On a Road Test : Five Strangers Sing Praises Instead of Blues About Unique Tour Headed for Coach House

Here’s an innovative idea: take five singer-songwriters who are strangers, pack them off together in a passenger van on a cross-country tour, and hope that they turn into a fun, chatty performing bunch, as opposed to, say, a five-way re-enactment of “Divorce Court.”

That’s the premise behind “In Their Own Words: A Bunch of Songwriters Sittin’ Around Singing,” which has taken Midge Ure, Chip Taylor, Darden Smith, Rosie Flores and Don Henry across the nation over the past month. The five, all of whom have separate careers, sit down together on stage each night (including a stop tonight at the Coach House), and take turns singing their own work. Between numbers they pause to talk about their lives and their art.

As with most innovations, this idea of a series of shows that would give onlookers a close-up glimpse into the songwriter’s craft was launched amid some uncertainty.

Ure, for one, wondered what on earth he was doing heading out on a tour armed only with an acoustic guitar.

“The idea of me sitting with an acoustic guitar is sort of alien, to say the least,” the Scottish rocker said recently over the phone from a hotel room in Boulder, Colo. With his former band, Ultravox, and in a three-album solo career, Ure (pronounced “yoor”) has made his mark as a rock symphonist, building up lush, densely layered structures of highly synthesized sound to carry grand themes of romance and social concern. Before the tour started, Ure said, he didn’t even know how to play most of his songs on an acoustic guitar--they’d mainly been created with the aid of computers in high-tech studios.

Chip Taylor had some non-musical concerns, mainly about what it would be like traveling with a bunch of strangers. The tour is the first in about a decade for the New York-based songwriter and producer, who is best known for two big hits he wrote in the 1960s--”Wild Thing” (first recorded in 1966 by the Troggs, and played thereafter by nearly every bar band on the planet) and “Angel of the Morning” (a hit in 1968 for Merrilee Rush, and in 1981 for Juice Newton).

“I had big reservations about it,” said Taylor, 52, who carried on a solo recording career during the 1970s. “I’m very claustrophobic on the road. I usually need a lot of space. Even if people like each other, they’re usually going to have some problems.”

Taylor says he also was suspicious of that Ure fellow, who is clearly the odd man out in this assortment. Besides being the only one who isn’t an American and who works outside a roots-oriented style, Ure is the only one of the five with a well-established reputation as a touring draw. Taylor is a comeback artist; Smith, a classy folk-rock performer from Austin, Tex., Flores a rocking-country exponent from Los Angeles, and Henry, a Nashville-based songwriter with one alternately wry and heartfelt folk-pop album, are all still emerging. Ure, though a bigger star in Europe than in the United States, had toured here with Ultravox and with his own band. In 1989, his solo song, “Dear God,” was an album-rock hit. Ure also was Bob Geldof’s songwriting partner on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” the 1984 song that launched the Band Aid and Live Aid efforts for Ethiopian famine relief.

At the start, Taylor said, he assumed Ure would bring an ego large enough to make that cozy touring van seem awfully crowded. “I was thinking, ‘What is this tour going to be like with a prima donna? What does he need to do this for? Five people traveling across the country, and one is a star--it’s going to be a little crazy.’ ”

But Taylor said that Ure turned out to be a splendid, smiling fellow with no ego problem. “I think the tone was set by Midge,” the veteran songwriter said. “We all just like each other a lot.” By Ure’s and Taylor’s account, the songwriters on the first “In Their Own Words” have become an easily bantering mutual-admiration society and, in some respects, a collaborative unit. The performers back each other up on stage, rather than standing by until their own turn to play comes around. And off stage, some new songwriting partnerships have been born. Ure and Taylor said they were polishing up a new song they’d written together and were intending to debut on the tour.

“I was wary at first, but it’s turned out to be a fun sort of traveling troubadour comedy show,” Ure said. “Darden is a very funny, witty guy, and we have this ongoing, onstage battle to see who can outwit the other one with little snide remarks. I think they’ll have a hard job finding people as compatible as we are” for a planned series of future tours under the “In Their Own Words” banner. “On paper, it looks as if we’re radically different characters, it seems like a very strange bunch of bedfellows. But there’s a great conversation, as well as friendly bitchiness, that goes on. We just jelled, and we’re enjoying this immensely.”

