Pop Reviews : A Vital Etta James at the Coach House

You’ve seen all those MTV nymphets, all those sleek things stepping out of sleek cars during commercial breaks, all those perfect bods appearing elsewhere in this very newspaper to seduce or shame you into plunking down for a health club membership.

The message: If you’re not like them, you don’t qualify as a respectable sexual being.

Etta James, one of the finest products of R&B; culture, certainly doesn’t fit mass pop culture’s model profile. Physically, she is big enough for two or three Video Age starlets.

But James is an openly sexual performer, refusing to be cowed by our pervasive stereotypes. Sexuality has been her main theme since she emerged in 1954 with the randy “Roll With Me Henry,” and not much has changed since then.

On Friday at the Coach House, James, who will be 54 on Saturday, swaggered with and reveled in her considerable physicality.

Unfortunately, she also stepped over the line into sexual pandering and unseemly burlesque.

The show could have done without the exaggerated hip shaking, tongue poking, crotch rubbing and Kabuki-like mugging that James went for early in her 95-minute set.

But just as things threatened to become truly tiresome, James backed away from the shtick and put her trust where it belonged: in her singing, and in her natural, pleasure-filled reactions to the music pumped out by her excellent six-man band.

By the time it was over, her zesty blues and passionate soul balladry had left the audience standing and hollering for more long after she had left the stage.

They were responding to the expression of vitality, talent and fully lived and felt experience. Those are the things of greatest beauty for a performer, and it doesn’t matter in what shape they come.