POP MUSIC REVIEW : Bolton’s Sob Stories

Michael Bolton wanted to know: “What are the relationships like around here?”

A pretty broad question when you’re asking 15,000 or so people, as Bolton did Saturday night at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa.

That absurd generality reflected the thinking behind Bolton’s dismayingly generic love songs. Never mind the ambiguities and individual twists that make up romantic behavior, the particulars that, when vividly rendered in a song, can say something universal.

The method of Bolton and his collaborators (his most frequent one is Diane Warren, the highest priestess of the lowest common denominator) is to encapsulate a feeling in plain wrapping and put it out for mass retail.

Bolton takes an emotion, frames it with blandly declarative phrases (he shuns imagery and the artful play of words as if imagination were a crime and cliche a commandment) and comes up with his basic product: pablum.

Coat it with lots of sugar (Can’t accuse Bolton and his pards of not being able to write an insinuating chorus melody), box it with tinkly chime synthesizers and swoop-and-grind guitars, and you’re ready to sell (and sell, and sell and sell: Bolton’s 1989 album, “Soul Provider,” has sold more than 4 million copies and is still on the charts; the current “Time, Love & Tenderness” has moved product to the tune of more than 2 million).

Now, who better to put on the big, big sell for such an impoverished product than a guy with a big, big voice?

Bolton’s singing was impressive at the Pacific, with his expansive range, raspy, R&B-tinged; textures and titanic force. This, his admirers might say, is a guy who really emotes, who lets it all out on every song, never holding back.

Yes, Bolton may be the Charles Atlas of singers. But you can’t swing freely if you’re muscle-bound. And you can’t capture the ebb and flow of feelings if you’re always trying to belt a tune out of the park.

Bolton’s mauling of “Georgia on My Mind” illustrated the wrongheadedness of going for the big gesture at every turn. This is a song of reverie, of intimacy--a song on which Ray Charles whispers and quietly keens far more than he erupts. Bolton, in a ludicrous staging gimmick, sang it at maximum force from the middle of the amphitheater, surrounded by the crowd and a cordon of security guards. So much for reverie and intimacy. An inflated version of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” also sacrificed meaning to style.

At least Bolton batted one for three on soul classics. He finished strongly with Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a song that welcomes all the ardor and lung power a singer can bring to bear. The show’s other likable tune was the funky “Love Is a Wonderful Thing”--the only number in the nearly two-hour performance that turned the mood light and breezy.

The rest was sobbing, heaving, embattled stuff, as Bolton alternated between groaning ballads and stormy pop-metal lite, including numbers like “How Can We Be Lovers” and “I Found Someone,” the hit he wrote for Cher.

Bolton’s big story of the night concerned how Bob Dylan summoned him to collaborate on a song--”Steel Bars,” which appears on Bolton’s latest album and probably has netted Dylan a nice piece of change.

Bolton (who opens a five-night engagement tonight at the Universal Amphitheatre) spoke of younger days when he would pore over Dylan’s albums, trying with difficulty to figure out what the songs meant. On the evidence of his own output, that brain-taxing experience must have scared Bolton off the hard stuff for life.