MUSIC REVIEW : The Cult’s Irvine Show Is Long on Style but Short on Substance

Try though he might, Ian Astbury is no Jim Morrison, nor is his band, the Cult, even a palpable flashback of the late ‘60s grunge psychedelia it emulates. At Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre Saturday night, however, Astbury did reach into rock’s incense-smoked past to dredge up a relic so horrific that even the hardiest retro-rockers have shied from its flared visage.

That’s right: Astbury was wearing bell-bottoms.

That may have been the boldest statement of the show. Where 20 years ago Morrison and the Doors, at their best, pushed at the boundaries of rock and the performer-audience relationship, Astbury merely pushed familiar buttons. Indeed, the band’s 90-minute set seemed carefully crafted to avoid the chance of sparking an original thought in any of the 15,000 young minds in the audience.

Instead, the L.A.-based Brits offered a show so contrived and formulated that it bore roughly the same relationship to real rock that wrestling does to professional sports. Opening with the Cult playing behind a modest wall of flame and closing with a series of above-stage explosions, it was all pose and no substance, pre-scripted from a lowest-common-denominator grab bag of rock cliches.

Given that, it wasn’t a bad sham. Astbury has a natural rock voice; beyond his mock-Morrison spoken drawl, he also has a bit of Morrison’s vocal huskiness, used to good effect on the yelping “Peace Dog,” “Fire Woman” and “Sun King,” which also featured an electric-bass-and-kettle-drum duet. Rising from his noisy incompetency of a couple of years back, guitarist Billy Duffy proved a deft craftsman, filling every inch of the Cult’s musical canvas with a textured sonic wallpaper of droning leads, heavy riffs and wah-wah excursions.

One other thing must be said for Astbury: He’s the king-hell hair-whip champion of the world. While singer Fiona and other pretenders may toss their tresses around with more aplomb, they approach neither the whiplash-heedless abandon of Astbury’s wrenching head flings nor the sheer quantity of them. His head was bobbing like one of those perpetual-motion birds nearly throughout the show, which concluded in a stunning display of hair-aerobics. Over a riff-heavy instrumental, he jerked his head and dark locks forward and back exactly 100 times in fast order.

As if that weren’t enough for rock godhood, he also repeatedly exhorted the crowd to get down, on the evolutionary scale no less. “I want to see (expletive) Neanderthals out there!” he encouraged at one point. Judging from the blanket of bottles and cans in the Irvine Meadows parking lot, and the $4.50 beers sloshing over the $20 Cult T-shirts inside, the fans were doing their best to comply.

Leading into “Fire Woman,” Astbury turned wistful for a moment: “The world, she’s a fragile thing. All the young people look to Southern California; they all look to see what you’re doing.” Hey wait! Was he going to go ecological on us now? Nah. “I want to see you (expletive) rock and roll now!” he concluded.

Later, during the encore of “Outlaw,” he vilified the security staff and urged the audience forward, declaring, “This is our (expletive) space!” Perhaps 20 fans answered by climbing onto the stage, only to be tackled by the band’s own crew, with nary a complaint from Astbury. Sheesh, folks, it’s not like he meant it or anything.

Austin’s Dangerous Toys preceded the Cult and proved that even that Texas bastion of independence isn’t immune from MTV-bred conformity. Jason McMaster is a high-caliber screecher, and the band played with more verve than anyone else on the bill, but its eight-song set--including the KNAC fave “Sport’n a Woody”--still sounded like a groove-worn copy of “Led Zeppelin I.”

Opening the show were metal act Tora Tora and former Sex Pistol Steve Jones. In a six-song set drawn largely from his current “Fire and Gasoline” album, Jones and his four-piece outfit sounded like nothing so much as a Southern boogie band with the musicianship extracted. Though Jones long ago became that which he once reviled, he keeps finding new avenues of expressing his complacency, the latest, on Saturday, being a series of Ted Nugent action poses.