O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : 5 Figures Who Add Up to a Fine Evening of ‘Words’

By and large, the five songsmiths who came to chat and sing at the Coach House Thursday night as the latest installment of the “In Their Own Words” touring series were so compatible and collaborative that the event almost could have been retitled “In Their Own Band.”

The Traveling Incognito Wilburys might suit them for a name. Marshall Crenshaw, Don Dixon and Jules Shear are veteran cult heroes with extensive track records but no star status. Texans James McMurtry and David Halley are relative newcomers. McMurtry, a protege of John Mellencamp, is awaiting the release in a few weeks of his second album, and Halley is a deserving but little-heard talent still looking for his first U.S. record deal.

The idea of “Words,” which originated at the Bottom Line club in New York, is to send a small squadron of songwriter-performers across the country to sit onstage together and take turns singing their songs and answering a moderator’s questions about their craft.

This bunch, the second in the ongoing series, was made up of players with plenty of common stylistic footing. None falls into a bailiwick like punk or blues or straight country, around which boundaries can easily be drawn. Instead, each takes his own path through the expansive, diffuse kingdom of rock-pop-folk songwriting where the goals are literacy and meaning.

The players’ interlocking talents, and their shadings of variety within a shared tradition, made the 2 1/2-hour evening flow like a concert, albeit one with a strong sense of the unpredictable.

If Halley, Shear and McMurtry came on strong with their streaks of serious-and-introspective stuff, Crenshaw was there to deliver a change of pace with his brisk, twangy pop. Or Dixon, who ranks with John Hiatt as a marvelous white-guy interpreter of soul-R&B; vocal stylings, would give the proceedings a directional shift with his hefty, husky, free-wailing exuberance and skewed humor.

The sense of band-ness came through in the mutual aid that four of the five were able to provide (each player got to sing five songs). Dixon, whose highest-profile credits have come from being in the studio producing R.E.M. and the Smithereens, backed up nearly everything on his stand-up electric bass; Halley weighed in with some first-rate lead guitar work, and Shear and Crenshaw provided nice vocal harmonies.

McMurtry, a fellow reserved and laconic to the point of dourness, mostly played possum when it wasn’t his turn to sing. When he did, Halley and Dixon provided a rich backdrop for his crusty-voiced irony and evocations of lonely rural landscapes.

Halley, who sounds like a more folkish, circumspect cousin of Don Henley, was unprepossessing in his first round, but as subsequent turns came up, he impressed more and more with subtle vocal phrasings, accomplished guitar accompaniments and direct emotion.

His “Rain Just Falls” (wonderfully recorded by one of his Texas buddies, Jimmie Dale Gilmore) was a first-rate dejection ballad. “Hometown” was a bitter, closely observed defeatist anthem about the human decay caused by urban decay. Halley admitted at one point that he’s no sunshine merchant: “I (tried once) to write a cheerful song, and I realized I didn’t have a cheerful bone in my body, that I’m really a morbid person.”

Shear also stayed on the serious side, hitting peaks with the poignant “Big Kid Face,” a portrait of a man-child who is made to pay for his naivete, and the moving elegy “If We Ever Meet Again.” Crenshaw added some hot acoustic guitar work to such catchy songs as “Fantastic Planet of Love” and “Cynical Girl.”

During the final round, when each singer was asked to cover a song he admires rather than perform one he wrote, Crenshaw led the ensemble in a bluegrass romp through “Over the Rainbow.” Dixon’s boisterous contributions down the stretch included a “Mustang Sally” that Wilson Pickett could respect, and the leader’s role during the encore, a fun-filled frat-party pummeling of “I’m Down.” Dixon introduced it as “the second-dumbest song that the Beatles ever wrote,” giving first dishonors to “One After 909.”

Earlier, Dixon had enlivened things with his back-to-back pairing of two humorously macabre tales of twisted love--”Praying Mantis” and “Heart in a Box.” He has another dimension, though: His show-opening sally, the unreleased “Every Time I Think of Home,” evoked a walk down dark streets as the night threatens to dissolve the last ties binding a troubled relationship.

Although none of the panelists have the gift of gab to make a “Tonight Show” talking-head hunter salivate, there was an element of dry, backhanded humor running through the between-song Q&A; segments. Host Jim Washburn (whose rock criticism appears regularly in Calendar), no stranger to dry and backhanded wit, would serve up a barbed phrase or opinion, eventually to get it batted back with a humorous backspin.

Washburn committed a faux pas of phrasing, though, when he asked Shear about his “guitar style, such as it is.” Shear, admittedly no fret-burner, reacted to that zinger with more bemusement than annoyance, and diplomatic Don Dixon stepped in to disperse the momentary tension by praising the guitarist’s sparse, open-tuned method as “ingenious” for its incorporation of both major and minor chords.

Whether in pay-back or just out of native surliness, McMurtry soon had the moderator dangling for a long half-minute in interviewer hell: To a series of questions about the role of personal experience in his songwriting, he replied only “Mostly,” “Sure” and “Nope.” C’mon--the show’s called “In Their Own Words,” not “In Their Own Monosyllables.”

In any case, “Words” figures to provide reliably fine evenings out if the organizers can keep serving up squads with this unit’s level of talent and synergy. But it would be a welcome departure if some rounds could embrace risk by offering more pronounced contrasts in style, background and approach, even at the sacrifice of some degree of mutuality.

It would be especially interesting to hear from a panel on which there were sharp, outspoken disagreements about songwriting methods--say an avowedly political writer such as Joe Strummer or Gil Scott-Heron teamed with someone who (like most of Thursday’s panelists) thinks topical songwriting is mainly bunk and is willing to say so in cordial debate before backing up his or her points with songs.