POP MUSIC REVIEW : ‘Regular Joe’ Diffie Is Putting on Airs

SANTA ANA — With his close-set eyes, mustache and squat physique, Joe Diffie looks like a heartland everyman, a guy who could be pumping your gas or selling you hardware rather than making No. 1 country records. He even enshrined his normalcy in “Regular Joe,” the second song in his early show at the Crazy Horse on Monday.

In the country-music spectrum, Diffie is a classic second-line Joe: capable but rarely inspired, easy to slip onto a radio playlist and hard to draw anything deep or lasting from, occasionally suggesting something special but invariably lapsing back into vocal and stylistic timidity.

His voice has a wide range, and power in every register, and he showed it off Monday by going from the basso profundo title phrase of George Jones’ hit “White Lightning” to steel-belted high notes on some of his ballads.

But the voice doesn’t have any texture to its surfaces, and Diffie lacks the sense of adventure to push it into areas of emotional revelation.

His material, much of which he co-writes, ranges from such hits as the memorable alienation lament “Is It Cold in Here” to sentimental homages to cliched symbols of home. The nods to tradition on his new album, “Honky Tonk Attitude,” are pretty generic. The exception--and one of the high points of Monday’s show--was “Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die),” which has an uncharacteristic tinge of irreverence.

Still, Diffie in the past at least conveyed a sincerity and an unpretentiousness that helped his music ring true. There might not have been any risks, but there were no excesses.

At the Crazy Horse, it appeared that the Oklahoman has decided--or was told--that in the age of Billy Ray Cyrus you have to be an entertainer . So he sort of shook his rear and did some playful high-kicking with his musicians--all of it forced and unnatural.

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Diffie appeared much more comfortable when he simply laid back and dug into songs close to the deepest vein of honky-tonk tradition. But even in areas of musical judgment, Diffie was disconcertingly slack--especially when he subverted his own sincerity during “Ships That Don’t Come In,” a sentimental but stirring study of struggle and failed dreams that was a No. 1 hit for him.

Diffie introduced it with comments encouraging more concern for the less fortunate, and this addressing of real issues momentarily lifted the show from the routine. But then on the final chorus, Diffie decided to hold a high note for a few minutes, eliciting whoops from the crowd, initiating a series of giggling attempts to return to the song, and utterly destroying the moment.

A year ago, when facing the choice of showing off or underplaying, Diffie had the restraint to serve the meaning of lyric. Now it appears that he’s either lost his taste or taken some bad advice. Say it ain’t so, Joe.