POP MUSIC REVIEW : Amos Earns Diva Wings, Supplies Own Halo

The traditional singer-songwriter was a species that thrived in the ‘60s and ‘70s but has been threatened in the ‘90s by a musical environment gone all grungy.

Still, like salmon spawn, they keep hatching, and good albums by ‘90s-vintage arrivals such as Vinnie James, Ben Harper, Archie Roach, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Germano and Freedy Johnston suggest that the breed hasn’t lost its grace, its commitment or its intelligence. But with noise-rock ringing the register among most younger fans, will these newest heirs to Dylan, Newman, Mitchell, et al be hardy enough to make the swim upstream to long-term survival?

Tori Amos is one ‘90s singer-songwriter who is getting on swimmingly. Her 1991 debut album, “Little Earthquakes,” went gold, and so has this year’s follow-up, “Under the Pink.” Not only did she sell out UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall on Saturday, but the humid little gymnasium, more fit in summer for growing tropical flowers than for staging pop concerts, rang out with ovations and intrusive, mid-song cries of adoration.

Amos, 31, seems well equipped for survival in today’s marketplace. Far from being a modest, unassuming songsmith, her appeal rests on a diva’s commanding voice and a diva’s intense, spotlight-grabbing, somewhat pretentious bearing (her show’s well-conceived, frequently arresting stage lighting typically vested the beatific star in a full-body halo).

The jarring dynamics that became a staple for Nirvana and other popular full-on rockers have their parallel in Amos’ shows, even though she plays as a soloist, self-accompanied on an acoustic grand piano. Many songs in her 90-minute set found her rising from delicate reveries to keening, tortured cries and back to dramatic whispers.

Amos also has a theme that’s ripe for ‘90s consumption: the struggle for empowerment. She is too ambitious an artist to address this pop-psychology concept in bland, psychobabble lingo. Still, what you get in Amos’ lyrics are fragmentary glimpses of characters struggling to don the vestments of full personhood. They confront crippling self-doubts and murmur to themselves in the aftermath of relationships in which they have been treated or, worse, allowed themselves to be treated, as inferiors.

Then there’s “Me and a Gun,” Amos’ memorable, first-person account of a rape in which the victim, stripped of all power but the power over her own thoughts, is seen playing whatever mental tricks she can to hold onto a sense of self and a will to live through the violation.

Having found an audience, the question now is whether Amos knows what to do with it. “Under the Pink” shows alarming signs that it may be going to her head. While the album is by no means a washout, it ends on a terribly sour note, with empty songs like “Cloud on My Tongue,” “Space Dog” and the bloated blather of the 9 1/2-minute “Yes, Anastasia.” These fail to register even fragmentary meaning; they are purely inscrutable, suggesting either that Amos lacked the songwriting stamina to finish off her second album, or that she has become so full of herself that she thinks an audience will swallow anything she sings, so long as it comes couched in that intensity, carried by that voice.

In short, if Amos as commodity looks well-established, the jury was still out on Amos as artist.

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Even to a skeptic, the show at Crawford Hall offered powerful testimony in her favor. She cropped out all the empty filler from “Under the Pink,” choosing six substantive songs from it. (Well, “Cornflake Girl” is as inscrutable as she gets, but the song worked on the strength of its musical drama. Amos’ darting, classically informed piano sallies gave it a sense of freedom and unpredictability that allowed her to get away with the questionable ploy of performing it to a canned backing track culled from the album. “God,” the only other song using similarly prepackaged ingredients, didn’t fare as well.)

Over a long closing stretch that encompassed nearly half the concert, Amos earned the right to a diva’s pretensions by doing what divas are supposed to do: She created a sustained, unbroken, fully involving moment of heightened passion. It was an unsparing sequence, filled with songs of deep sadness and loss, starting with “Bells for Her,” which she played on an upright piano rigged to produce the delicate, hollow-ringing sounds of Chinese bells.

