POP REVIEW : Bowie’s Latest Act: Just a Regular Guy

David Bowie has made a career out of pretending to be one thing or another, so it wasn’t as simple as it seemed when he told a charged-up audience at the Roxy on Friday that he was “having a ball” playing for them.

He probably was. The unannounced show at the 500-capacity room on the Strip marked the first time that the English rock giant has played a small club in Los Angeles, and the sneak-attack tactics (tickets only went on sale earlier that day) and the event aura contributed to an excitement that Bowie and his band Tin Machine sucked up and fed back with mounting intensity.

But the parade of personas that Bowie has adopted and shed for 20 years inspires a certain suspicion. He was acting like a regular guy, but was it just the latest pose in the series (rock star stops shaving and rediscovers the source of the music’s joy and power)?

Maybe so. But as he did with Ziggy Stardust, Bowie at the Roxy registered as both theatrical experience and as the human being behind it.

The persona this time is that of royalty sneaking away and having real fun with real people, a “Prince and the Pauper” wish-fulfillment in which he finally enjoys the earthy pleasures he’s been denied by his station.

Bowie is really pushing the idea that he’s just one of the boys. Like the new album, the Roxy marquee billed the act as “Tin Machine,” with no mention of his name. When the quintet strolled onto the stage for the first of Friday’s two shows, it was bassist Tony Sales who greeted the crowd and introduced the musicians. They all clowned around and roughhoused and pretended that Bowie was from Kentucky.

And the one-hour set consisted of 13 of the 14 songs on the “Tin Machine” album, plus a tune sung by drummer Hunt Sales. Period. Not even a glancing reference to any other phase of Bowie’s career. Though the crowd groaned when the band declined to encore, there had been no audible calls for Bowie classics during the set. That was the implied contract: You can see us in a little club, but we get to play just what we want and it won’t necessarily be your favorites.

Theatricality as such was at a minimum, perhaps in atonement for his last swing through town with the “Glass Spider” show, a misguided mess of props and sets and dancers whose garish excess and suffocating calculation obscured everything good about him.

At the Roxy, Bowie simply planted himself and sang, centering Tin Machine’s stormy playing with a voice that’s gruffer than his old sharp-edged delivery, but strong enough to hold firm in this thundering setting. Though there’s a back-to-basics tone to this music--it’s all bruising guitar rock ‘n’ roll, with a roughness recalling the very early “Man Who Sold the World” album--it’s not all that simple.

The new songs cover familiar Bowie territory: society in decay, and the psychic underpinnings of the breakdown. There’s an elevated urgency this time as he depicts a corrupt world sinking into savagery, idiocy and numbness, where sex and love are both a desperate relief and just another symptom.

Tin Machine is a fittingly freakout-prone ensemble, quite up to the task of stating Bowie’s case in an unmistakable, brink-of-chaos musical language. On top of the Sales brothers’ loose-limbed rhythm section, guitarist Reeves Gabrels and supplementary guitarist Kevin Armstrong lurched and churned and wrapped every phrase thick with barbed-wire guitar lines. When they flew off into private solos, it was like muscle pulling away from bone.

The really eccentric and striking thing about this lurching, churning sound is the way the pieces stretch and bend unexpectedly, distorted through some crazy lens, or jerk to a near-stop as if they stepped in something. This is music that responds to its own imperatives, not to rules or expectations.

And like the best of Bowie’s canon, it paradoxically invigorates and affirms as it rises from the muck.

The man who fell down-to-Earth? You better believe it.