POP MUSIC REVIEW : Making Crime Play : Sparks Fly at Coach House With Widespread Panic’s Borrowed Sound; Original Work Would Burn Brighter

A common path to rock success in the early ‘90s is to swipe the sound of some band from 20-odd years ago and hope that masses of people will either not notice or not care.

What is Pearl Jam’s instrumental approach but a recycling of the Jimi Hendrix Experience? Who are the Black Crowes if not a Faces/Stones tribute band? Haven’t Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Aerosmith been pillaged more in the past five years than the Great Pyramid has in the past 3,000?

A good thief knows that crime eventually won’t pay if he keeps picking the same pocket over and over. But not all thieves have the skills to diversify.

Widespread Panic needn’t worry about that. This six-man band from Athens, Ga., has the chops instrumentally to swipe just about anything it chooses. If it can find a brighter spark of inspiration for its songwriting--which, after three albums, is nothing special--it might even be able to fashion those stolen materials into a contribution of its own. After all, the influential bands of 20 years ago were nicking the styles of players who preceded them by 15 or 20 years.

Playing for a sparse but lively audience at the Coach House on Wednesday, Widespread Panic engaged in more than two hours of wide-ranging quotation. The breadth of its borrowing allowed the band to sustain interest during expansive, well-conceived instrumental excursions in which individual grandstanding was nil, the ensemble was all and, as a result, songs could be stretched with no lapses into diffuse noodling.

The Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band are the most common points of comparison. Like those precursors, the band features a two-man percussion team and emphasizes keyboards along with guitar. Wednesday, the brooding blues passages that called to mind the Allmans were relatively few but the Dead were brought back repeatedly via airy, vaguely countrified moods carried by light, churning rhythms. “Space Wrangler,” after many ebbs and surges and changes of mood, rolled with cresting power at the end, the way the Dead can. It brought a jolt of joy to the dancing fans.

At other moments, Widespread Panic summoned some Louisiana funk a la Little Feat and a salsa accent by way of Santana. There were echoes of Eric Clapton’s bands from the early ‘70s. At one point, Michael Houser’s razor-toned lead guitar and Dave Schools’ highly active six-string bass created a driving tumult that recalled Yes’s Steve Howe and Chris Squire, circa “Starship Trooper.”

In short, Widespread Panic was reminiscent of just about every band from 1971 that had the acumen to stretch beyond short-form pop and go exploring.

Houser, Schools and a third fine soloist, piano/organ player John Hermann, coordinated parts or handed off to each other like a well-drilled football offense running a flea-flicker. Drummer Todd Nance and percussionist Domingo S. Ortiz laid down country train rhythms, blues shuffles or funky R&B; patterns, keeping the show’s rhythmic flow varied and well-paced. The singer, John Bell, can sound stiffly declamatory on record but, rasping like Rod Stewart on a particularly chesty day, he was warmer and more natural in concert.

Working without spotlights, Widespread Panic made no attempt at showmanship. Houser was like a tailor at his bench, hunched over the guitar, face hidden by a mop of hair. But there was so much movement in the music that it hardly mattered that the players were almost immobile.

In contrast to pop culture’s prevailing irony and jaundiced view of life, this is a band that offers earnest philosophizing and mythic elevation of the ordinary (its current album, “Everyday,” has a number of songs about seeing grandeur in small things). Lyrics often tell of journeys taken, and at the Coach House, the episodic, restless cast of the music in songs like “Papa’s Home” certainly made those trips seem like passages of great importance.

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Such tunes as “Hatfield” and “Walkin’ (For Your Love)” contain good, hummable refrains. Still, there was a sense Wednesday that the songs existed primarily to launch the band on its instrumental forays, rather than as fully realized, involving entities in their own right. Widespread Panic has a lot of good grist for its instrumental workouts but it has yet to write outstanding songs that have their own eloquence. When the band comes up with truly memorable and resonant material, the charges of thievery likely will be dismissed.