POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Hitchcock Poses More Than Puzzle

If Robyn Hitchcock were inclined to take up the craft of his late countryman and namesake Alfred, he would film whodunits that never quite get around to saying who dunnit.

The English rocker is fond of posing puzzles and challenges to interpretation in oblique, non-linear songs full of symbols and odd transformations of being into new shapes, or being into nothingness. When Hitchcock wasn’t singing Friday night at the Coach House, he was chattering his way through absurdist verbal riffs that followed delightfully in the spirit of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Between the obliqueness of the music and the near-lunacy of the patter, it was easy to get lost.

“I don’t think you really get my drift, do you?” Hitchcock cheerfully acknowledged at one point.

If his were all conundrum and no clue, it soon would become arid, with appeal only to those who enjoy mental gamesmanship. But there were enough hints and pointers in his 90-minute, acoustic-based show to make a listener feel somewhat in touch with Hitchcock’s concerns and emotions, if not always his logic.

Even the between-songs sport of wits between Hitchcock and Andy Metcalfe, the bass and keyboards-playing half of his longtime backup duo, usually touched on something beyond the pleasures of wordplay for its own sake.

At one point, Hitchcock, waving hands above his head, painted a fanciful word portrait of a whale trapped in a lake of soap suds.

“How do you save him? You meditate. That’s just what we are doing in Sarajevo, folks.” Whale, lake, suds, sardonic political commentary. In some parallel universe, that logic is impeccable.

In Hitchcock’s universe, it did link up eventually to something meaningful. When he and Metcalfe subsequently performed a comic sketch as two confused, arm-waving Eastern Europeans trying futilely to converse in different dialects, their funny depiction of Balkanized language took on added resonance in light of that earlier allusion to the awful consequences of Balkanized ethnic politics.

Perhaps with his more abstruse methods (and he also is capable of simple and direct song craft, as in the inviting show-opener, “So You Think You’re in Love”), Hitchcock is just trying to help us understand that understanding doesn’t come that easily.

It was possible to let all the symbols and wordplay fly by unheeded and uncomprehended and still get a great deal out of the show. Hitchcock, Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor first played together in the mid-’70s in the band Soft Boys, and by now their musical linkage is as snug and tight as their songs are skewed.

The concert’s semi-acoustic mode showcased fine all-around instrumental craftsmanship and beautifully woven harmonies as Hitchcock’s sidekicks created the perfect, lush bed for his own thin, nasal vocal leads, which made up in melodic reach what they lacked in body and power. It took no thinking cap to understand the beauty of such songs as “Heaven” and “Wax Doll,” to feel the wistful sense of loss in “Madonna of the Wasps,” to get caught up in the hothouse Eastern mysticism of “Globe of Frogs,” or to appreciate the energizing Buddy Holly kick behind “Yip,” one of several new, unrecorded songs Hitchcock played.

In two encore covers, Syd Barrett’s “Dominoes” and the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” Hitchcock paid homage to his psychedelic precursors and perhaps revealed something about his own fears and aspirations.

“Dominoes,” played solo on a darkly tolling 12-string guitar, was a chilling depiction of life winding down toward stasis--one of many Barrett songs that can be read as premonitions or harbingers of the tragic fall into insanity that ended the Pink Floyd founder’s musical career (Hitchcock, in a bit of ironic black humor, referred to him as “the almost late Syd Barrett”).

With “Eight Miles High,” Hitchcock leaped far away from stasis and wove his own gossamer needlepoint interpretation of the famous Roger McGuinn guitar parts. The song is an ode to motion, the opposite of stasis--and it is particularly an ode to the imagination’s journey through strangeness and mystery. That’s a trip Hitchcock himself has taken often enough to rack up frequent flier points.

Besides Barrett, Hitchcock alluded during his show to another ‘60s pop genius who subsequently fell into a state of creative arrest, Arthur Lee of Love (if you don’t own a copy of Love’s brilliant “Forever Changes” album, you’re missing a landmark moment in Southern California rock that is at least as magical as anything ever done by the Doors or Buffalo Springfield). Maybe having Alex Chilton on the bill as his opening act put Hitchcock in mind of rockers whose potential goes to waste after great early achievements.

Chilton (who sang lead on the Box Tops’ hits in the 1960s) flowed with inspiration in the early ‘70s when he led the Memphis band Big Star, producing a trio of timelessly appealing pop-rock albums that delved deep into post-adolescent longing, frustration and anguish. A drinking problem sidetracked Chilton for several years, but since the mid-’80s he has been back as a likable, amiably ironic and unpretentious, but not very ambitious, basher of R&B; oldies and garage rock.

His 45-minute set found him still likable and amiable, still unpretentious, and still bashing it out with a loose-but-right drums-and-bass duo. Big Star has been getting more attention lately than it ever did during its brief, commercially disastrous lifetime, thanks to the praise of R.E.M., the Replacements and other bands Chilton influenced, and to the Rykodisc label’s release this year of two albums of previously deleted or unavailable Big Star material. But despite its newfound currency, Chilton didn’t go out of his way to emphasize that chapter of his career, carrying on with his usual eclectic mix.

As casual as his approach continues to be, Chilton’s performance had a spark to it that suggested he still might have it in him to pull off something more ambitious. His voice was in fine shape, and his guitar playing was a hoot--a thoroughly satisfying mixture of honed acumen and raw, go-for-it rock ‘n’ roll spirit.

He laid on the humorous irony in songs about sex and money (or the lack thereof), his two most persistent themes since his 1985 comeback. But he also tossed in a couple of Big Star nuggets, performing “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and “In the Street” with complete sincerity and conviction.

Even on “What’s Your Sign Girl?” a hokey pop-soul obscurity originally done in 1979 by one Mr. Danny Pearson, Chilton conveyed an affecting, Brian Wilson-like sense of innocence and pure musical joy. “I’m serious about that, I believe in that stuff,” he said, half jokingly and half sheepishly, in reference to the song’s cheesy theme of better-romance-through-astrology. But he might have been speaking about the pleasures of pop instead.

Chilton, who hasn’t had an album of new material out in the United States since 1987, told the audience that he is negotiating now for a new record deal. It’s impossible to say whether inspiration will hit and allow him to get beyond superficial pleasures and add another deeply emotive chapter to his career. But where performance talents are concerned, Chilton is one near-casualty of rock ‘n’ roll who clearly has come through with his faculties and his enthusiasm intact.

Robyn Hitchcock refused to allow his picture be taken by Times photographers.