POP WEEKEND : Cameo Flounders, Finds Groove, Rocks the House

Friday night at the Celebrity Theatre was shaping up about as well for Cameo as Super Bowl Sundays have for the Denver Broncos.

Nathan Leftenant, one of the veteran funk band’s core trio of singers, was out sick, leaving the remaining 11 members to face a sea of empty orange chair backs in a 2,500-seat hall that looked at least two-thirds empty. Cameo hit the stage and spent 20 minutes wandering through a grooveless desert marked by a whanging metallic guitar solo, a muscle-bound drum solo, and song snippets too meager to establish a firm, funky direction. The singing sounded pretty iffy, too. The fans, meanwhile, sat on their hands.

At this point, a lot of bands would have decided it was time to turn in a real cameo job and hurry through the motions to end the misery. But a band doesn’t last 13 years, as Cameo has, without having a certain amount of gumption. In a fine show of leadership, Cameo’s strapping, muscular, Gorgon-haired main man, Larry Blackmon, broke the band down to the basic elements of funk--a hammering drum beat and booming bass--and rallied the fans to their feet.

Blackmon had come off as something less than sincere early on when he greeted the dormant audience by saying: “Thank you for having us, we’re enjoying every minute of it.” Manners count, Larry, but it’s obvious that any host who throws an under-attended party is going to feel less than ecstatic. In what ought to be a great lesson to showmen and politicians everywhere, Blackmon won the fans over and jump-started the party by leveling with them.

“There’s only a few of us in here, but it’s as if the whole place is filled, as far as we’re concerned,” he said--then backed up his words with charging energy as he exhorted the crowd with the help of a hard-core beat. With the fans up and dancing, Cameo stretched out the number, “Back and Forth,” and firmly established the long-absent groove.

The elements came together from there. A few more tough funk numbers dug the foundation deeper. Then Cameo was free to slow the pace a bit. “She’s Strange,” mysterious yet still funky, was a nice departure. So was a ballad turn by guest vocalist William Morris. Morris provided the touch of melismatic pop-soul bel canto one doesn’t get from Blackmon or his co-vocalist, Tomi Jenkins (Blackmon’s idiosyncratic nasal twang sounds like a cross between John Lee Hooker going “how how how” and Sly Stone drawling into his vocoder).

The second half of the 75-minute show did feature some nice ensemble vocal work, as well as many of the catchy little synthesizer hooks that are a Cameo trademark. Drummer Buster Marberry’s bludgeoning approach was ill-suited to some songs that called for subtlety, but he was perfect for the all-out funk of the show-closing hits, “Word Up” and “I Want It Now.” Aaron Mills’ bass thumped with such a convincing percussive thud that he might have been shooting mortar shells rather than notes, and every man in the lineup showed a willingness to embody the funk as well as play it--especially Charlie Singleton, the lanky, rock-oriented guitarist whose black paramilitary garb made him look like a deserter from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation army.

On its records, craftsmanship, rather than inspired songwriting, has made Cameo a reliably strong-selling act. This show underscored another attribute that has allowed it to keep a high-ranking spot in R & B: a determined work ethic and a desire to rock the house under any circumstance.