for the Universal is a Jan. 27 “Sounds of San Francisco” show featuring the Seeds, Moby Grape, Arthur Lee and Love and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. . . . A second Information Society show has been added at the Roxy for this Tuesday. Monday’s performance is sold out. . . . Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano will do a solo show at McCabe’s on Jan. 20, sharing a bill with Thelonious Monster’s Bob Forrest.