POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Lone Troubadour Evokes Old Bruised Romanticism

While the notion of what constitutes folk music has not been quite the same since Bob Dylan plugged in with a band in the mid-1960s, there still is much to be said for the voice of the lone troubadour, and a strong case was made by Dylan contemporary Eric Andersen on Thursday night at Bogart’s in Long Beach.

As part of the East Coast folk boom that produced Dylan, Phil Ochs and others, Andersen had been one of the first to turn from the politicized cant of the day to more personal subject matter. While he never achieved major success, his songs were covered by Judy Collins, theBlues Project and others, and his recording career spanned into the late ‘70s.

With songs drawn largely from his comeback “Ghosts Upon the Road” album, Andersen, working alone with a guitar and mouth harp, was able to evoke the solitary wanderer’s acute vision and bruised romanticism that marked his best early work.

That was no mean task, as the “Ghosts” album comes laden with a Winnebago-load of overly portentous and dramatized arrangements (provided chiefly by Suzanne Vega’s band and producer). In that context, some of Andersen’s current songs, similar to recent Leonard Cohen releases, seem crushed by their self-importance.

But released by Andersen’s direct stage delivery and evocative voice, “Listen to the Rain” spoke of solace with a delicate beauty, while the down-scaled “Too Many Times (I Will Try)” came across as an intensely personal anthem of perseverance, speaking in succinct lines of the mistrust of one’s own emotions that can come with mid-life: “Too many times I tried to love and not believe my eyes.”

Announced as a “murder ballad” for persons tired of love songs, the half-spoken “Trouble in Paris” favorably recalled Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” narrative style.

In the 13-song set--which also contained “More Often Than Not” and “Sheila” from 1972’s “Blue River” album, and the mid-’60s “Close the Door Lightly When You Go”--the only number that didn’t connect was Andersen’s other narrative opus, the 10-minute autobiographical narrative “Ghosts on the Road.”

Again, it was more effective delivered in the show’s conversational tone than in the album’s oratorical pronouncements.

Still, the performance didn’t make up for the lack of small details and insights needed to breathe life into the story of his early scuffling days.