ORANGE COUNTY POP REVIEW : Quaid as Roots Rocker Offers No Threat to Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Lee Lewis is not a man given to understatement.

But the first words he ever spoke to Dennis Quaid--as reported in this month’s Esquire magazine--put the Killer in the running for understatement of the year: “Son, you can’t sing like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Judging from his performance Monday night at Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach, Quaid’s singing isn’t even up to the yeomanly standard of hundreds of roots rockers who eke out their livings in obscure blues and rock ‘n’ roll dives across the land--let alone the caliber of Lewis, the rock Hall-of- Famer Quaid portrays in the upcoming movie “Great Balls of Fire.”

As front man of the Eclectics, a first-rate collection of Los Angeles players that includes three members of Bonnie Raitt’s touring band, actor Quaid apparently is earnest about establishing a side-career for himself as a purveyor of roots rock. Playing to a sold-out, overwhelmingly female crowd, Quaid--who played nondescript piano and rhythm guitar--showed off a wide-ranging taste for roots-music forms and a hearty sense of enjoyment in playing them. But he didn’t prove that he can do a professional job of performing the music he enjoys, and he didn’t cut an especially confident or charismatic figure.

Maybe this was just a bad night for him, but Quaid’s hoarse, scratchy, tuneless voice was far from big, and never easy. His singing was serviceable on rowdy zydeco and blues numbers that let him get by with belting rather than singing. But when Quaid came to ballads requiring nuance, range and control, he could offer only more belting.

That probably didn’t matter to the segment of the audience that shrieked with delight simply to be within a bra’s toss of an icon of male sex appeal (yes, a single bra was tossed Quaid’s way during a questionable bit of beefcake burlesque that found him slithering suggestively on top of his piano. It probably was intended as self-parody of Quaid’s sex-symbol stature, but it came off as pandering).

Thanks to Quaid’s fellow Eclectics, those who wanted some musical fun to go with the celebrity-worship wound up being able to have a fairly good time, too. Quaid sang about two-thirds of the songs in the 80-minute set, leaving some of the vocals in the more capable hands of Steve Conn, the keyboards player and accordionist, and Johnny Lee Schell, the fine guitarist from Raitt’s band. Schell’s “Love Will Make It Right” was a first-class blues rocker, as tough as it was catchy. Raitt herself sat in for two songs at mid-set, contributing classy slide guitar and harmony vocals.

Overall, the Eclectics were a little too eclectic. Their handling of Cajun-Zydeco, rolling New Orleans R&B;, Chuck Berry-style rock and straight blues forms was welcome, and they came up with a zesty finale cribbed from the classic “Gloria” garage-band riff. But attempts at Latin-tinged cabaret music and the lounge balladry that accompanied Quaid’s piano-top routine moved beyond the eclectic into the needlessly eccentric.

To Quaid’s credit, he didn’t try to milk the Jerry Lee Lewis songs and Killer persona that his fans will be flocking to see in movie theaters. But beyond his winning, boyish smile, there wasn’t anything distinctive in Quaid’s approach to carving out a role for himself as a musical front man. His between-songs comments, along the lines of “Feel all right?” and “Everybody wanna rock ‘n’ roll?” were from the most tired and impersonal bar-band script.

Lacking the musical strengths to command attention, this movie star, clad in jeans and a Sun Records T-shirt, just wasn’t much to watch.

Some might beg to differ, of course.

“Did you see his arms?” one woman asked in the parking lot after the show. “Didn’t he have wonderful arms?”