POP MUSIC REVIEW : They’re Not as Good as Their Words

The “In Their Own Words” concert at the Rhythm Cafe was pregnant with mistakes waiting to happen.

That dicey element is part of the excitement of this ongoing, occasional series of concert tours, in which accomplished songwriters are thrown together to make a show out of talking about their music as well as playing it. In an era when most concerts aspire to glitch-free efficiency, the “Words” tours offer a night out when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

The audience does have one pretty solid guarantee, however: When a show is in the hands of good songwriters, it’s hard for it to go too far wrong. In terms of song quality and the level of individual performances, Friday night’s show--featuring Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Michelle Shocked and Allen Toussaint--was strong indeed.

The performers in this foursome didn’t know each other well, if at all. And, since the Rhythm Cafe show was only the second night of an 18-city tour, one wondered how well they’d be able to mesh, and how many of those potential goofs they’d be willing to risk against the possibility of striking a fresh creative spark.

The four played it conservatively for most of the two-hour, 20-minute session, concentrating on individual performance, with limited, low-risk musical interplay. Seated in a row on stage, the songwriters took turns until they’d gone through the line five times. Then they came out for an encore, and took the plunge with an attempt at full, four-way collaboration.

As such plunges go, what they’d intended as an improvised-on-the-spot blues number was a real belly flop. Singer-guitarists Ely, Clark, and, especially, Shocked didn’t improvise much that was cohesive or even coherent. That left Toussaint, the New Orleans R&B; master and pianistic wonder, to carry the “vamp in G” with some bawdyhouse piano improvisations of his own.

One suspects that by the end of the tour the four will be working well together with backing harmonies, rhythmic support and maximum exploitation of Toussaint’s keyboard ability (his more than 30 years’ experience as a record producer figures to make him particularly adaptable to other musicians’ needs).

On night two, it was a little disappointing to watch Ely or Shocked silently mouth someone else’s chorus lyrics instead of jumping in with wholehearted harmonies. It might have been better if they’d been somewhat more venturesome with vocal and instrumental interplay, even if it meant that more of those mistakes-in-waiting would indeed leap out.

Ely, who plays second-fiddle on guitar in his own band, did offer tasty, if nothin’-fancy solos and fills in support of songs by his fellow Texans, Shocked and Clark.

The show’s most satisfying moment of collaboration came when Toussaint jumped in with barrelhouse piano on Ely’s “I Had My Hopes Up High,” making a boisterous rocker even more so. By the end, the two were smiling broadly, having ventured something new and seen it work.

What the show lacked in cohesiveness it made up in variety, with four very different personalities on display, along with four widely contrasting musical approaches.

Clark, a big man with a craggy visage, was droll and drawling, and not beyond directing some of his crusty humor at the evening’s host, Danny Kapilian. (Kapilian, the “Words” tour manager, did a credible job as stand-in moderator for Billy Vera. He said after the show that Vera, a Los Angeles R&B; bandleader, actor and talk show host, had to bow out because of a sudden change in the shooting schedule for a part he was playing on “Beverly Hills 90120.” The explanation should have been given to the audience at the outset.)

At one point, the moderator asked Clark to explain some of the inner mechanics of his songwriting--a question that implied writing songs is a logical, trial-and-error process, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Clark responded with some cranky, though not nasty one-liners, then played “How’d You Get This Number,” a song full of absurd humor that clearly isn’t the product of a highly rational mind. “How the hell you gonna explain something like that?” the singer mused when it was over.

Clark, whose style weaves folk and country (making him an influential forebear of such other fine Texas performers as Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett), excelled with a grainy, homespun storyteller’s voice well suited to songs rich in dialogue, character, and setting. He supported himself on guitar with nimble, assertive finger-picking.

While emphasizing humor, Clark also registered with a couple of fervent songs, “L.A. Freeway” and “Come From the Heart”--the latter, a Kathy Mattea hit written by Clark’s wife, Susanna, and their friend, Richard Leigh, was his choice for the final round, in which the songwriters were asked to play a song they hadn’t written themselves, but wished they had.