The concept of bringing together a diverse panel of songwriters to play and discuss their music began about two years ago at a New York City nightclub, the Bottom Line.

“We felt that in our market there was a real need not being met by radio, an audience really hungry for songs that was not being satisfied,” said Allan Pepper, one of the Bottom Line’s owners. “In the beginning we’d have 100 to 120 people. But last week the show”--which featured a dream bill of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Paul Kelly, Michelle Shocked and Allen Toussaint--”drew over 700 people. It’s become such a regular part of our programming that people look forward to it. We do it once every five or six weeks, and it doesn’t matter who the songwriters are. People just buy tickets on the title of the show.”

One keen fan of the Bottom Line series was Marty Diamond, a New York-based booking agent who came up with the idea of turning “In Their Own Words” into a touring attraction. With the Bottom Line serving as consultant, Diamond packaged the current tour and has plans to send out several songwriters’ caravans each year. The first one has been drawing 100 to 200 people at most clubs, Diamond said, but he expects the draw to grow as the idea becomes established, as it did at the Bottom Line. All of the clubs on the first troupe’s itinerary are interested in having “In Their Own Words” back, Diamond said.

“Five people sitting in chairs and talking and singing--the whole format really sounds interesting to an old hippie fart like me,” said Ken Phebus, concert director at the Coach House. “We plan to go ahead” and book future rounds of the songwriters’ packages.

Ure, like all his companions except for Smith, had appeared in the Bottom Line’s series before signing up for the national “Words” tour. He said his March appearance persuaded his record company and management that the chatty, stripped-down format would help him get across a personal dimension that might have been missing from previous tours that recreated his elaborate studio sound.

“Normally, I play four or five songs and say ‘Hello,’ then play the rest of the songs, say ‘Goodby,’ and that’s it,” Ure said. He likes the idea that, in the “Words” format, he has to be freer with his words. “You get a chance to be funny, you get a chance to say things and let people see your character. Ultravox had this serious image; we came across as computer programmers instead of musicians. I think that image has stuck with people, and I’m actually not like that.”

Ure said that the “Words” tour is likely to have some farther reaching effect on the way he approaches his own music. Before his 1989 album, “Answers to Nothing,” Ure holed himself up in his own recording studio for about a year and a half to write and produce the record. Crafting “Pure,” his current album, took two years of dabbling with studio technology.

Watching his companions on tour, Ure said, has shown him that songwriting can be a simpler, more portable process that can be carried out without Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

“I’ve learned that they work at (songwriting) constantly, and I don’t,” Ure said. “These guys do it all the time, because they’re not just writing for themselves. I’d be sitting reading a book, and they’d be writing lyrics and working on melodies. We’d book into a hotel room, and they’d have the guitar out, singing and working on songs, and I’m watching ‘Married With Children.’ It has embarrassed me into writing more songs.”

“I’ve always written in the studio with a batch of machinery. It’s the joy of having your own studio, but it’s also the cost, because you can dabble until you’re blue in the face. (This tour) has changed my opinion on how to make the next album.” Instead of dabbling by himself until he is satisfied, Ure said, he plans now to write the songs in advance, rehearse them with a band, then record them during a brief, concentrated time.

Ure said that he has been talking about record production techniques with Taylor. “He’s saying, ‘I’d love to hear you with a very stripped-down, simple production,’ not the overblown, kitchen-sink production I do. I think I’d like to get away from that.”

Not that Ure has completely forsworn high-tech music-making. A few dates into the tour, he’d had enough of playing with just an acoustic guitar and went out and bought some sound processors and guitar effects to flesh out his sound.

That, says Ure, has led to some good-natured ribbing from his touring companions. “There have been many jokes about how I’ll have to rent myself a U-Haul.”

“In Their Own Words,” with Midge Ure, Chip Taylor, Darden Smith, Rosie Flores and Don Henry, takes place tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $18.50. (714) 496-8930. WORDSMITHS

‘Words’ show at Troubadour was awkward, but solid. F28