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POP MUSIC REVIEW : Tim McGraw: Steady Diet of Country Corn

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Tim McGraw fit right in as an attraction at the Orange County Fair.

The newly minted country star’s show Wednesday night at the Pacific Amphitheatre offered a midway’s worth of musical junk food, but dang if the flash, the barker-blarney and the swirl of enthusiasm didn’t make you want to swallow at least some of it.

McGraw’s 95-minute show included enough sugary fluff and drippy molasses to start his own cotton-candy and candy-apple franchises. Fortunately, his sharp, sturdy, and delightfully motley-looking backup band, the Dance Hall Doctors, made sure that there was some healthy protein in the diet.

One of the biggest hits on the menu, “Don’t Take the Girl,” was a treacle-coated corn dog of a ballad that the overflow crowd of about 9,000 swallowed in a gulp. McGraw sang this mechanical, bathetic potboiler about young love and young death in a stricken, fervent voice, and many of the fans sang along.

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Another remarkably awful ballad was “Not a Moment Too Soon,” the title track from McGraw’s breakthrough album, of which millions (two, anyway) have been sold, just like cheeseburgers.

It will be instructive to quote the entire chorus of this marvel of song-craft. Like certain fair delicacies, it consists of almost 100% unadulterated fat--the cliche being the verbal equivalent of the fattiest junk food.

For hack songwriters concocting commercial confections, cliches are a main ingredient, like so much butter and cream. For critics, they are sheer heart attack.

Not a moment too soon (cliche No. 1)

Without a minute to spare (2)

You touched my heart (3)

When I didn’t have a prayer (4)

In my darkest hour (5)

With my world filled with gloom (not quite a cliche; OK, so they put in half an ounce of lean)

Your sweet love saved me (6)

Not a moment too soon (I think I’m having chest pains)

If the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) won’t put warning labels on this stuff, maybe the MLA (Modern Language Assn.) will. The crowd sang along on this one, too. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger.

Which brings us to McGraw’s breakthrough hit, “Indian Outlaw.” This buffoonish ditty, a pointless, incoherent jumble of ridiculous cliches about Native Americans is the musical equivalent of “F Troop.”

Some Native American groups have taken offense and called it bigoted (the Cherokees of Southern California and the American Indian Movement sponsored a small protest outside the fair’s main entrance Wednesday evening before the show).

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But “Indian Outlaw” is too dim and scattered a work to qualify as mean-spirited. A bigot would have an opinion about Indians. To have an opinion, you have to be able to think. There is no evidence that the two Nashville songsmiths who wrote “Indian Outlaw” put any thought into it at all. Mindlessly, unintentionally insulting? Yes. Bigoted? Doubtful.

Congratulations to the protesters, though. Maybe the next songwriter will remember the fuss they made and pause to think. As historical dues go, Native Americans have paid in full and earned the right to be taken seriously, without exceptions.

Novelty-seeking wags should look elsewhere for ethnic flavor. McGraw is of Irish-Italian extraction. If he wants to stay on the same level with his next album, perhaps he can give us drunken leprechauns or a spaghetti-twirling fat man exclaiming, “Mama mia!”

McGraw served up “Indian Outlaw” at the end of his set, without commenting on the controversy. It lifted a delighted house out of its seats. And, in fact, the live version was boisterous enough to elevate the song into the “Achy Breaky” category of idiocy that is kind of fun.

The band threw in some riffing from the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman,” as if to point out that McGraw isn’t the first paleface to capitalize on musical cliches culled from Hollywood oaters.

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As if to set the record straight, McGraw had Paul Revere & the Raiders’ 1971 pro-Indian hit, “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian),” played over the sound system just before the show started. The song is briefly quoted at the end of “Indian Outlaw,” but for no discernible reason.

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In other PC news, McGraw had an interpreter on stage to translate his show into sign language. But since she was a long-tressed, tight-jeaned, hip-shimmying lovely who also functioned as a go-go girl, he only gets half-credit in the political-correctness department.

McGraw gets full credit for effort: One had to admire his eagerness to get across and stir up the crowd in any way he could.

He entered rump first, turning and waggling his fanny at the crowd before he’d sung a note. But he avoided the Billy Ray Cyrus trap and kept that kind of excess in check.

To get a rise, the chatty McGraw did coyote howls, led the crowd in back-and-forth yells, even trotted out the rappers’ exhortation, “Somebody scream.” He didn’t need to do all that extraneous stuff: Keeping up a high-energy performance is enough, and the wiry, fundamentally likable singer in the too-big cowboy hat managed that consistently--except for a dawdling band-intro segment that temporarily stalled the show.

McGraw involved the band in some of the showmanship, and an interesting cast they were.

Balding, bespectacled fiddler-guitarist Bob Minner turned up in a white shirt and a tie, looking as if he’d just come from an office day job and hadn’t had time to change for the gig. Opposite him was keyboards player Jeff McMahon, trailing long blond hair of Afghan hound proportions and looking like a refugee from a late-’80s Sunset Strip glam-metal band (actually, McGraw introduced him as an ex-member of Prince & the Revolution).

Lead guitarist Darran Smith had the stocky, stubbly, seedy look of a character actor in a crime drama, the sort of fellow the cops haul in for interrogation, trying to get him to turn informer.

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All were capable players, allowing McGraw to incorporate honky-tonk, Western swing, country-rock anthems and a good, authoritatively rocking version of Earl Thomas Conley’s 1982 hit, “Somewhere Between Right and Wrong” into the mix. Smith and drummer Denny Hemingson (introduced as an Orange County resident) leaned a bit too much toward the rock side, but their forcefulness was on balance a help.

McGraw, who hails from Louisiana (and is the son of one of baseball’s biggest hams, colorful former relief pitcher Tug McGraw), sang in a thin if pleasant voice with a pronounced nasal twang.

There was a bit of John Anderson in some of his sliding phrases, but he lacked the easy playfulness and depth of passion mustered by that exemplary country veteran.

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McGraw sang a couple of new songs, one a sappy lovelorn ballad called “I Didn’t Ask And She Didn’t Say” that the audience instantly loved. Sounds like radio-ready fodder from here.

The truly disheartening thing about McGraw isn’t that he became a star by finding the lowest common denominator of line-danceable beats and schmaltz-laden balladry. It’s that his 1993 debut album, “Tim McGraw” (from which he drew four of the set’s 20 songs) offered far more substantial and tasteful stuff, and flopped.

It featured lots of fine picking (often acoustic), and if the songs weren’t exactly daring and poetic, most of them made believable emotional points with a measure of grace.

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For “Not a Moment Too Soon,” McGraw returned with the same producers but a far different menu of songs. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger--more than 2 million sold. Don’t think he’ll be serving that health food again soon.

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