O.C. Pop Music Review : The Offbeat Gets Strong Play

What do you get when you put two quirky cult figures on a double bill? A cult figure quirk-off, if the acoustic Peter Himmelman/Robyn Hitchcock show at the Coach House Sunday night was any indication.

Though they are not household names except among the show’s far-from-capacity audience, Englishman Hitchcock and Minnesota-born, L.A.-based Himmelman both have had lengthy careers (dating back to the mid-’70s in Hitchcock’s case). Hitchcock comes from the Syd Barrett surrealist school of turning dreams into songs. Though far from a mainstream rocker, Himmelman is a more direct songwriter, grappling with complex emotions and difficult themes. Onstage, though, he tends to balance all that weight with free-flying humor.

So it was Sunday, as he not only opened his solo set with a--one assumes--unreleased song about the shortcomings of being a dachshund (how the little fellows go thirsty while German shepherds get to drink from the toilet bowl and such) but also enlisted a member of the audience to dance in sympathy.

Himmelman’s singing voice sounds like an appealing cross between Elvis Costello and the early, pre-bellicose Neil Diamond. Between songs, though, he was a vocal chameleon, maniacally and expertly changing characters in a way that recalled Peter Sellers’ Clare Quilty in “Lolita.” In one instance, Himmelman introduced himself as country star Travis Tritt, leaped into a feminine example of interpretive dance, and then asserted in Tritt’s manly Southern voice: “I’ll deny doing that. It’ll be your word against mine.”

The biggest test of his impromptu skills came when he asked the audience to feed him emotions around which to base a song. “How about one for when you really have to go to the bathroom?” one woman asked. After Himmelman had obliged, fairly brilliantly, the woman’s companion requested: “How about one for when you have an embarrassing girlfriend?”

At which point Himmelman extemporized a song that commented on the fellow’s clothing and concluded:

It’s not the girlfriend that’s embarrassing.

Something that’s very true:

The embarrassing one

Is you.

Later, Himmelman had that couple and another come up onstage to dance in a merry circle as he had the club dim all the lights except its disco ball. It says something for the strength of his songwriting that this setting did little to detract from what he was singing, “Beneath the Damage and the Dust,” a hard and moving look at a homeless woman.

On record, Himmelman offers his songs in a rich, inventive sonic context. Stripped down to just voice and guitar or piano, they were just as powerful in evoking spiritual longings (“Been Set Free,” “Impermanent Things”) or the day-to-day distances between souls (“Difficult to Touch,” the haunting “Waning Moon”).

Though several of his songs don’t want for irony, Himmelman also is capable of the direct, open-hearted “Raina,” about the brief moment when all life’s cares and distractions dropped away as he first saw his newborn daughter.

*

“Yesterday I saw the Devil in my bed, I could have strangled him, but I’m English, though,” sang Hitchcock in “The Devil’s Coachman” during his solo set. The typically British reserve of the character in the lyric also is present in Hitchcock’s work, even at his most jarringly surreal.

At least as often as his dreamscape images connect in new ways of expressing human feelings, they also come off as merely clever and emotionally indirect to the point of being babble.

Unlike Himmelman’s immediate, far-ranging and sometimes physical humor, Hitchcock’s quirkiness Sunday was limited to his wordplay. He has a gift for dissemblance which he used between songs to tell rambling metaphysical shaggy god stories. At one point a napkin sighted on the stage prompted him to invent a tale about Napoleon’s soldiers being halted by a huge sheet of paper they had to try to fold eight times.

Hitchcock has concocted some wonderfully strange pop confections over the years, but his lengthy 17-song set didn’t touch on many of them. There were more snippets of choice wordplay and imagery in some songs, including such lines as “It rains like a slow divorce” and “People get what they deserve: Time is round and space is curved.”

Hitchcock’s story-songs, like those of Pink Floyd avatar Barrett, play out on a lysergic landscape full of fanciful phrases and seeming non sequiturs. But Barrett had the advantage of being certifiably mentally ill, his songs propelled outward by inner demons, while Hitchcock too often--at least at the Coach House--seemed just cutesy and deliberately obscure.