POP MUSIC REVIEW : Parting Is Such Sweat Sorrow : Southside Johnny Pours On the Energy in His Last Concert as an Orange County Resident

One is tempted to say “Johnny, we hardly knew ye” to Southside Johnny Lyon, therocking New Jerseyite who is heading back to the East Coast after a three-year residence on the south side of Orange County.

But anyone who saw Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes play a warm and rowdy, heartfelt and sweaty, long, soulful and beautifully constructed concert Wednesday night at the Coach House must have come away with a pretty thorough knowledge of his talent as a rock ‘n’ soul performer.

It was one of those special nights. Lyon and his eight-man band were obviously enjoying the music and each other’s company, the crowd got keyed in, then it got keyed up, and the evening just rode along from strength to strength, from pleasure to pleasure, from ovation to ovation, and from encore to encore (three in all, before the house lights went on, ending the show after 2 hours and 15 minutes).

The performance figures to be Lyon’s last as an Orange County resident (he said in a post-concert interview that he and his wife, Jill, have sold their house in San Clemente and expect to move soon to a new one they’ve bought in Stamford, Conn.).

Lyon bid no farewells from the stage. He did, however, begin the show by announcing that it marked a career first: “All my neighbors from San Clemente are here tonight. Never in 25 years of playing have I played to my neighbors.” Lyon grew up in Ocean Park, N.J., a retirement community where, he said, “all my neighbors were 75 or 80, and they didn’t come to see me” when he was making his way through the Jersey Shore bar scene.

Lyon came out of the same scene as Bruce Springsteen and Miami Steve (or, as his latter-day tag has it, Little Steven) Van Zandt. Both helped Southside along by providing him with strong material as he began recording in the ‘70s, and both were reunited with Lyon on his strong 1991 album, “Better Days.”

The book on Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes has always been that it’s the quintessential good-time bar band. With the compactly built Lyon bouncing all over the place in black T-shirt, black jeans, and black, high-topped Converse All-Stars, snapping fingers, flapping arms, air-drumming, jumping on tables, and grabbing his sweat-drenched head in both hands as if overcome by the honed energy pouring out of his horn-driven band, you could safely say he lived up to his reputation.

But many of the new songs from “Better Days” gave the show a deeper thematic text than sweaty good times. Lyon’s new material, much of it written or co-authored by Van Zandt (with one new tune by Springsteen), was about innocence lost. Such elegiac songs as “Soul’s on Fire” and “All I Needed Was You” were the monologues of characters who realize too late that their pursuit of carefree, footloose times has had a cost, that they’re no longer young, and that they have squandered the one true love that was all they ever really needed. In “All the Way Home,” the song contributed by Springsteen, a man who has earned humility the hard way tries to regain his shaken sense of worth by reaching out for love.

Lyon constructed his show cannily, proceeding by degrees from bright R & B workouts to graceful, emotive moments that could be rendered with full band clicking and three-man horn section emitting warm swells, or with just Lyon and his guitar and harmony sidekick, Bobby Bandiera, sharing a single microphone.

Southside established his band’s signature horn section early on, letting it swagger through “Better Days” and charge through “I Played the Fool” (“Better Days” is a Van Zandt composition with a different outlook from the identically titled song on Springsteen’s new “Lucky Town” album. Where the Springsteen song cherishes a contented family life, Southside’s title track is sung from a bottomed-out, laugh-to-keep-from-crying perspective in which “better days are on the way, ‘cause you know and I know it can’t get no worse”).

Soon, Lyon was into his first quiet interlude, harmonizing with Bandiera on the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream” and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee.” With the band joining in, Lyon turned “Renee” into the first of several extended showcases for his raspy-but-right soul-singer improvisations. Later, after the show had wound through a couple more cycles of driving rockers and regal laments, Lyon and Bandiera offered another fine duo turn with a couple of Springsteen songs, “All the Way Home” and “Fade Away.” Besides serving as the perfect, fervently harmonizing vocal foil for Lyon, the bantam-sized Bandiera also had plenty of chances to show his rocker’s stripes. His guitar solos had a dramatic flair, and he also got a chance to lead the band through a rollicking, Stones-like blazer toward the end of the set.

Along with its other virtues, Southside’s show served as a good primer to classic R & B, honoring sources and capturing their spirit, but without slavish duplication. When he wasn’t touching on a soul-based style with a cover song (Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat”), Lyon was paying respectful nods with original material. “Talk to Me,” one of three songs culled from Southside Johnny’s highly regarded 1978 album, “Hearts of Stone,” was a doo-wop extravaganza that eventually involved almost the entire band in harmonizing; after the crowd greeted it with the evening’s first standing ovation, Lyon displayed his showman’s instinct by jumping immediately into one last reprise of the chorus.

In rock’s evolution, the street-corner simplicity of ‘50s doo-wop was transformed by Phil Spector in the early ‘60s into a much grander construct. Sure enough, the next song, “All I Needed Was You,” paid tribute to the Spector style, complete with Lyon banging a tambourine for that extra wall-of-sound wallop. Later, with “Trapped Again,” Southside branched into Motown-style soul symphonics in a number that mustered the clenched drama of a prime Four Tops tune.

While covering his extensive musical home turf so gloriously, Lyon had a few barbed things to say about his adopted turf in Southern California. He noted, proudly, that, in the sartorially inelegant Jukes, Bandiera’s basic jeans and vest would have to stand as “our (concession) to those Los Angeles people who think you need a lot of flash on stage.” He playfully accused some fans at the back of the room of a couple of snooty sins: driving elegant foreign cars (“I hope somebody runs into your BMW and sets off your car alarm”) and sipping champagne and cognac to a band that’s strictly about beers-and-shots. At one point, Lyon invited everyone to brunch at his house, then thought better of it: “Nobody who’s ever gone to a brunch comes to a Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes show.”

After launching momentarily into a deliberately off-key “Fun, Fun, Fun,” Lyon stopped to muse wryly about the current implications of that carefree Beach Boys nugget, written at a time when the California dream of easy affluence seemed so reachable. “I didn’t know a goddamn girl who had a T-Bird when I was young. ‘Daddy gave her a Thunderbird’--no wonder they’re rioting in L.A.”

In an interview in his dressing room after the concert, though, Lyon spoke fondly of the county he plans to leave next month.

“I really love it out here. I’ve made good friends--we’re in and out of each others’ homes all the time. It’s the first time in 43 years I’ve had neighbors I’m really close to.”

Lyon said he bought his home in San Clemente hoping a change of venue would spur him to write more songs. “I wanted to shake up my life enough to break out of my complacency in New Jersey.” Instead, he said, “I think I’ve just settled into the relaxed Southern California mind-set, where every day is kind of (unplanned); you read the paper, drink coffee and figure out what you’re going to do with the day. I guess I’ve just got a lazy streak I need to fight all the time. I love to sit around all day, read and take walks. I need to be more energized.”

By moving back into the orbit of New York City, Lyon says he hopes to pick up his creative pace. He said his desire to be near his 76-year-old mother, who still lives in his old hometown in New Jersey, was also an important part of his decision to move.