Pop Music : Julee Cruise Offers Disembodied Innocence, David Lynch Style

Julee Cruise, from all appearances, is one of those girls who got killed in that spate of ‘60s fatal-teen-car-crash pop songs, gone to heaven now to become a true teen angel, but still gooey in love.

Floating away into the night, she continues to bestow blessings upon her beloved, sounding even more ethereal, beatific and distant now than the lonesome cry of a Roy Orbison ballad coming out of a mono car radio.

At the Japan America Theatre on Friday night, it was easy to see how Cruise is the embodiment of film and television director David Lynch’s fantasy of disembodied innocence. As the delicate doll in the evening dress who’s not quite of this world or this prom, Cruise sang not in her own strong voice--in interviews, she’s characterized herself as being by nature “a belter”--but in the wispy, fuzzy, impossibly soft one created for her by Lynch (who wrote the lyrics to all the songs) and composer Angelo Badalamenti.

Much is made over Lynch’s “dark and troubling things” side, but less discussion is devoted to his equally dreamy sense of all-out romanticism. The bluebird-of-happiness ending of “Blue Velvet” was not a joke, and teen lovers James and Donna of “Twin Peaks” seem to be a match made in pure soul-kiss heaven, a perfect pairing right out of an innocent ‘50s pop song. Which is where Cruise, the house singer of the Lynchian nightclub, comes in.

In direct proportion to Lynch’s ‘50s-meets-the-’90s ethos, Cruise seems ageless and eraless, the teen dream made eternal. Lynch’s lyrics aren’t going to win him any songwriters’ awards--he’s deliberately simple and banal, and mixes metaphors as freely as decades--but he is effective at suggesting the kind of early pop-rock that expressed romantic longing as not so much sexual as hyper-spiritual, as if going steady were crucial to world peace.

Badalamenti has used tremolo guitars, saxes and doo-wop vocals to further suggest that ‘50s/early ‘60s time, while slowing down the tempo to a complete crawl and taking it to multi-synth heaven. All this can seem hopelessly campy or happily nostalgic, depending on your predisposition.

The audience at the Japan America was a mixture of young sophisticates who seemed to have strolled down from the nearby artists’ district, along with “Twin Peaks” fanatics, who were treated to some instrumental numbers from the show.

Though it benefited in some ways from live performance, there’s a stiffness to the music that the band, which appeared to be made up of pro pickup musicians, couldn’t quite transcend.

The three synthesizer players, in their dark suits and skinny ties, evoked a slight Kraftwerk vibe, staring intently at cloaked banks of keys in the dark. But the potential for sterility was thankfully undercut by sax player Bruce Heron soloing at length, and drummer Scott Jarvis managed to get some nice brooding energy out of his necessarily quiet brush work.

Cruise herself remained a cipher. The few times she spoke to the audience, it was typical thanks-for-coming-out-L.A. sentiments, and almost seemed like an actress breaking her role. This show was all about Cruise the invented character, not Cruise the real person. But if the dated pop associations that mean something to Lynch mean something to you too, some real emotion--real romanticism, even--was bound to break through the conceptual artificiality. Here’s to James and Donna.