Pop Music Reviews : George Strait’s White-Bread Brand of Distillation

Let’s hope George Strait has had all his inoculations. If not, he’s bound to catch something from all those flower-bearing babes he kissed between songs Sunday at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

But then, the health risk was the only risk the big-grinnin’, big-hatted Texan took in a show marked by a superficial and safe nature that pretty much summed up the sad state of country music, 1989. And there’s no vaccination for vacuousness.

Sunday’s show left little doubt that the whistle-baiting hunk’s success is due as much to his looks as to his music--a Strait-arrow, white-bread distillation of Texas swing and honky-tonk, without a hint of the innovative genius associated with such pioneers as Bob Wills and Hank Williams.

Which isn’t to say that Strait and his solid Ace in the Hole Band are without merit. His voice is as shiny as his teeth, and the band has a natural feel for the styles. But you’d never know from their version of the Wills arrangement of “Milk Cow Blues” or from such facile Strait hits as “All My Exes Live in Texas” that Wills’ fusion of hillbilly music and swing jazz was explosive and inventive.

An even better (?) example of sanitized regression came from opening act Baillie & the Boys, which draws not upon country, but its very distant relative, ‘70s California pop a la Karla Bonoff and Wendy Waldman. Second-billed Kathy Mattea fared a bit better, thanks largely to her pure alto and winning personality. But there’s little in her twang-pop to distinguish her; these songs would sound the same done by any pure alto with a winning personality.