POP MUSIC REVIEW : Jones Lets His Blarney Get in the Way of a Good Cry

The unalienable rights of a country music fan include life, liberty and hearing George Jones sing about lovers caught up in the pursuit of unhappiness.

The problem with Jones’ show Saturday night at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim was that he didn’t pursue unhappiness single-mindedly enough. The foundation of Jones’ greatness is his ability to sing the most blatantly lachrymose, maudlin material and invest it with honesty, conviction and beauty.

But in a short, 50-minute concert (not counting 15 minutes of warm-up and sign-off by his band), Jones failed to dwell on heartbreak for even two consecutive numbers. The result was that he never established a proper groove in which the tears could flow, an intimate, lingering mood in which a sweet spell of commiseration could take hold.

Instead, Jones, 57, ran the program in a routinely showmanly way, alternating sprightly tunes with ballads in clockwork fashion from beginning to end. Three up-tempo bluegrass instrumentals served only to keep the oscillating pattern going, or perhaps to provide a rest for Jones, who apologized several times for bronchitis and for taxing his voice with a cigarette habit.

“I’ve just got to quit smokin,’ ” he confessed at one point--and it would hardly be George Jones if he wasn’t grappling with some sort of career-hampering vice (infamous for his bouts with the bottle, Jones assured his near-capacity audience that the cup he was sipping from between songs contained nothing but ice water).

In fact, Jones’ singing didn’t betray any obvious signs of an abused or infected voice box. The keening, high nasal passages that make his sad emoting sound real came through clear and strong on ballads like “The Right Left Hand” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Where others can sound contrived with typical catch-in-the-voice grandstanding, Jones is still able to make his firm but muted wail sound like a natural, dignified expression of pain.

The singer didn’t ring nearly so true when, acknowledging the cheers of a lively, appreciative audience, he gushed: “I’m liable to stay here till 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.” In fact, Jones was gone within the hour, having condensed four of his old hits into a medley because, he said, “we’re afraid we wouldn’t have time to get (the songs) in if we didn’t do it this way.” Most likely everybody in the house had their appointment books clear for the evening and could have stuck around for the full-length versions.

On the surface of it, Jones’ phony “play all night” pledge seems puzzling, especially from a performer honest enough to admit his insecurity about the effect that his smoking habit might be having on his voice.

But comments like Jones’--and he’s not the first performer to beat a quick retreat after promising the moon--betray another kind of insecurity. Maybe Jones wishes he had the resilience or the passion for performance to turn in a good, solid set that establishes moods and lets them evolve over the course of a string of first-class songs (certainly 30 years’ worth of hits both playful and tearful would allow for that).

Lacking the will, or maybe the stamina, the star indulges in wishful thinking--pleasant little lies that he would like to be true. But facts are not irrelevant things, and Jones should have served his fans a fuller, more thoughtfully sequenced show instead of flattering between-songs blarney.

It was still a full evening because of Vern Gosdin, who delivered a fine opening set of straightforward, understated honky-tonk. Gosdin, 54, also dwells on heartaches, and he turned his 45-minute performance into an intimate musical conversation that didn’t stray from the subject.

While keeping things varied by mixing in wry bits and picking up the tempo from time to time, Gosdin stuck to his theme and brought it home with a singing style that is low-keyed but still richly dynamic at all the right junctures. Gosdin reaped an emotional payoff at the end of his scar-studded exposition with a gospel-tinged affirmation of love’s healing power, and he exited to a well-deserved standing ovation.