POP MUSIC REVIEW : Axton Does Best on Road Less Traveled

Folk songs can seem such a common property, so much a part of a culture’s fabric, that it’s easy to forget that almost all of such songs were penned by a single person. Alongside such perennials as “On Top of Old Smokey” and “The Fish Cheer,” playgrounds now abound in the sounds of kids singing “Jeremiah was a bullfrog . . . ,” little knowing that the author of “Joy to the World” still walks among us.

Hoyt Axton has written any number of songs that may yet be passed down through the generations: His early-’60s “Greenback Dollar” (a hit for the Kingston Trio) has certainly held its value. His songbook encompasses some lovely ballads, ripping yarns and American tales, and it’s hardly his fault that it’s his fluff tunes--notably “Joy to the World,” popularized by Three Dog Night, and the Ringo hit “No No Song”--that have gained the widest acceptance.

Axton’s 19-song early show at the Crazy Horse Steak House on Monday featured both those songs, along with his familiar “Never Been to Spain” and some less-than-necessary covers of other writer’s songs. But he also led his five-piece band and female backup singer down some of his less-traveled and far more scenic lyrical byways.

He applied his low, grainy voice (not always faithfully reproduced by the club’s sound system) to Western spirit-evoking “Wild Bull Rider” and the romantic “The Lion in Winter.” Axton’s best moments came when his daughter April joined him to duet on a pair of lovely ballads, “The Bluebird” and “I Dream of Highways.” The latter song--a tale of love, a wandering spirit and a faltering tongue--found father and daughter singing in aching harmony, while Axton’s lead guitarist and fiddle player superbly doubled each other’s lines.

Axton took a relaxed approach to his performance, even when there were some false starts and flubs. He explained, “I figured a long time ago that if no one was trying to cut me or shoot me, the rest of it was all right.” As ever, he was brimming with jokes and repartee. When someone in the audience requested one of his older songs, he exclaimed, “Why, that was 100 pounds ago!”

While Axton plugged his current “Spin of the Wheel” album, he scarcely touched on its songs in his performance. He ignored his own tunes, singing only two of the album’s cover songs, a stately reading of Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight” that differed only slightly from the Band’s version, and an uptempo, Memphis-beat rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel,” the Elvis hit that Axton’s mother, Mae, co-penned in the ‘50s.

While perhaps not as stellar as the visit Dwight Yoakam and the Desert Rose Band’s Herb Pedersen paid Buck Owens on the Crazy Horse stage last week, Axton certainly had a surprising guest in the form of O.C. dance-music star Tiffany. It seems that before her current musical incarnation, she used to sing country at the club. Along with joining Axton’s daughter on the chorus of the encore “Joy to the World,” Tiffany performed “Stand By Your Man,” singing far better than her recordings generally would lead one to expect.