POP MUSIC REVIEW : Dramarama Makes Itself Right at Home at Coach House

Martin Mull would have been flattered.

The fellow known nowadays for playing Roseanne Arnold’s television boss put out a 1973 album titled “Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room.”

Dramarama turned up at the Coach House on Friday night with its furniture. The stage decor included a big sofa, a coffee table, lamps, many candles, a framed picture propped on the piano of a young George Harrison and a silent television set that was switched on throughout the performance, showing the 1968 film, “Candy.”

Dramarama figured that getting comfy was the way to play in a stripped-down format involving bongos instead of drums, and guitars that MTV would have said were unplugged.

Dramarama wasn’t saying that, though. “This is all a big lie about being unplugged. We’re all plugged,” singer John Easdale cheerfully announced early in a show that was billed as “an acoustic evening with Dramarama.” Right after he said it, lead guitarist Mr. E. Boy started contorting notes with an E-bow, a sort of hand-held guitar synthesizer that you can be sure has never been used by any unplugged picker.

If truth in labeling matters, the show should have been billed as “a moderately amplified evening with Dramarama so you could really hear the songs, except for the times when the sound mix wasn’t so hot.” These days, thanks to MTV’s “Unplugged” concert series, “acoustic” performance has come to be seen as a cliche. But letting songs stand quietly for inspection is fundamental to good music, and shouldn’t be dismissed as a fashion or a gimmick just because slickly performed “acoustic rock” sessions are suddenly marketable.

As far as performance goes, Dramarama wasn’t unqualified to play unplugged-or-whatever, but it wasn’t in its best element, either. Rather than toying with songs--retooling an all-out rocker as a ballad, say, as Elvis Costello is wont to do, or using the quieter circumstances to explore new ways of musical interaction among the players--Dramarama stuck mainly with its less raucous songs and played them in arrangements that paralleled the recorded versions. Mr. E. Boy and second guitarist Peter Wood are great at howling away in amped-up circumstances. They got in some decent, if repetitive, licks on acoustic guitars, but any acoustic player in a good country band could have done much more.

That didn’t stop Dramarama’s adoring fans from getting all warm and runny (as Mr. Mull put it in his best-known song) every time they heard a lick off a familiar record (and this partisan group knew virtually every lick off every Dramarama record).

Intro strums would bring delighted cheers of recognition; every E. Boy solo was greeted with loud audience glee (when the fans applauded one dramatic circling riff, the guitarist paused to point out wryly that “it’s only three notes”).

What made the show worthwhile was the chance to hear deeply emotive songs in a relatively intimate musical setting. Basically, we got to wallow with singer-songwriter Easdale through 90 minutes of quieter-than-usual desperation as he sang about teetering relationships, hollow feelings and unmet needs.

There was enough variety and intensity in that sustained wallow to save it from dullness. Mr. E. would switch to his more expressive electric guitar from time to time, lending a lonely, vast-open-spaces feeling to songs dealing with emotional emptiness--notably “Worse Than Being By Myself” and “Fireplace, Pool and Air Conditioning.”

With his frayed, scratchy voice registering strongly, Easdale did a fine job of inhabiting the succession of anguished moments depicted in his songs. For contrast, Dramarama offered a wistful, bittersweet cover of an old Faces tune, “Ooh La La.” The Faces song looks back with acceptance and equanimity on past mistakes; Easdale’s originals always seem to be set in an anguished present, in which that sort of balanced, long view of things is impossible.

Also impressive, and something of a departure for Dramarama, was a new, unrecorded song called “I Will Work For Food.” It’s hard to offer a confident evaluation of the song because for half of it Easdale’s voice was buried in the mix. But the rest of it appeared to rise well above conventional pity and hand-wringing over the homeless (thank you, Phil Collins). The song was plaintive, but it also quietly located the inner dignity of a person scrapping to stay alive rather than giving up: “I will keep on rolling, keep on rolling,” went a refrain that affirmed without trying to glorify.

“Last Cigarette” lent a more rocking note of mirthful desperation (as opposed to the typical note of just-plain desperation) to the proceedings.

In a too-predictable move, Dramarama saved “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)” for its final encore. It’s an excellent song, and an important one for Dramarama, which first became big in Southern California in 1986 when KROQ began to feature it. (That radio success led the band members to move here from their hometown of Wayne, N.J.).

The semi-acoustic reading of “Anything” had lots of clout, and it drew a shrieking response from the audience that would have registered on the Beatles meter. But this was exactly the song that Dramarama should have disassembled and reconstructed into something new if it was going to treat going semi-plugged as an adventure, a way to really rearrange the furniture.