POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cockburn Is All Business : The Singer Delivers the Goods Without a Lot of Chat and Charm

Most rockers with a folk background know how to turn on the charm by drawing on lessons they absorbed in their early days, when they had to win an audience with just a guitar, a voice and whatever warm, witty and endearing things they could think of to say between singing and strumming.

Bruce Cockburn came up in the ‘60s as a folk-oriented solo performer, but one suspects he was playing hooky on the days he was supposed to be attending folkie charm school. On the other hand, Cockburn must have been an “A” student when it came to mastering the core curriculum of musical expression. While the Canadian singer-songwriter-guitarist barely registered in the charm and chattiness departments Wednesday night at the Celebrity Theatre, he delivered the essential goods most of the time with a richly varied and beautifully played set.

With his gray hair, his small, round spectacles and his austere bearing, Cockburn came off more like a professor of higher mathematics than an entertainer. Most of the time, he spoke only when spoken to--and then only to parry with dry wit some fan’s request for a song, or just for some acknowledgment.

During a pregnant lull early on, someone called out: “Talk to us, Bruce.”

Cockburn mused jokingly that the guy must be “from the bureau of incrimination,” and refused to spill any beans. Maybe somebody had warned this left-liberal politicized rocker that he’d better be on his guard in Orange County (maybe that somebody was Cockburn’s politically kindred buddy Jackson Browne, a former Fullerton resident who turns up singing harmonies and playing guitar on Cockburn’s solid new album, “Nothing but a Burning Light”).

There were times when it would have helped for Cockburn to lower his wall of reserve and extend a warming gesture. The middle going of his one-hour, 45-minute performance seemed so detached that one began to imagine Cockburn was playing for television cameras instead of a live audience (a smallish one of a few hundred fans).

Not that Cockburn and his four-man band were playing poorly. Only “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” perhaps his finest song, was a complete disappointment: After an enticing, stately introduction, the tune fell flat. Cockburn’s voice, which resembles Browne’s, drifted wanly (as it did from time to time during the show, though it also registered moments of intensity). The only way to rescue the number would have been for Cockburn, an excellent lead guitarist, to ignite it with some fireworks. But he held back until the song had played itself out, never venturing the needed solo.

Still, there were good, extended passages throughout the evening when the music was enough. One came at the beginning, when Cockburn focused warmly on probing his musical roots: He opened with a solo guitar piece full of rustic, folksy appeal and followed it with “Soul of a Man,” a 1930-vintage country blues by Blind Willie Johnson.

The sequence also included “Somebody Touched Me,” a love song to God, and the swaying, bittersweet R&B; of “Coldest Night of the Year,” a statement of romantic yearning.

Cockburn also looked toward rock’s roots with some new, as-yet-unrecorded material: a country-flavored love song with the refrain “any thing, any time, anywhere for you,” and a lighthearted Chuck Berry tribute that addressed neuroses with advice to “open up the window, let the bad air out.”

Cockburn was always on target with his love songs and his songs of spiritual yearning. It’s his political material that can be a problem. Some of his topical songs are one-dimensional, delivering an opinion in a tone of bald indictment, with none of the deeper resonance and immediacy needed to make a song more than a mere vehicle for a viewpoint.

Even an advocate of South African apartheid might recognize the power in a great political song such as Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” which expresses funerary sorrow as well as revolutionary rage, and builds from the brutally specific to a scale of grand historic and moral sweep. The same goes for Dylan’s greatest protest songs, which are more like prophecies.

As for Cockburn, while the like-minded may cheer, there is nothing that truly gets under the skin in such screeds as “Stolen Land,” “Indian Wars” and “If a Tree Falls” which, with its spoken vocal, came off in concert like an environmentalist’s “Chestnut Mare.” Fortunately, in live performance each song had appeal apart from its politics--especially “Stolen Land” with its driving beat and a concluding guitar solo from Cockburn that spoke with more passion than his lyrics.

And yet, the show’s most memorable moments belonged to the politicized Cockburn. “Mighty Trucks of Midnight,” with its brooding, wind-swept guitar sonics, went beyond mere opinion-flinging to invoke ineffable mysteries and a timeless sense of a moral destiny awaiting fulfillment.

The next song, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” was full of stark, startling specifics (about the cruel slaughter of peasants in Guatemala) delivered with naked, vengeful ire. The song’s stripped-down arrangement--just two electric guitars and chimes that Cockburn set a-clinking with his foot--heightened its impact. Cockburn’s key collaborator during the sequence was Colin Linden, a stocky, bearded sidekick who not only dabbed on fine slide and tremolo guitar accents all evening, but gave the show what visual interest it had as he played an earthy Sancho Panza to Cockburn’s severe, stiff-backed Quixote.

Opener Sam Phillips, clearly a product of folkie charm school, offset her dark, inwardly probing songs with a succession of slightly zany between-song quips. Her brisk, basic chord-strumming was no substitute for the rich, offbeat pop-rock arrangements of her albums, and she couldn’t stave off sameness during her eight-song solo acoustic set. But a winning personality, good melodies and a memorable, husky-but-winsome voice were enough for this noteworthy talent to capture the audience and get called back for an encore.