Brickell: A Kinder, Gentler Role Model

Willowy, teasing, wistful and unfashionably non-confrontational, Edie Brickell may be the living personification of what Soho would call a hippychick, though very little countercultural self-consciousness was evident in her unaffected, shy, informal style on Saturday at the Wiltern Theatre.

If not quite genuinely hippie-ish, at least she’s a paragon of post-modern nonviolent resistance: Brickell sang several songs, like “Nothing,” having to do with avoiding fights, judgment or anger, and her famous plea to get strangled in the shallow water before she gets too philosophical was followed in the encore by her version of David Bowie’s futuristically masochistic admonition to “Put your ray gun to my head.” Not since Melanie advised a generation to lay themselves down. . . .

Brickell and her band, the New Bohemians, attracted roving packs of college girls who were delighted to have in this long-legged, torn-jeans-clad Texan a role model a little kinder and gentler than Madonna. “I don’t believe in hatred anymore,” she sang late in the set, and a tie-died girl in the third row formed her hands into peace signs.

It may help foster this image that the New Bohemians have been sired in some of their instrumental ways by the Grateful Dead. But they’re also grounded in the ‘90s with pop songs that are generally compact--if often progressively structured--and sentiments that are, while sentimental, also frequently tough-minded, to Brickell’s credit.

Blue Rodeo opened with an uneven but likeable set that managed to invoke the Byrds without the benefit of 12-string guitars, and, in a wild Manzarek-style organ solo, vintage Doors.