POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Shear, Stekol: Playing for Weeps at the Coach House

Old buddies Jules Shear and Richard Stekol were in a tragicomic mood Saturday night at the Coach House.

With their between-songs chat, the two singer-songwriters invariably provided laughs. But when they started to strum and sing in their separate solo-acoustic sets, they almost always spoke of pain and tears.

The two first teamed in 1975 in the short-lived Los Angeles band, Funky Kings. Since then, the New York-based Shear has maintained a steady cult-level recording career (with Stekol sometimes sitting in as a session player) and notched a couple of big hits as a songwriter (Cyndi Lauper’s “All Through the Night” and the Bangles’ “If She Knew What She Wants”). Stekol, a Laguna Beach resident best known locally as the guitarist in Honk, the early ‘70s Orange County band, remains an unsung source of finely etched folk-rock material.

Stekol’s opening set was a half-hour meditation on heartache. After beginning innocently enough with “Lonnie,” a never-released Funky Kings number about passionate yearning, Stekol sang six new songs about shattered relationships, pacing back and forth between bitterness and sorrow with no balancing detours onto a more cheery path.

That’s a risky tack, but Stekol pulled it off with high-impact lyrical imagery and emotional performances that seemed to cut close to exposed personal nerves. Even part of the between-songs comic relief, a bizarre but funny tale involving his small daughter, had as its disturbing undercurrent the theme of how divorce impacts on kids.

While Stekol’s 1991 solo album mined the subject of love lost, its tenor was forgiving--sweetly sad, but never bitter. This new stuff was dark and agonized.

In “Stealin’ From a Thief,” Stekol played the part of a man who, now that a relationship has ended, concludes that it was valueless, based on nothing but false appearances and mutual deceit: “We were diplomats, can’t we leave it at that?/It was just stealin’ from a thief.”

Next came “Love Can Be Just So Much Rope,” a piteous number about dashed dreams and demolished ego: “But don’t hang around with me, you’ll hang yourself/’Cause love is so much rope/Go find another tree far away, like everybody else.”

Toward the end, Stekol sang about mustering reserves of hope and comfort in the face of disaster. “Yield Not” was a pep talk, but one whose speaker is well aware that not giving in to pain is hardly the same thing as not feeling it.

In the tender but probing concluding song, “Daddy’s Kisses,” Stekol’s protagonist looks for comfort in his warmest childhood memories. But the songwriter permits no easy sentimentality: the realization that he was given the gift of unconditional love as a child makes it all the more anguishing that he can’t find it as an adult.

When Shear launched his headlining set with forthright a cappella singing, he might have been picking up, out of sheer empathy, where Stekol had left off.

His first number, “Squirrel Hill,” was about journeying to a special place in one’s past, and trying to use the memory to find one’s balance in a troubled present. Like Stekol, Shear’s song (so far released only on “Walking a Changing Line,” an Ian Matthews album consisting solely of Shear compositions) posed memory as an imperfect salve, but, in many circumstances, perhaps the only one available.

Looking Dylanesque and a bit haggard under untamed curls and scruffy facial hair, Shear made the most of a spare, unorthodox guitar style and a thin, nasal-husky voice that managed to stretch far enough to grasp the melodic riches in his exemplary pop-rock songs.

Shear’s guitar method was literally all thumbs: playing left-handed on an open-tuned guitar strung for a righty, he pressed the strings with one thumb and strummed them with the other. That didn’t stop him from jabbing out some rough, aggressive chords that lent a raw edge to the soaring lament, “The Sad Sound of the Wind.”

Shear amped up the intense foreboding of “Open Book,” an unrecorded song he co-wrote with Wall of Voodoo alumnus Andy Prieboy, with tolling bass notes followed by a sparse, downward-ticking pattern on the guitar. He capped the song with a falsetto sigh so full of anguish it was almost startling.

“Open Book” introduced Shear’s darkest sort of villain, a controlling male who manages to ensnare a manipulable female in a classic trap of co-dependency. The story remained the same, albeit with a far more acidic tone, on the next song, “Jewel in a Cobweb,” which echoed the drive of Dylan’s “From a Buick 6.”

Next, Shear reached back to the debut album of his late-’70s band, Jules and the Polar Bears--an odd choice considering that he played only three songs from his very strong current album, “The Great Puzzle.” While it’s about love gone wrong, that old number “Convict” also works, if one is so inclined, as a metaphor for the troubles in Los Angeles.

It opens with a vision of a burning building, and hammers home a bitterly ironic refrain that could be taken as a challenge or a warning to a society trying to figure out whether it can muster unified resolve for something other than bombing Third World dictatorships: “When doubt is like a convict, running loose on our brains . . . we lapse into a sadness that drains and drains./But the nice thing about true hopelessness is that you don’t have to try again.”

Shear wasn’t one to preach about his themes or explicate his songs, but he had plenty of dryly funny anecdotes concerning his life and times as a songwriter. Concerning the winsome “All Through the Night,” which he issued on a solo album before Lauper got hold of it, Shear noted: “I sort of thought it was a folk song, and she thought it was a drum machine and techno thing. Not that I don’t love it--it bought me my apartment in New York, and I love her version very much.”

Stekol joined Shear to harmonize on “All Through the Night,” and Shear returned the favor as Stekol stayed on to sing his own deeply moving song of a community’s grief, “America Walking By.”

The 75-minute set ended with Shear’s other mass-appeal credit, “If She Knew What She Wants,” which he slowed down considerably from the brisk and breezy pace of the Bangles hit.

Set against earlier songs like “Open Book” and “Jewel in a Cobweb,” the plaintive number came off as a kind of embattled affirmation. In contrast to the other songs’ manipulating emotional games-men, here was a guy mystified and confused by an inscrutable woman, yet willing to accept her nonetheless.

Despite his befuddlement and frustration, he’s able to confess, “I’m crazy for this girl.” Not exactly a ringing declaration of joy, but on this night of downcast but rewarding music, it was about as happy an ending as could be expected.

Shear is due back at the Coach House on June 4 as part of “In Their Own Words,” a touring show-and-tell session in which highly regarded songwriters discuss and display their craft. Also on that promising bill are Marshall Crenshaw, James McMurtry, Don Dixon and David Halley.