The a cappella “Me and a Gun” was next--a song as unsparing as they come. Conventional concertizing would call for an eventual upward reach after that, moving from the song’s stark depths toward an eventual affirmation later in the show. But Amos, who had played her few humorous, music-hallish cards early in the concert (“Leather,” “Happy Phantom,” “The Waitress”), continued to survey inner damage on the next song, the set-closing “Baker, Baker.”

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Through three encores, she kept the momentum going. A luminous cover of Stevie Nicks’ Fleetwood Mac-vintage ballad, “Landslide,” was the closest she came to affirmation, but it was only an affirmation of the will to endure loss. “Winter,” one of her loveliest songs, came next, with its glimpse of a father’s desperately impatient attempt to get through to an apparently depressive daughter.

Encore three was a haunting meditation on the dismal side of rock history, linking Buddy Holly’s accidental death with Kurt Cobain’s self-inflicted one. Amos, a minister’s daughter who loves waxing ironic about Christian iconography, began with the quietly ironic fragment of Don McLean’s “American Pie” in which “the three men I admire most, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost” are seen giving up their own faith on “the day the music died.” Then, with spectral circles of light swirling about her, she moved into a ghostly reading of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” giving poor Cobain the only thing in anyone’s power to give: a properly mournful wake in which his own sad music was kept alive. This grieving show-closer was far from an affirmation, but it was something more than a denial.

In all, a memorable display of power, depth, taste and thoughtful linkages of meaning consistent with a real contender, rather than a lucky diva of the hour.

Amos’ handpicked opening act, Bill Miller, is a Native American from Wisconsin. His message was both anguished and stirring. His songs lamented the historic disaster that befell his people, and in “Trail of Freedom” he didn’t flinch from reporting on such lingering effects as the widespread alcoholism among Native Americans. But the songs, drawn mainly from Miller’s major-label debut, “The Red Road,” also carried the conviction that the story isn’t over. He envisioned a rebirth of Native American culture, founded on enduring spiritual values and a tenacious national character.

Certainly nothing in his fervent, kinetic, hard-strumming performance would belie that message. Backed by Hans Mayer, a capable bass and mandolin player, the sturdy-voiced Miller offered familiarly structured folk-rock anthems and laments geared for the mainstream, but also injected traditional strains with bracing tribal chants and a haunting flute air. His raw but focused music, full of driving, elemental acoustic guitar solos, had far more clout live than on his comparatively tame album.

Miller was personable, inserting musical jokes to set the audience at ease (although a brief, laugh-drawing interlude from “Stairway to Heaven” was out of place in the middle of his powerful prayer-song, “Praises”). The only thing you could really fault him for was a tenuous grip on Orange County surf-rock history: introducing a wryly conceived acoustic version of “Pipeline,” which he said was one of the first songs he learned as a kid, he described the Chantays original as a Ventures tune. On the other hand, we’d hate to face a pop quiz on the history of Miller’s tribe, the Mohicans.

The sound in Crawford Hall, where punk and alternative bands go to drown in acoustic murk, was adequate for Amos and Miller. The gym, set up for reserved seating, was far more hospitable with chairs on the floor in lieu of the customary mosh pit. But the muggy heat was awful. There must be a better place in Orange County for serious, singer-songwriter-type acts with a draw of 2,000 to 4,000 fans.

Maybe the Orange County Performing Arts Center will one day see fit to work with established rock promoters on this sort of show; the politics of the pop concert industry make it very unlikely that OCPAC can program contemporary artists such as Amos on its own. Another possibility is the dormant Pacific Amphitheatre. Under Nederlander, its former operator, the Pacific proved itself a fine venue for scaled-down shows by such theater-level performers as Tracy Chapman, Carole King, Bruce Hornsby, the Chieftains and an acoustic Neil Young. The Orange County Fair, which now controls the Pacific, would be doing a public service by resuming those smaller-scale, won’t-disturb-the-neighbors shows at the amphitheater.