Pop Music Review : Tepper Swaps Weirdness for Song-Serving Simplicity

After playing with two of the most determinedly individualistic musicians in the history of pop--Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits--it’s only fitting that Moris Tepper’s music bears no relation to his work for his former employers.

In place of the maddeningly complex, angular guitar work Tepper brought to such Beefheart albums as “Ice Cream for Crow” and Waits’ “Frank’s Wild Years,” his performance at UC Irvine’s well-hidden Zot Spot Cafe on Wednesday night focused on his own stubbornly original folk-based songwriting.

Rather than the thorny thickets of sound he’s known for (by a small number of fans, granted, though at least one person in Wednesday’s audience hummed Beefheart bass lines between songs), Tepper applied a song-serving simplicity to his acoustic guitar, banjo and mandolin awork. While not quite ready for the “genius” label attached to his mentors’ music, Tepper’s faith in his songs was well placed.

His music might be comparable to the folk forays of fellow L.A. musician Peter Case, but only inasmuch as he is hewing his own path through a musical wilderness. Tepper’s songs used touches of Japanese koto music, skewed circus tunes, jug band music, Irish balladry and even an adapted anthem from the Boer War as a set-closer, but he pulled the disparate styles together into an impassioned package.

That feat was abetted by an empathetic trio (which should have been a quartet, but its bass player was presumed lost on the highway) composed of former Motels drummer Brian Glascock, keyboardist Louis Durra and multi-instrumentalist Tom Roach. With their assistance, Tepper found an emotional heart in arrangements--using jaw harps, concertinas, duck calls, slide whistles and sundry--that might have seemed errant novelties in other hands.

With a straining voice that bears some relation to the Waterboys’ Mike Scott, Tepper’s vocal on “Man Overboard” detailed the plight of homelessness, but with a wry eye for the things its narrator has lost: “I even had my own front lawn.”

“When I Dream” placed the tale of a crumbled relationship into the sort of jaunty, jangly arrangement little heard since Dylan’s “Please Crawl Out Your Window.”

Tepper’s most pointed song, “Dead Presidents,” applied a Scottish flair to a lyric on the way money can color one’s feeling for living:

Life is always the same

You have to drive to the doctor in the pouring rain

Life never seems to make as much sense

As when you have a pocketful of dead presidents.