O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Motorhead Mired in Promoter’s Bland Operation

It’s almost always bad form for a rock band to grouse on stage about how its new album isn’t selling, but Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister has a reasonable excuse.

It can’t be easy trekking around the country as the tangy mustard in an otherwise bland noise sandwich, which is Motorhead’s lot these days. Operation Rock & Roll, which played Irvine Meadows on Friday night, finds Motorhead stuck in the middle of a heavy metal bill whose headliners are a dated caricature (Judas Priest) and a rock vaudevillian who remains competent, but mired in the same old shtick (Alice Cooper).

Also along for the ride as early-evening filler are a faceless young speed metal act (Metal Church) and a pathetic Warrant wanna-be (Dangerous Toys). The five bands are chained together by business ties (all work for subsets of Sony Music) and economic fate (a limp economy in which promoters are trying to sell tickets with a more-is-better pitch).

Consequently, Motorhead had just 35 minutes to ply its crude but brutally effective brand of hard rock. The long-running British band commits aural thuggery, playing music the way the old Oakland Raiders played football. Big, bearded and malevolent-looking, singer-bassist Lemmy gets to play the part of that dastardly quarterback-eater, Ben Davidson.

Besides his brawn and his wheezing hack of a singing voice (it calls to mind the bark of an agitated sea lion), Lemmy has wit and a consistently curdled view of things.

The wit appeared as Lemmy urged the audience to buy more copies of Motorhead’s new album, “1916.”

“If you buy a million, maybe we’ll be able to put on the big show for you, instead of this Army blanket here,” he said, alluding to the band’s only prop, a large fabric backdrop that depicted a slobbering dog of war. “Maybe we’ll have three Army blankets.”

Musically, the Motorhead approach is limited and loud (you wouldn’t want to hear that much more than 35 minutes), but its aggression was bracing. None of that wheedly wheedly squiggle school of metal guitar; the tandem of Phil Campbell and Wurzel Burston played shrieking but shapely leads and crunching riffs. Lemmy’s songs espouse no faith in humanity, which he views with the eye of a cynical social critic. That leaves only rock ‘n’ roll and its attendant hedonism as timbers to hang onto. It isn’t much, but Motorhead hangs on tenaciously to the rock ‘n’ roll part.

The “1916” album does show a widening range. The set’s new material included such blazers as “Angel City” and “Going to Brazil,” (a zesty knockoff of Berry-influenced road songs such as “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and Creedence’s “Travelin’ Band”), but Motorhead also played “Love Me Forever,” a slow waltz with a love-is-hell theme that is about as close as this crew is apt to come to a show of sentiment. Lemmy actually sounded kind of choked up by it. Then again, he always sounds as if he’s being choked.

As for Cooper, well, there isn’t a more bizarre and fascinating character in show business today. Oops, that’s Agent Cooper of “Twin Peaks” fame. Operation Rock & Roll only had Alice.

The old trouper was far from fascinating as he gave us another look at the same old sadism. Cooper’s show is no longer very elaborate in its effects (the biggest one was on video, not in-the-flesh), and his madman routine has grown tame, weighed down with the familiar icons of his one-dimensional character--whips, canes, top hats, black mascara, severed doll head, bloody and abused female dummy, live boa constrictor.

But nostalgia buffs and a new generation that didn’t see the show when Alice was riding high in the ‘70s might be legitimately amused by it all. Aided by an enthusiastic, if overly metalloid young band, and armed with some credible material from his new album, “Hey Stoopid,” to fill in blanks between the oldies, Alice’s show rocked well before getting bogged down with theatrics too silly to call macabre.

Cooper donned a derby and cane for “I’m Eighteen,” as if to admit that his superb teen- Angst song is now just an act (he can’t, after all, sing “I’m Forty-Five”). But he put some real frustration and defiance into the song, and made it the best of his 70-minute set.

In one respect, Cooper was right up to date: his new songs employed the canned, ersatz Red Army Choir backing vocals fashionable among today’s pop-metal acts. Et tu, Alice? Then off with your head.

Judas Priest is said by its fans to be the quintessential heavy metal band. They’re probably right.

The British band’s show was an hour and a half of intense, but utterly unengaging screaming, thumping and wheedly, wheely, squiggle guitar (in dual harmony, no less).

With his metal-studded leathers and shaven, knobby head, front-man Rob Halford looked like a cross between a storm trooper and Nosferatu the vampire--an interesting get-up, but one he didn’t try to flesh out with any diabolical role-playing. Halford was just the friendly metal entertainer, there for your head-banging, fist-throwing pleasure. Guitarists Glen Tipton and K.K. Downing deserve medals of valor for standing heel-to-heel with him during the mandatory chorus line head-banging routine. With spurs the size of pizza cutters on Halford’s boots, one false step and they’d have had their Achilles’ tendons sliced.

For those who have a need to bang heads and throw fists, Priest is surely utilitarian. But anyone wanting more out of a concert had to wonder how a couple of quirky, potentially interesting choices of outside material, Joan Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust” and Fleetwood Mac’s “The Green Manalishi,” wound up getting homogenized into the same screaming sludge that Judas Priest manufactures on its own.

Dangerous Toys was fronted by one of those singers who can do no more than squawk and crow in a stilted, gargly voice, the sort that fancies himself a cock of the walk while revealing himself to be a capon. The most dismaying thing about this sloppy, impotent band of the Poison/Warrant ilk is that it’s from Austin, Tex., a respected music town where young rockers should come across enough good influences to avoid imitating the ridiculous affectations of Hollywood pop-metal.

Metal Church opened with a competently executed but unexceptional set of speed metal. The songs were all grounded in resentment, and came across as strident and judgmental. Not included in the show was “The Final Word,” a glaringly wrongheaded song from the band’s latest album, “The Human Factor.” Starting out as a condemnation of flag-burning as a protest tactic (a fair enough point to make), the song finds Metal Church going overboard as it yaps about how nifty it would be to stifle disagreeable opinions and run those who hold them out of town. Rock ‘n’ roll can be many things, but it’s foremost an open platform--a way for ordinary people to jump into the hurly-burly of life and say what’s on their minds as they see fit. Maybe Metal Church should join a tour called Operation Toleration.