Pop Music Review / Mike Boehm : Playing, Writing in the Present Intense

Quiet intensity is Ben Harper’s ticket to pop music’s roster of all-star rookies for 1994.

The 24-year-old singer-songwriter from Claremont fired up a small audience Wednesday night at the Coach House without even leaving his chair. The seat was mandatory because Harper plays lap-style acoustic slide guitar steeped in the Delta blues tradition. But rather than position himself as another blues shouter, he explored the intensity that can come from focusing inward.

His singing was founded upon near-whispers, low moans and half-swallowed keening plaints. His vintage Weissenborn guitars moaned and quavered too, and rattled like the wind blowing through an abandoned desert town. The result was instant gravitas, a clear sense that the artist had more on his agenda than an evening’s entertainment. His inward but dramatic bearing added to the effect.

His lyrics also conveyed a sense of mission. Some songs carried at least traces of lightness, but often they revealed a barely reined-in anger over the persistence of racial injustices, weariness in the face of insurmountable troubles, and a yearning for spiritual release.

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Harper did make room for one rambunctious element: a three-man, drums-bass-percussion rhythm section that played with far more force and drive than on his debut album, “Welcome to the Cruel World.” It proved to be a mixed blessing. Early on, the emphasis on tough rhythm nearly derailed the show as the band crowded out Harper’s voice and guitar playing. Eventually, the force was harnessed and became an asset.

Harper contributed to his halting start by opening with a 10-minute song that tried to create tense drama but never got off the mark, largely because his guitar playing was more taken with percussive sound effects than with the creation of coherent lead lines. The number, not on his album, raised concern that here was another unprepared rookie desperately trying to stretch a 50-minute CD’s worth of material into a 90-minute headlining set.

But Harper found his bearings with “Whipping Boy,” a slow, brooding song that merged folk-blues guitar with heavy rhythm, as if Ry Cooder had taken over leadership of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.

Harper’s best songs were his most meditative: the back-to-back ballads “Waiting on an Angel” and “Forever.” Starkly lovely and palpably aching, “Angel” is one of the best ballads of the year. Both songs rank with the work of two other quietly intense singer-songwriters, Joan Armatrading and Tracy Chapman.

Those laments set up a long, concluding dialogue between confrontations with worldly troubles and the attempt to leave them behind with a spiritual leap. A dark, driving gospel song, “Child of God,” looked toward escape to the hereafter. “Like A King” returned to the fallen world, invoking Rodney King and Martin Luther King to decry the lasting effects of racism.

Like some of Harper’s other protest songs, the “King” lyric settles for the bareness of a prosaic, ready-made sound bite, where good topical writing demands flashes of imagination (you don’t write bald position papers in miniature--”can’t walk the streets, to them we are fair game”; you try to write something with the clarifying symbolism of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or with the you-are-there storytelling and portraiture of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” or “I Shot the Sheriff”). But the “King” music was trenchant and memorable, and Harper’s chant-like delivery gave it a resonance and timelessness missing from the lyric.

Harper came to the brink of despair with “Welcome to the Cruel World,” which would have made for a stunning closer if he’d had the nerve to leave an audience with its devastating declaration of utter dejection:

And if you get up to heaven before I do,

I’m gonna tell ya, it’s gonna be cruel there, too.

He relented, however, ending with “Breakin’ Down” and its extended, boisterous workout on Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The finale may have been conventional, but Harper seems like a newcomer with the artistic ambition to mount future challenges to his audience and to himself.

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The Woodbys, regulars on the local coffee house scene, offered a set made of far milder stuff. Most of it was folk-pop in the mellow ‘70s vein of Kenny Loggins, Dan Fogelberg and Crosby, Stills & Nash--pleasantly wistful, but rarely striking.

The grand exception was “Lonely Rider,” a superb a cappella song featuring yearning lead vocals by Stan DeWitt and outstanding glee club-cum-bluegrass harmonies from the three other band members. Few opening acts have the gumption to venture a ballad, let alone sing it without instrumental accompaniment. The Woodbys seized the house and held it with a striking performance.

The Aphids’ opening set reminded one that any motivated garage band can have its moments of ragged, three-chord glory. But given the foursome’s overall stiffness, its wan, mannered singing, and its bland lyrics about girlfriend problems, glory proved fleeting.