POP MUSIC REVIEW : Electricity in Short Supply in America

If you think America the country is hard to decipher, try America the folk-rock band.

During the group’s early ‘70s heyday, some of pop’s all-time haziest lyrics spilled forth from Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley, its principal singer-songwriters. Consider these doozies:

“And Cause never was the reason for the evening, or the tropic of Sir Galahad” (from “Tin Man”).

“Seasons crying no despair, alligator lizards in the air” (from “Ventura Highway”).

“There were plants and birds and rocks and things, there was sand and hills and rings” (from “A Horse With No Name”).

“I understand you’ve been running from the man who goes by the name of the Sandman / He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye of a hurricane that’s abandoned” (a hurricane abandoned? By what--its mommy?) (from “Sandman”).

America sang such vagaries as if they were freighted with great philosophical meaning. For that, and for the group’s tendency to stock its melting pot with ingredients purloined, then pureed (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young being the chief suppliers of sounds to be smoothed out and softened), America forfeited critical respect.

In the Rolling Stone Record Guide, virtually every America release from 1972 to 1980 is rated “worthless”--a verdict that the guide’s editors reserve for “records that need never (or should never) have been created”--or “poor” (“records . . . that are remarkably ill-conceived”). The lone exception is “History,” a greatest-hits collection that was graded “mediocre.”

Yet, America had an undeniable ability to churn out indelibly catchy tunes. If you’re a veteran pop listener, even one who wouldn’t think of having an America album in the house, the melodies and harmonies that came attached to the above-quoted lyrical clinkers may already have eddied up from some recess of your brain.

That quality keeps America on the road. In the first of two shows at the Coach House on Thursday night, Bunnell and Beckley and their three-man backing band didn’t pretend that America has a reason to exist other than to offer faithful playbacks of the old hits.

They showed up in casual, after-work attire, looking more like a bunch of guys who had scored box seats for the ballgame than rockers preparing to dominate a stage. They proceeded to reel off the hits, without letup, without changes and without glaring flaws. Heading for its 20th anniversary, America is at least as good a jukebox as your better oldies cover bands.

But in their perfunctory between-songs chatter and their passionless proficiency, Bunnell and Beckley brought little personality to the proceedings. They care enough to make the songs sound like the records, which was all it took to please a nearly full house. But it was questionable whether the songs still kindle much of an emotional spark in the singers themselves.

Bunnell (the would-be pop philosopher who mimicked Neil Young on “A Horse With No Name,” the first of the group’s 11 Top 40 singles) is a passable singer, although his range has diminished and his vocal texture is brittle. Beckley, the reedy-sounding romantic behind such love songs as “I Need You” and “Sister Golden Hair” was in fine voice.

Actually, America does have some new songs to play: Four of them surface along with older catalogue material on “Encore: More Greatest Hits,” a just-released Rhino Records compilation. Those new songs sound a lot more coherent than some of America’s best-known numbers.

America’s 70-minute set included one of them, “Hell’s on Fire,” a solid, hard-driving rocker that echoed Eric Clapton’s retooling of “Crossroads” as it depicted the proverbial romantic obsession with the wrong woman. The band leaned into it with more verve than it had shown up to that point. As the show turned toward tougher-sounding material near the end, America managed to prove that it still has some zest for rock ‘n’ roll. At the end of “Sandman,” Bunnell and sideman Michael Woods twined guitar solos to raise a tempest, if not quite a sense of hurricane abandon.

An encore version of “A Horse With No Name” included some ridiculously stentorian vocalizing on the “la-la, la-la-la-la” refrain that conjured images of inebriated Bavarians swinging beer mugs during a rathskeller sing-along. But America stretched the number out with some effective psychedelic guitar swarm. No need for a kinder, gentler America; this one seemed much more engaged when giving itself a rough, electric jolt.

Local solo-acoustic folkie Keri Goetz spent 20-odd minutes in opening-act purgatory. Although she sang with unflagging passion and presence, employed whisper-to-a-cry dynamics and demonstrated a striking vocal range, Goetz found herself serving as background music for a chattering, largely uninterested house.

Goetz was partly to blame for her fate: She had succeeded with a gutsy opening gambit, grabbing the audience with an a cappella ballad about sectarian strife in Belfast, but she soon lost her hold with awkward blather about how the audience probably wouldn’t like another song because it defied majority opinion about the Persian Gulf War.