POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Busey Wants to Board the Starship Rock ‘n’ Roll

Gary Busey has never been cast in any of the “Star Trek” movies, but that’s not deterring him from trying to boldly go where no actor has gone before: to rock ‘n’ roll stardom.

Plenty of rockers have beamed up to the big screen, starting with Elvis (the Capt. Kirk of rock ‘n’ roll himself) to the Beatles up through Tina Turner and Sting. It’s successfully navigating the opposite direction that apparently requires greater warp drive.

Busey--who gained fame playing one of rock’s pioneers in “The Buddy Holly Story”--made his latest bid Sunday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, where he joined ex-Band members Rick Danko and Garth Hudson and assorted friends for the final show of a fleeting three-date Southland tour.

Busey was far more believable in the rock singer role than Dennis Quaid, the man who would be Killer in “Great Balls of Fire,” the upcoming film biography of Jerry Lee Lewis. Quaid-watchers will recall that he brought his own rock band, the Eclectics, to Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach for a dull concert in March, hinting that if he manages to project any charisma or rock authority in “Great Balls of Fire,” major credit will belong to the director.

Unlike Quaid, Busey has a decent singing voice. If he sounds reminiscent of any rocker, it would be Del Shannon, with a similarly clear, piercing tenor (although Shannon’s power and control are light years beyond Busey’s).

Beyond that, Busey possesses enough basic rock ‘n’ roll instincts that they lifted his performance above the level of one who is merely slumming. Busey apparently cares about this music, even if he did flub a lyric here and there. As a front man, he was obviously nervous and a bit stiff at the mike early on, but he soon felt comfortable enough to get a little chatty with the crowd.

Busey shouldn’t start thinking about trading in his Actor’s Equity card for a Musicians’ Union membership. But in the handful of numbers he led, he seemed to have a whale of a good time without embarrassing himself, or those he shared the stage with.

Although he did several of Buddy Holly’s hits, by the way, he made no attempt to invoke the late performer’s persona, as he did so effectively in the 1978 movie. He came across as a man who has spent a few nights in the house of Holly, not taken up full-time residence there.

Rick Danko, acting as master of ceremonies throughout the two-hour show, quickly established a living-room-jam-session-like ambiance, opening with a couple of sit-down, back-porch blues numbers for which he was joined by Jefferson Airplane stalwart Jorma Kaukonen on slide guitar.

Virtually vibrating with manic energy, Danko’s voice was nonetheless distressingly colorless, coarse and flat--early on. But eventually he hit his stride and illustrated the distinction between a competent rock singer, which Busey is, and a great one, which Danko can be when so inclined. He sounded most inclined in garden-fresh readings of “Twilight” and “It Makes No Difference,” pulled from a nostalgia-heavy song list that included a half-dozen Band chestnuts.

Garth Hudson contributed musical bits and pieces on keyboards and saxophones in his characteristically absent-minded-professor manner (in some dead language, Garth must mean “The Bearded One Who Never Utters a Word”). Actually, he looked remarkably like the mysterious gray-haired deity that the crew of the USS Enterprise encounters during its search for God in the new “Star Trek” movie.

In some way, the resemblance was more than coincidental: Hudson created entire worlds of beauty out of primordial chords fashioned by fingers that seemed to hold the musical wisdom of the universe.