POP MUSIC REVIEW : Graham Brown’s Prefab Passion Dilutes His Songs

While it’s fun to carp on about the importance of country music’s respecting and drawing on its roots, it is also mildly refreshing that the ‘60s soul-influenced music of T. Graham Brown has found a niche on the slick surface of the contemporary country charts. There was a time in U.S. music when such a cross-pollination of musical styles was far more common, and it certainly didn’t hurt the vitality of the music.

Brown’s 20-song set at the Crazy Horse Steak House and Saloon on Monday did not give even the slightest nod of a cowboy hat to country tradition--not that Brown had such a hat; he sported a shiny blue ‘60s soul suit and shades. His fine-grit vocals came straight from Memphis rather than Nashville, and there was nary a country lick heard from his five-piece band, the Hardtops.

The show opened with the self-touting rocker “We Tote the Note” from his soon-to-be-released “Bumper to Bumper” album, with lyrics explaining how nice they are to bring their music to our town. He featured five other songs from the new disc, including “Moonshadow Road,” a Bob Seger-esque back-seat-nostalgia song delivered with a Don Henley-esque vocal. His older efforts included “I Tell It Like It Used to Be,” “Darlene,” “Don’t Go to Strangers,” “I Wish I Could Hurt That Way Again” and “RFD 30529,” a salute to his parents.

While pleasant enough, Brown’s performance was also a goodly emotional distance from the Stax Records soul style he emulates. His vocals are featured in a recent Taco Bell commercial, and it’s indicative of the depth of Brown’s art that he put at least as much feeling into repeating his ode to corporate foodstuffs as he did in singing his own songs. Brown’s band avoided the overplaying that mars many ersatz soul bands, but their lounge-ready rote performance did nothing to spur him to any greater emotional effort.

That prefab passion was sufficient to raise his “Come as You Were” and the new “Bring a Change” (a “We Are the World-ish” anthem) to a near-Huey Lewis level of undemanding enjoyableness. But his covers of soul-geyser Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Dock of the Bay” had so little fire they could have been safely stored next to gasoline.