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POP MUSIC REVIEW : Mel Tillis in Full Swing at Crazy Horse

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Mel Tillis could solve the riddle of the Sphinx and put amanned probe on Mars and he’d probably still be known as “that guy who stutters.” His performance Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House spoke eloquently of his accomplishments in country music, but many more people still know him by his speech impediment than as the author of “Detroit City,” “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and other classics.

The 75-minute performance showed the veteran performer is still a solid, if not singular, country singer and a commanding bandleader.

It was accomplishment enough just to shoehorn his huge 15-piece band onto the Crazy Horse stage. At a time when many performers are cutting back--with the economy compelling some to tour solo--Tillis seems to be employing half of Nashville and equiping it to the hilt. (There were two Kurzweil synthesizers on stage, each of which costs as much as a down payment on a house.)

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The show was nearly as set and structured as Disney’s Bear Country Jamboree, but any stiffness stopped when the music started. There are some fine players in Tillis’ Statesiders, as they had ample opportunity to prove in the show’s several Western swing numbers.

Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa” and “San Antonio Rose,” Tex Williams’ swing-derived “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” and other tunes showed the advantages of having a slew of fiddles, saxes, singers and hot guitarists handy. Not to be outdone, Tillis exhibited a real affection for the music in his vocals.

Tillis took such pleasure in doing other writers’ songs, one would scarcely know that he’s sitting on a catalogue of more than 500 of his own compositions.

Some of those he performed Monday, such as “Who’s Julie” and “Send Me Down to Tucson,” deal realistically with the ache of a love divided, while better times were conveyed in the mildly salacious “I’ve Got the Hoss” and “Good Woman Blues.”

He debuted two new songs. One was a comic look at the love triangle, he explained, of “a man, a woman, and a lawyer,” while the other was a serious view of a couple rekindling its fading love.

The only song to receive short shrift in the show was “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” which, impossible as it sounds, even Kenny Rogers has sung with more passion. Tillis’ version was too brisk and over-orchestrated to allow the lyrics any depth, to say nothing of the jolly burble of congas and trap drums that accompanied one verse.

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Tillis’ speech impediment has made him a real underdog and has provided him with so much comic material that he’s practically the Yakov Smirnoff of stutterers, feeding off the topic about as often as Smirnoff says “In Russia . . .”

And like the post-glasnost Smirnoff, Tillis’ between-song jests are nearly moot: He appears to have largely triumphed over his stammer; it surfaced Monday virtually only when he was joking about it.

Sympathy might be better reserved for his band members, who were uniformly attired in drab Kona coffee-colored suits that seemed designed specifically to discourage groupies.

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