O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : NRBQ Still Playing Rock of Ages : The Coach House performance combines veterans’ acumen with the innocence of youth, making it a critic’s wish come true.

If a genie came into my life tomorrow, after seeing to world peace and curing all sickness, my third and final wish would be: Let me relive my teens, but knowing what I know now.

Somewhere, sometime in its near-constant travels over the past 25 years, NRBQ must have found a magic lamp, rubbed, and been granted something like that. The four band members keep alive the innocent and enthusiastic spirit of an idealized teen-hood, while playing with the sophistication and acumen you’d expect only from the most grizzled and experienced veterans of rock ‘n’ roll’s bar-band campaigns.

Terry Adams and Joey Spampinato, who have been in NRBQ since the beginning in 1967, Al Anderson, on board since 1971, and Tom Ardolino, the junior partner with a mere 18 years tenure, cruised into the Coach House yet again Tuesday night, sounding 17 going on infinity. Listening to NRBQ was like eavesdropping on a crew caught up in the perfect unity of cruising and hanging together, with all the inside jokes, permutations of language and unto-themselves rituals that being best high school buddies entails.

It’s only fitting that the 90-minute set contained some great songs about romance in its most innocent and zestful incarnations (for the most part romance between boy and girl but, in the case of Adams’ fetching “Little Floater,” between boy and car). At the same time, NRBQ’s playing reflected a conversance with a half-century or so of pop music history. The members’ obvious enjoyment of their work made it clear that they can still play that rock of ages with the freshness and vigor of youth.

For a lot of bands, plying an itinerary of small haunts year in and year out becomes a strain on the spirit (speaking of small haunts, NRBQ’s new live collection, “Honest Dollar,” was culled from gigs in such metropolises as Cotati, Calif., Palenville, N.Y., and Branford, Conn.). NRBQ clearly isn’t immune to that strain, and over the years it has indulged in a variety of silly stunts (blowing up Cabbage Patch dolls, for instance) and musical tomfoolery to break the monotony and relieve the inevitable boredom of playing one-nighter after one-nighter. The “Honest Dollar” collection has more than its share of such moments.

What made Tuesday night’s concert special was the tremendous focus that NRBQ brought to virtually everything it played. Adams didn’t go as far afield as he is sometimes inclined to; his keyboard explorations have been known to start in Jerry Lee Lewis’s back yard and wind up somewhere near spacey jazz bandleader Sun Ra’s purported home among the planets. Those excursions can be fun, but this time Adams reined in his outlandish instincts and let idiosyncrasy suffice.

Applying chromatic accents and clavinet crashes and gurgles in ways undreamed of by more straightforward rock ‘n’ rollers, or throwing trills galore into a Jerry Lee style workout, Adams showed his delight in working in and around (and around again) the rock ‘n’ roll piano tradition.

His presence was as engaging as his musicianship: This blond mop-top never let just his hands and fingers do the keyboard walking when it was so much more fun to involve almost his entire musculature in reaching for a note and giving it the proper body English. With looks of bliss, mischief or astonishment ever flitting across his pliant face, Adams came across as a Harpo Marx for the rock era.

Bassist Spampinato (now immortalized in a charming new rocker, “Spampinato,” that was a cross between a spelling bee and “The Name Game”) and drummer Ardolino may form the best Italian combination since sausage and peppers. They were able to rumble through a prime rocker like “It’s a Wild Weekend,” lay down a bluesy swamp beat, or provide a springboard for jump-swing excursions.

All the while, Spampinato and Ardolino looked as pleased with the proceedings as Adams--the bassist grinning and letting out periodic coyote howls, and the curly little drummer swaying in his seat like a happy but slightly sleepy tot.

With all that sunshine around him, guitarist Al Anderson may play NRBQ’s resident grizzly bear merely to keep a sense of proportion (although even he had to drop his permascowl and smile broadly at the playful piano flourishes Adams dabbed onto “I Love You, Pretty Thing”).

Despite the gruff exterior, it’s somewhere under Anderson’s massive chest that the heart of NRBQ’s innocence beats--or, more accurately, somewhere within his nasal cavity, since it’s from there that his sweetly scratchy, impishly twangy vocals emanate.

Anderson’s romanticism emerged on “Till There’s a Better Word for Love,” a new song that he performed solo. It was the sweetest, most tender sort of romantic ballad, the kind that makes couples clinch and cuddle and get all misty. In it, Big Al professes a love so great that he wants to find a new vocabulary to express it. Concluding that he can’t improve on the same old monosyllable, he decides in the end, “I guess I’ll just hold her tight, till there’s a better word for love.”

Another new song, “A Little Bit of Bad Sounds Good to Me,” offered the flip side to that purely romantic vision, portraying sex as a natural source of untroubled, good-natured fun, all the while still sounding tender and sincere.

The sort of exaggerated Angst that the Cure or Depeche Mode serves up doesn’t figure in NRBQ’s world, but the band showed that it could turn several shades of blue with a slow, gospel-inflected reading of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye, Bye Love.” Getting fine harmony support from Spampinato, Anderson put a cry into his phrasing that alternately echoed Ray Charles, Richard Manuel and George Jones--about as impressive a trifecta as a singer can hit without being at the race track.

Anderson also is pound for pound one of the most inventive guitarists in rock, which, given his ample size, is saying quite a lot. But part of his magic was lost to a stereo sound balance disorder that made most of his Telecaster solos hard to hear on one side of the room. It was the only drawback to a show that was in every other respect the answer to a pop-lover’s wishes.

Two local bands opened. I’ve reviewed second-billed Medicine Rattle several times in the past year, and by now the band must be as sick of reading my complaints about Melanie MacDowell’s overwrought, exaggerated all-aflutter vibrato vocal technique as I am of listening to it. Too bad, because Medicine Rattle is a talented, energetic band that writes some solid, roots-rock material.

The Pivot Foots, who opened, have sharpened their instrumental trio sound to the point where it now offers a nice, skittery, off-kilter complement to the band’s skewed, ironic lyrical sensibility.

Brent Walker’s modest guitar lines kept taking unexpected, angular turns as he scratched out country and blues-derived licks. His brother Blair provided a supple swing element on bass. But vocals were a problem, except when Blair stuck to the comfort of his severely limited middle range.

What the Pivot Foots need is another leg to stand on: a singer who can give the songs some melodic dimension, and dramatize them in a way that brings out the humor and satire in the Walker brothers’ material.