O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Frankie & Annette: Shtick, Flimsy Pop

Friday the 13th was a nicely ironic day for Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello to open their first concert tour together. It brought to mind the gulf between teen exploitation then and teen exploitation now.

The innocent romance and endless fun in the warm California sun of their disposable beach movies made Frankie & Annette both an item and an icon to the popular mind of the early ‘60s. Wind the teen-flick reel forward a generation or so and we’ve gone from a chaste couple smooching in the sand to a homicidal demon in a hockey mask wreaking bloody mayhem on the sexually initiated young--the basic premise of the “Friday the 13th” series.

The premise of Frankie and Annette’s reunion tour, which began Friday afternoon on an outdoor stage at Knott’s Berry Farm, is a nostalgic return to innocence with a scrubbed, friendly all-American couple who grew to middle age without becoming mired in the unwholesomeness that started setting in when hair started growing long.

Funicello, now 47, talked about how she never toured before, despite Frankie’s urging, because she was too busy taking her three kids to Little League baseball games and shuttling them around in car pools. Avalon, 50, tossed out stale one-liners about what it’s like to be the father of eight children. “That’s with one wife, you know,” he noted in a straightforward tone, adding a wholesome dab of background paint to the show’s American dream portrait.

Frankie and Annette were a likable duo who seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s company and were willing to poke fun at their old selves. But their 50 minutes of silly, scripted shtick interspersed with some of the flimsiest pop hits of all time quickly eliminated any craving for a return to innocence. If songs like Funicello’s “Tall Paul” and Avalon’s “Why” are the stuff of wholesome pop, it’s a good thing corruption prevailed.

Avalon and Funicello both rose to success on a cleansing late-’50s tide that partly succeeded in taking dirty ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, the creation of blacks and wild Southern boys, and turning it into something safe and sanitized for well-bred kids from good suburban families. Of the hits they re-created, only Avalon’s “Venus” was worth hearing again.

Avalon, tanned and trim, presented the croon and patter of a Las Vegas lounge smoothie. It was a workmanlike, generic performance, without any distinguishing qualities. Watching Avalon on stage at Knott’s, it was easy to imagine any other handsome and competent middle-aged lounge singer or wedding-band pro standing in his place. Avalon was just lucky enough to have had Dick Clark in his corner when he was young.

The show rocked a wee bit on “California Sun,” a 1964 hit for the Rivieras, with Avalon doing a bit of back-to-back boogie with his guitar-playing son, Tony. Another son, Frank, played drums and, with his brother, served as an excuse for a get-a-haircut joke that was just one predictable slice from a whole moldy loaf of one-liners. Avalon’s humor was worse than stale when, after singing “Beauty School Drop-out,” from the film, “Grease,” he tried to make some sort of clever connection between grease and Mexicans. There is more wholesomeness in a hormonal, expletive-filled heavy-metal show than in that sort of ethnic humor.

Funicello sang like a Miss America contestant whose voice is not her strong suit. She was able to carry a tune in a thin, tinny voice, but after a while she was prone to drop it. The 11-member backing ensemble included three singers who were able to cover for Annette when she needed help.

Funicello’s solo spot (the concert sandwiched short solo bits between opening and closing duo sequences) included a half-sung, half-narrated country-style ballad that she wrote about her family’s move from New York state to the “promised land” of her California girlhood (Funicello said she started out intending to write a book instead of a mere song, but publishers weren’t interested in a tale so lacking in seamy details and glitz). Eventually, she said, “an angel appeared in the form of a man known to millions as Walt Disney” to take her off the stage of a school play and onto the set of the Mickey Mouse Club.

With her perpetual demure smile, Funicello still stands for the perky wholesomeness of a Disney girl. But there was something unsettling about seeing a middle-aged woman wearing a big pink bow in her hair. There ought to be a statute of limitations on some childhood trappings, even for a former Mouseketeer.