Pop Music Review : Tramps Shy Away From Deeper Side

As usual, Cadillac Tramps made it an exciting and pounding ride.

Playing its most prestigious headlining gig to date Friday night at the Palace, the hard-driving Orange County band took a large and loyal following on a typically sweat-soaked excursion.

But if the Tramps want to be an all-terrain vehicle that can take fans around the emotional bends as well as zoom down the high-energy speedway, they are going to have to load their concerts with all the options. At the Palace, we didn’t get some of the most powerful add-ons in the Tramps’ recently improved and updated product line.

The band can hardly be accused of spinning its creative wheels (sorry about all these automotive metaphors, but I’m a product of American car culture--I can’t help myself). With their new album, “It’s Allright,” the Tramps make significant strides. In two previous releases, they usually emphasized the humorous side of life on the mean streets, chuckling in the face of desperate circumstance with a seriocomic, deliberately cartoonish swagger. With “It’s Allright,” their best and most complex album, the Tramps take a deeper, more serious look at people struggling to hold their frayed lives together in the face of social decay and their own inner turmoil.

If the band wants to operate at the highest possible level, its challenge is to bring all the strands together--the ribald humor with the full-on anguish, the sweaty stomps with the dark, coiled songs in which the thrill comes from the power of the emotions, and not just the physical clout of the performance.

Over the course of their three albums, Cadillac Tramps have created a kind of composite character. He’s a complex fellow who laughs and clowns and tries to tough it out with wry bravado, but who lets down the mask sometimes to reveal how overwhelmed and desperate he feels. If the Tramps can deliver a show that explores the full range of that guy’s feelings in a cohesive way, they will be reaching their potential.

At the Palace, there were some small but positive steps in that direction, but the Tramps’ 70-minute set was mainly business as usual, relying on the qualities that for the past five years have made it the most popular band on Orange County’s grass-roots alternative rock scene.

Front man Mike (Gabby) Gaborno’s natural inclination on stage is to go with the swaggering, fun part of the Cadillac Tramps composite. The massively round and bouncing Gabby really is a homeboy--an entertainer with a rare gift for establishing a bond of fellowship with his audience, even as he joshingly ridicules them (while including himself in the joke). When he stretched out his arms and greeted the crowd as “all my friends,” or repeatedly addressed them as “brothers and sisters,” it wasn’t a show-bizzy ooze of snake oil he was selling, but a warm, genuine cup of fond regard. By the end of the show, Gabby had given away his blue bandanna, his sunglasses and his wrist band as tokens of appreciation to fans near the stage.

He was antic, as always, playing the part of the ribald carouser and show-off--a shuffling, Spanglish-spouting hi-de-ho man, a Sir Juan Falstaff whose ample belly, protruding from an unbuttoned shirt, is his proudest trophy. Gabby has gone overboard at times in the past in his pursuit of belly laughs via flab-shaking, stomach grabbing, trouser-lowering sight gags. This time, he kept such displays within reason.

The other Tramps don’t slack on visual presentation. Lead guitarist Jonny Wickersham combined the dark-suited garb of a ‘50s jazzman with the spiky, electric-blue hair of a ‘70s punk rocker. The other guitarist, Brian Coakley, wheeled jerkily about the stage like a marionette in the hands of a clumsy, novice puppeteer. Warren Renfrow, a bassist with the approximate dimensions of a large refrigerator, looked like Curly of the Three Stooges with his shaven head, except with a touch of menace.

Musically, the Tramps were up to par, which means that the 16 strings collectively commanded by Wickersham, Coakley and Renfrow hit with the impact of 16 tons. The Tramps’ sound is a sort of Yardbirds update in which punk drive is harnessed to old-line blues and rock ‘n’ roll licks, with Wickersham’s razory solos giving the band’s blunt force a cutting edge. Strong backing vocals from the two guitarists gave choruses a lift behind Gaborno’s growly lead.

The Tramps’ new drummer, Dieter Hartman, capably sustained the beat through the thrusting, bouncing and churning grooves on which Tramps songs are built. The transplanted Austrian didn’t sound as muscular as predecessors Jamie Reidling and Spanky Barrios, but that may have been a matter of a sound mix that favored vocals and lead guitars over the rhythm section (and a good mix it was: too many rock shows are undermined when lyrics and guitar parts are expunged by booming basses and crashing cymbals).

The show rocked, most certainly. But it didn’t tug at the heart and mind as it might have. Along with such rowdy favorites as “Life on the Edge” and “Train to Fame,” from their 1991 debut album, and “Shake!” an aptly titled track from the 1992 release “Tombstone Radio,” the Tramps did include several of their new album’s dark songs. But “It’s Allright,” the title track that was being shot for a video, came off as just another hard-charging burner. The song is about loyalty and comradeship under the hardest circumstances, as its protagonist promises to stand by an AIDS-stricken friend in her fight with “monsters no one can see.” But that emotional subtext didn’t come through.

Gaborno did set aside his customary antics to sing with straightforward intensity on new songs like “Hate,” a rousing anthem that decries the rise of meanness and suspicion on the social landscape, and “All I Wanted,” a portrait of a desperate character who sees all avenues to a good life closed.

But to complete the character composite that emerges on their albums, Cadillac Tramps need to play their most probing songs. Those tend to be slower ones that would force them to downshift and conceive their shows as something more than a continuous action sequence.

These are some of the cards the Tramps didn’t play: “(Carry My Soul To) The River,” a deep lament from “Tombstone Radio,” and such new-album highlights as “Wreckage,” a vivid, richly melodic song that explores anguished depths, and “Waiting,” a taut suicide note in which the band shifts to a reggae-beat arrangement a la Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives.” One can understand the Tramps’ desire to give faithful fans the rocking fun they’ve come to expect from the band. But they can’t let that stop them from playing their most strongly emotional material, and showing off their full range as a band. To do otherwise would be a failure of nerve.

In a telling moment, Gaborno took an encore request for “Don’t Go,” a sad, romantic power ballad from the Tramps’ first album. He hemmed and hawed while Coakley strummed the opening chords, as if reluctant to plunge into the set’s only ballad. In a touching gesture, he noticed a woman crying in the audience during the song, and tried to cheer her up with the happy-face gestures that older kids make when a little one has gotten upset.

“Somebody give her a big hug and tell her things aren’t as bad as they (seem),” Gabby said when the song was over.

The Tramps won’t realize their potential in concert until they play the songs that make it powerfully clear how bad things can be. They have to find a place for the tears, along with the laughter and the sweat.