Ely provided the show’s rock ‘n’ roll fire, strumming and belting his way through a series of rousing numbers before switching to pretty, wistful balladry in his outside choice, “If You Were a Bluebird,” by his Lubbock, Tex. buddy, Butch Hancock. Asked to sing one of his hottest rockers, “Musta Notta Gotta Lotta,” Ely demurred at first, saying he didn’t think it would work without a rhythm section. “Anybody got a trash can lid?” Ely wondered, before plunging ahead.

The smallish but unremittingly enthusiastic audience did its share with robust clapping-in-time on the rockabilly stomp, while Ely did his best whooping Jerry Lee Lewis impression. We waited in vain, though, for Toussaint to kick in with the equivalent on piano, which would have been hot sauce on a thoroughly tasty bite of rock ‘n’ roll.

Toussaint has a reputation for holing up in his New Orleans studio and rarely venturing out on tour (the “Words” trek will be the longest of his 35-year career as a headliner). “I don’t do this enough to feel comfortable; I’m suffering up here,” he said, disarmingly, to the first Orange County audience he has ever faced. A sincere, quietly charming man, he managed to get in his share of funny lines during Q&A; segments.

Toussaint’s usually smooth, low-keyed vocals sounded tentative at times, and he strained when reaching for high notes. But it was a treat to watch him engage a white grand piano with a true master’s aplomb.

His “Southern Nights” was bathed in the most fragrant, creamy tones anyone could coax from a keyboard, evoking warm, cheek-stroking breezes and the shimmer of full moonlight on the waters of a still bayou.

In a tribute to Professor Longhair, the patriarch of New Orleans R&B; piano, Toussaint moved from classical flourishes to the trademark romping, bouncing syncopation that Longhair created. He finished the tribute with “Thank You Lord,” the affectionate gospel ballad he wrote and performed for Professor Longhair’s funeral in 1980.

As Toussaint explained, he is no stranger to writing songs to order, offering as evidence “Wrong Number (I Am Sorry, Goodby),” a winsome, hangdog ballad that he tailored for Aaron Neville 30 years ago. By the last round, when he offered a soulful reading of Bob Dylan’s “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind,” Toussaint’s level of comfort and confidence were clearly rising.

There’s no shyness in Michelle Shocked, who was as wry as the others between songs, but went for darker musical hues than her counterparts. Her choices included two new, unrecorded original songs, and a fiery, a cappella version of Steve Goodman’s Celtic-influenced anti-war folk song, “The Ballad of Penny Evans.”

One of the new songs, which Shocked also performed in an excellent set with an acoustic band last year at Irvine Meadows, was a wailing, belting blues about her childhood friend, “Eddie Bonebreak.” Supported by some rapid, buzzing lead licks from Ely that added to the intensity, Shocked sang about a boy whose father is killed by lightning, then turns to pyromania in an act of vengeance: he sends smoke skyward, “hoping God will choke.”

Darker still was a recent composition, apparently called “Stillborn,” which marshaled vivid rural imagery to describe a haunting day in the life of a midwife after she has delivered a dead infant. Even in the funny blues, “When I Grow Up,” Shocked moved from humor to desperate intensity as she sang the refrain, “When I grow up, I wanna be an old woman”--suggesting there’s no guarantee the song’s protagonist will make it that far.

At its best, the “Words” concept will allow ideas and opinions about music to fly back and forth across the stage as readily as the music itself. That sort of engagement, debate and repartee didn’t emerge here, possibly because the moderator in this case was a guy who has to spend the rest of the tour with these people and couldn’t prudently attempt the valuable role of instigator and provocateur. If a tad mannerly, this installment still let fans feel they were getting an up close, in-person, inside look at four musical personalities who are all worth getting to know well.