POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Tender Fury’s Driving Set Closes Night Moves on a Bright Note

Night Moves is finished after five years as a punk and alternative rock venue, but its last concert was full of promising new beginnings for the band that bid it goodby.

Tender Fury closed the club in Sunday’s wee hours with a 55-minute set powerful enough to have stirred an arena crowd, let alone one in a dark and dingy little bar (Night Moves will be renovated and renamed before it reopens next month with a mainly Top 40 format that new managers say will exclude punk and hard rock).

The reconstituted Orange County/Long Beach band was playing only its second show together; with extraordinary swiftness, the new lineup has come to maturation--and so, at long last, has leader Jack Grisham. Once the seemingly incorrigible bad boy and rabble-rouser of the local punk scene, Grisham--who turns 30 today--appears finally to have gained the focus and seriousness about his art to match the considerable personal charisma he always has brought to the stage, with earlier editions of Tender Fury and before that with T.S.O.L.

A new Tender Fury album, “If Anger Were Soul, I’d Be James Brown,” is due next month on the Triple X label, and it’s a giant step ahead for Grisham and the band as Grisham works through the fury that has motivated much of his music, and is able to find tenderness at last.

In fact, the deeply personal, thematically cohesive album traces exactly that process. Grisham looks inward, probing himself in each song and doesn’t find anything to like. He has been undermined, he discovers, by his own anger, and in the final song, he tries to move haltingly beyond anger and toward love. The emotional battle that goes on throughout the album comes across in music that alternates, often within a single song, between fast, blazing guitar rock and soft, balladic passages highlighted by Mott the Hoople-style piano.

Material like this doesn’t deserve to be fodder for a show that is less about putting over the songs than about whipping up an audience with outrageous behavior--something Grisham has been known to do in the past (one of his favorite maneuvers has been to unbutton tight trousers and drop them teasingly below half-mast). This time, Grisham, who looked as debonair as Ray Davies in pink bow tie and dark suit with pants of normal cut, didn’t let himself, or his audience, get distracted.

Instead, Tender Fury flung itself into the songs almost without letup. Grisham’s singing was strong and intense, conveying simultaneous anguish and ire in a stagey but unaffected voice that alloyed a touch of Al Jolson with a more typical rocker’s husk.

Tender Fury now has a beautiful frame for Grisham’s singing--excellent backing vocals by guitarists Robbie Allen (back in the band after a falling out with Grisham a few years ago) and Frank Agnew, a former member of the Adolescents. Their “oohs” and “aahs” were a good, fresh gust of pop style, but they also were important bricks in the band’s wall of sound, lending heft as well as melodic lift.

Agnew spun out some stinging solos, and bassist Randy Bradbury (the only holdover besides Grisham from Tender Fury’s last album, “Garden of Evil”) consistently came up with parts that bristled with energy and melody, taking him far beyond a timekeeper’s role.

New drummer Chris Webb is a powerful pounder who also is able to deftly manage the shifting dynamics and tempos the band’s new material demands. Eddie Sedano’s keyboards were used mainly to accent and undergird what is fundamentally a guitar band sound and to provide linkage between songs during the fast-paced set. At a few junctures, it would have been interesting to have heard him stretch out and venture a piano solo.

Highlights were numerous. Tender Fury practically assumed ownership of “Mr. Soul,” Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield-era blazer about the madness and disorientation that comes with rock stardom. The band’s fiery delivery brought “Mr. Soul” out of the ‘60s and turned it into a reflection on the strangeness of Grisham’s own days as a punk hero.

For “This Time/You Want More,” the searching ballad that ends “If Anger Were Soul,” Grisham pulled up a chair and sat down. Fans who’d been slam-dancing a few moments before found that the new Tender Fury is a band you can slow-dance to as well. And Grisham, who has the timing to make broad, theatrical gestures seem spontaneous, showed that he could command a stage as well from a chair as he does from his trademark panther’s prowl.

At one point, Grisham did try one of his old tactics, baiting the audience into putting out more energy. “Wake up,” he admonished. “C’mon, this place isn’t even gonna be around after tonight.” But he flatly turned down requests for the old T.S.O.L. punk material that really would have roused the rabble.

That stuff is still available in the rather frequent reunion shows Grisham has played lately with his old T.S.O.L. mates--a chapter in his career that, given the strength of this edition of Tender Fury, now seems ripe for the closing.

Indeed, the show’s focus and intensity suggested that Tender Fury now has a chance to make the leap that Social Distortion, another veteran of the Orange County punk rock boom, has made over the past few years--from near-shambles to solid career prospects on a major label. One of the biggest ifs involved is whether Tender Fury can match the prodigious work ethic Social Distortion has shown (Grisham has had a phobia for touring in the past). It will be interesting to watch what happens to this band beyond Night Moves.

Black Creep opened the evening with a set that almost made up in crunch what it lacked in melody. With a funky-but-heavy rhythm section and a guitarist, Scott Obey, well immersed in Jimi Hendrix, the four-man band seldom failed to rock convincingly. What was missing were tunes: Singer Jason Bigart was limited to howls and growls as he stomped about the stage. It kept the energy level high, but after a while, a band that hammers your ear without occasionally plying it with sweets becomes wearisome.

Black Creep’s best original number was “Hell on Wheels,” in which Bigart’s growl fit just right with music that recalled early Alice Cooper and Hendrix’s version of “Hey Joe.” The racially integrated Orange County band also stirred up a storm on the Allman Brothers warhorse, “Whipping Post.”

Silvertrain’s X-influenced mixture of garage rock, rockabilly and country music needs to be more sharply played if the band is going to pull out of the station.

Singer Jenni McElrath had a limited voice and an almost deadpan, drawled delivery that didn’t bring the band’s material alive. Lead guitarist Pete Bickly’s fluid soloing was Silvertrain’s strong point. When he broke a string, the other three members stood around for several minutes until he had replaced it. The string snafu still left Silvertrain with a bassist, a drummer, and a singer-guitarist who presumably could have played a song during the delay. After all, many bands construct entire careers with no more resources than that.