Pop Music Review : Billy Dean: Capable but Emotionally Flat

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, they say. They seem to be finding ways around that at the Crazy Horse Steak House, though. There were scarcely any cigarette smokers lighting up for Billy Dean’s early show Monday (and hurray for that) but you never would have known it from the stage fog being pumped into the room.

Dean’s music ran a good sight more true than the canned atmosphere. But like many of his video-ready generation of country singers, his music doesn’t approach the hard-earned character of its forebears.

“I’ve got a greatest-hits album out already and I don’t even have any gray hair,” he remarked early in the show, and it is a mite curious. The guy only has three albums out, and already his label has deemed him worthy of a retrospective.

Onstage, the brown-haired, black-garbed 31-year-old Floridian is a capable performer who knows how to engage an audience without resorting to forced enthusiasm. His voice is pleasant, if not exceptionally emotional, and one didn’t need the James Taylor covers in his set to draw comparisons.

The 16-song set featured all but one of the tunes from Dean’s hits collection, including “Only the Wind,” “I Wanna Take Care of You,” “I’m Not Built That Way,” “Once in a While” (from the “Eight Seconds” soundtrack) and the sweet, sad ballad “Somewhere in My Broken Heart.”

Dean and his five-piece band were able to wrap a mood around that number and the 1993 hit “Tryin’ to Hide a Fire in the Dark” (the latter particularly benefited from guitarist Don Mahar’s David Lindley-like statements on a double-neck guitar/six-string bass rig). At such times, Dean sang with feeling, and if you didn’t get a strong sense of personality from it, at least you could tell there was a person there.

This wasn’t always the case. Take Dean’s version of the 1977 Dave Mason hit “We Just Disagree.” A tender, sad, blameless look at the way love can slip away despite a couple’s best intentions, the song has been one of the saving graces of Crusty Dave’s endless career.

Dean prefaced his version with a cute, predictable story about a girl who had dumped him back when the Mason version was a hit. He told her, “ ‘That’s OK, but one of these days, darling, I’m going to be on that big stage, singing my big hits, making the big money and honey, you’re going to be big time sorry. . . .’ She hated this song. She was so glad when it went off the charts, and guess who brought it back?!”

The story sorta makes one think ol’ Billy Dean hasn’t actually paid much heed to the song’s lyrics, and when he sang them Monday he only supported that impression, tossing the tune off with a minimum of emotional contact.

*

Meanwhile, his band, which played with style and form throughout most of the set, went overboard with thick K mart Studio Orchestra synthesizer tones and extraneous guitar and bass solos.

Some of the songs in the set weren’t especially deserving of emotional input, having been built, in the modern Nashville way, around a predictable lyrical hook. The new “Money Don’t Talk, It Swears” was one such tune, borrowing a single line from Bob Dylan’s 1965 “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and beating it into the ground. Dean’s forthcoming single, “Men’ll Be Boys,” wasn’t exactly overflowing with fresh insight either, with its refrain:

The only difference between men and boys

Is the size of their feet and the price of their toys.

Dean closed the show accompanying himself on acoustic guitar during three numbers, his hit “If There Hadn’t Been You” and surprisingly effective covers of relatively minor James Taylor and Jimmy Buffett tunes, “Shower the People” and “It’s My Job.”