POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lindley’s Jabs at Middle Class Are Gentle but Telling : His and percussionist Hani Naser’s performance in San Juan is typically extraordinary--and typically bizarre.

Maybe it’s good that the world at large has never caught on to the wonders of David Lindley. Imagine this gnome-like creature at the Rose Bowl, leading 80,000 fans as they chant:

“Put away the axes, and pay those taxes. Let’s all get normal at the luuuuuuuuuuuau.”

It was bizarre enough when nearly 500 people chanted just that during Lindley and percussionist Hani Naser’s typically extraordinary performance Saturday at the Coach House--bizarre, but it also was very comforting that a club full of listeners would so wholeheartedly embrace this gentle jab at middle-class values (from Friz Fuller’s “Tiki Torches at Twilight”).

Cynicism is in such vogue in pop culture--witness Beavis and Butt-head, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh--that Lindley’s refusal to throw in with the pack is downright counterrevolutionary. Instead, he sides with Elwood P. Dowd, Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Harvey,” choosing good-humored eccentricity over bitterness in reacting to the world’s idiosyncrasies and injustices.

Opening with the stinging “Cottonmill Blues,” one of half a dozen songs he played from his current self-produced “Official Bootleg” CD, Lindley made it clear that he is aware of what is happening in the world around him.

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With a perplexed shake of his head, he dedicated the song “to all those people who voted for NAFTA,” giving a timely twist to this traditional song’s lyric: “You can’t make the money till you move away.”

Usually, though, Lindley and Naser draw delight from their encounters with the world’s people and their music. An ethnomusicologist could spend a week trying to separate the various threads woven through Lindley’s version of the Louisiana zydeco standard “Bon Temps Rouler” (or, as Lindley has it on the album, “Bon Ton Roulie”).

As he quite accurately put it, “In Louisiana, everybody has a version of this, and no two are alike.”

Lindley’s is the least alike of all.

Using a Weissenborn Hawaiian guitar as a lap slide, he not only captured the fundamental blues and Creole Indian elements upon which most zydeco artists draw, but--abetted by Naser’s colorful hand drumming--he also infused the song with a hypnotic Middle Eastern tint and a throbbing, decidedly reggae rhythmic base.

Lindley moved throughout the nearly two-hour show among a couple of Weissenborns, a pair of Turkish sazzes (that look like mandolins on steroids) and electric and acoustic bouzoukis.

There seemed to be no world beyond the reach of his and the inventive Naser’s symbiotic music-making. (Having given up his law practice to follow the musical muse, Naser is that refreshingly rare attorney who recognizes that in a just universe, law and music are mutually exclusive careers.)

For Jerry Joseph’s “Lick the Tears,” the tale of a bitter breakup, Lindley selected the larger saz and coaxed out melancholy klezmer-like riffs. At another point, he showcased one of the gem-like songs he found two years ago during a trip that he and guitarist Henry Kaiser took to Madagascar to record with indigenous musicians. Lindley described the gorgeous solo instrumental, played on a Weissenborn, as “a sort of national anthem of Madagascar.”

Of course, Lindley and Naser probably could make “The Star-Spangled Banner” sound like music of the gods.

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To close the set, Lindley indicated that musical talent is indeed hereditary by bringing out daughter Roseann, a former member of an L.A. pop group called the Casual Girls. On this occasion, Lindley the Younger revealed herself to be a persuasive blues belter--more convincing, in fact, than opening act Hans Olson. He turned in a solo set of blues from the John Hammond mold, but minus Hammond’s dexterity as an instrumentalist and his utter abandon as a singer.

The singer-songwriter-mouth harpist from Phoenix was at his best during a Brownie McGhee song about the charms of his objet d’amour . (“She’s got a million-dollar figure. See those legs. She walks like she’s walkin’ on soft-boiled eggs.”)

Olson’s own songs--one about the hard life of a rolling stone who can’t take a wife, another about the burden of worrying about pollution, money and crime--fell on the wrong side of that fine line that separates blues singing from whining.