POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cracker Is Main Dish in Coach House Double Bill

Two highly regarded bands came to the Coach House on Friday to sing their frustrations.

Neither the headlining Cracker nor the second-billed Counting Crows harbors any illusions that the world is a brightly lit place where fulfillment is humanity’s birthright.

Though Counting Crows’ earnest, wounded plaints were worth hearing out, Cracker’s hardtack attitude, ironic slant and healthy sense of the absurd offered the more mature artistic vision and by far the night’s more diverse and satisfying show.

Perhaps that was inevitable.

Counting Crows and its singer-lyricist, Adam Duritz, are still on their first album (one that has drawn a lot of attention for its passionate delivery). Cracker’s front man, David Lowery, is a crookedly grinning scamp who has been one of the more interesting young singer-songwriters around since his 1985 debut with the alternative rock (back when it really was alternative to the mainstream) icon Camper Van Beethoven.

Duritz, in song after song, came off as the shaken, embattled idealist. His characters desperately want meaning, transcendence and connection from life, and they are sent reeling when the shock of youthful experience makes it clear that the world’s ways and their own inner flaws will conspire to thwart them.

That’s a meaty premise on which to build an album or a set. But Counting Crows didn’t come at it from enough angles. Playing unplugged as a tour-ending change of pace, the Bay Area band offered a litany of anguished cries from the heart. An often attractive litany, to be sure, and one performed with craft and full conviction. But this was a one-note affair. Counting Crows needs to broaden the songwriting to encompass other moods and points of view.

Cracker’s outlook was more experienced, jaded and worldly-wise. Lowery is long past the stage of Angst --as was made explicit in the deliciously catty “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now),” a semi-hit song from the band’s 1992 debut album that mocks the notion of pop music as anything worthy of self-seriousness.

In Cracker’s view--expressed in songs by Lowery as well as his lead-guitar sidekick, Johnny Hickman--the world is a cheat, and there is little to be done to change it. Perhaps that is why the band chose to cover the Grateful Dead’s dirge, “Loser,” the monologue of a doomed, self-deluded gambler. It ends Cracker’s new album, “Kerosene Hat,” and in concert served as a mid-set thematic centerpiece.

In rock ‘n’ roll, sex is the most commonly prescribed cure for the existential blahs. And in many a song, Cracker sets off in pursuit of amorous relief. Where the Stones posited “no satisfaction” as an acute but surely temporary problem, some Cracker songs portray sex as a double-edged attraction that can be a trap in itself.

In “Low,” the new album’s MTV entry, Lowery does indeed want to get down. But the song’s imagery, which compares sexual escape to druggy oblivion, suggests that, besides the obvious allure and instinctual tug of the sex drive, there is something dangerous and perhaps even shameful about over-investing in what is, after all, the thing we share with animals.

In “Movie Star,” the Cracker singer returned to that idea as he barked “Girl, you’re a beautiful animal” over and over, mixing a strong hint of disgust and desperation with his nevertheless undiminished erotic interest. So sex is probably a cheat, too--but it’s a game we can’t resist, and pursuing it is at least a way to pass the time, as Lowery did with a fine sense of self-deflating comedy in his mock-epic quest narrative, “Euro-Trash Girl.”

At some point, Cracker realizes, mental health demands saying “ah, heck” and just rocking out or having a good laugh.

It did so in the insouciant “Cracker Soul,” in “Lonesome Johnny Blues,” a countrified, tongue-in cheek country tune that Hickman delivered with a yodel and a twang, and “Sweet Potato,” in which the band’s Southern-fried musical dish borrowed some of its spice from Little Feat’s recipe for “Dixie Chicken.”

Cracker’s playing approach was as plain and simple as its namesake, and this set was tasty with each bite.

Hickman was a stylish guitarist, fluent but unfettered. The band achieved a loose, rough-hewn feel set down by such country-influenced precursors as the Rolling Stones and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Lowery’s brittle and grainy voice demands harmony support, and he got all he needed from Hickman and bassist Bruce Hughes. Hickman and Lowery were high school friends in the San Bernardino County town of Redlands. Hughes, formerly of Poi Dog Pondering, and drummer David Lovering, an ex-Pixie, were a sharp rhythm section hired for this tour.

Even though “Kerosene Hat” tops Cracker’s strong first album, the set wasn’t as satisfying as the band’s show a year ago at the Coach House.

Cracker played for only 70 minutes this time--leading one to suspect the band, which was winding up a two-month tour, was a tad too eager to start its Christmas vacation early. If it had performed 10 songs from the new album, instead of just six, we might have almost had our fill.

*

Yet again, Susan James opened the evening. The San Francisco solo performer is a promising singer, heavily influenced by Joni Mitchell, and she does well when not drifting off into dull, self-consciously arty extended reveries, as she did in a droning cover of “Eight Miles High” and a set-closing reworking of David Bowie’s “Heroes.”

James is managed by a Coach House staffer. She has had three coveted opening slots for national headliners at the club in the past 3 1/2 months, and at least three since last December.

With the recent demise of Bogart’s, the Coach House is the only high-profile concert club available to Orange County rockers. It should redouble its efforts to give local acts a shot opening for popular touring headliners, with the valuable experience and exposure such gigs afford.

Awarding the goodies so lopsidedly to one in-house favorite is not the way to go.