Pop Music Review : Nice to Almost Meet You, Ricky Van Shelton

Ricky Van Shelton seems like a nice guy with a pleasant baritone voice. And somehow, that’s enough to have earned the Grit, Va.-born singer several platinum records and a heap of awards since his debut in 1986.

At large country venues Shelton has employed a fancy diner-motif stage set, but he’s no flashy Garth, or, thank heaven, Billy Ray, with polished, teasing stage moves.

There wasn’t any fancy staging at Shelton’s early show Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House. Indeed, his drummer accidentally broke part of the venue’s neon sign on the wall behind the stage. And Shelton? He just stood there, singing and grinning.

That should be enough, and for the packed house it clearly was, as they responded to his 100-minute set with rapture. There’s no reason to begrudge Shelton his fans’ affection. Unlike the glib routines of so many overworked touring country acts, he and his six-piece band appeared to genuinely delight in playing their music for people.

Though his group lacks the distinctive signature sound of, say, Merle Haggard’s Strangers, all its members are rambunctiously good players who enjoyed sparking each other with hot solo handoffs.

But for all its 26 songs, the show gave only a hint of how good Shelton might be, because most of the tunes were the slickest of Nashville boilerplate, offering no place for an emotion to grab hold.

It’s nigh on impossible to listen to songs such as “Love Without You,” “I’ve Cried My Last Tear for You” and “Keep It Between the Lines” without picturing teams of cynical hacks sitting in air-conditioned offices cranking out the tunes like they were ad copy or legal clauses.

The latter, for instance, is part of a whole slew of recent mawkish formula tear-jerkers in which a parent or grandparent shares a cliched encouraging catch-phrase with a youngster, who then gets to repeat it back in a new ironic context decades later when Dad or Gramps is a drooling wreck, and then God gets a few licks in the last verse, reprising the phrase with inspirational overtones.

After you’ve heard the formula in a half-dozen songs, it’s enough to make one want to go have a good manly barf-out by the tree Bobby Goldsboro planted for “Honey.”

With such depth-defying material, it’s no surprise that Shelton’s strong, full voice only rarely injected feeling into the proceedings. Instead, much of the time he sounded like a voice pulled out of a chorus, able to sing well, but without the personality or palpability of the great country singers.

That he was able to make a bravura, Orbison-style showstopper out of fare as vacant as a “Statue of a Fool” suggests that Shelton can achieve more with his voice, as did his delivery on some of the covers in the set.

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While the actual Roy Orbison tune in the set, “Pretty Women,” was done in rote, bar-band fashion, Shelton and his band put some unique rhythmic movement into the Hollies’ “Bus Stop,” which Shelton sang as Gene Pitney might have done it, which is not too shabby at all.

While not quite claiming them as his own, he also did commendable versions of Harlan Howard’s sad ballad “Life Turned Her That Way” and the old Ned Miller hit “From a Jack to a King.” Other covers included the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now” and the Killer’s “Great Balls of Fire.”

He did several songs from his most recent 1994 album, “Love and Honor,” including the kiss-off tune “Baby, Take a Picture,” “Thanks a Lot,” “Then for Them” and the warmly rocking “Lola’s Love.”

For his encore, Shelton sang “Junk Cars,” a novelty tune about a fellow who just loves a car up on blocks. He had to read the lyrics off a sheet, as it was his third time singing it on a stage.

The hottest moments in the show arguably came when Shelton wasn’t singing at all and turned his band members loose to do their stuff on two extended psycho-bluegrass instrumentals.

With violinist Tiger Bell’s demonic fiddling leading the way, the band members freely careened through other styles of music, with pianist Bruce Harrison emulating McCoy Tyner in places, while guitarist Darren Favorite showed how Jeff Beck might approach bluegrass and Tommy Hannum took a space excursion with bent harmonics on his pedal steel guitar.