Pompous Yet Vapid: It Must Be Boston : Its Phony Grandeur and Formulaic Techniques Spell Artistic Death

Anyone who loves Boston’s music probably thinks the average rock critic stands no taller than a Munchkin, anyway, but here goes:

“Ding dong, the witch is dead. The wicked witch, the witch is dead. Hi-ho, hi-ho,” etc.

Finally, after nearly 20 years, there is scant reason for continued critical vigilance against Boston and its slick and pompous corporate-rock brethren. The overstuffed beast that fed well from the mid-’70s through most of the ‘80s is starving in the ‘90s, and it has about as much chance of feasting on a fresh infusion of fans as the Charleston has of being the next big craze.

It is hard to imagine that upcoming cohorts of rock ‘n’ roll kids, raised on the raw meat of punk and grunge, will ever toss aside the emotional realism and sonic edge that they now demand in favor of the shiny banalities, phony grandeur, party-hearty boogies and hopelessly sappy moon-June ballad doggerel that are Boston’s never-changing hallmarks.

Boston’s show Saturday night at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre played to a two-thirds capacity house of about 10,000 delighted fans, most of them in their 30s and up. That’s a significant remnant, but if the old fans heed the advice of Boston’s 1978 hit, “Don’t Look Back,” there may not be much for them to look at.

There doesn’t seem to be much up ahead for corporate rock--witness the flop of Boston’s 1994 release, “Walk On,” after the band’s three previous albums had collectively sold about 25 million copies in the United States. Times surely have changed since 1986-87, the year of Boston’s previous release and tour. Foreigner, which ranked next to Boston in the corporate world of the ‘70s, played a club gig when it passed through Orange County recently.

Of course, anything is possible in rock ‘n’ roll: While Boston was succumbing commercially last year, that other ‘70s-vintage corporatist, Meat Loaf (who has a strong image and some comic appeal, unlike the faceless and humorless Boston), was scoring an unexpected multiplatinum comeback. So, since no pop movement is truly finished until it’s ding-dong dead, let us proceed to heap some more dirt on the corporate coffin. With luck, we won’t need the old critical shovel much longer for this style of music.

Boston’s 2-hour, 20-minute concert was mostly awful by any demanding set of standards, although it was a strong showing if you take the band on its own misbegotten terms.

Boston--that is, its chief architect, producer/song-writer/multi-instrumentalist Tom Scholz--decided long ago that human voices would sound just nifty if whipped, blended and smoothed into the vocally harmonized equivalent of processed cheese. Onstage, Boston replicated this recorded feat quite well. Fran Cosmo, the newcomer who fronted Boston on the “Walk On” album, played a prominent supporting role onstage, sharing vocals with main man Brad Delp, the singer on Boston’s previous releases.

With further vocal support from drummer Curly Smith and bassist David Sikes, the Delp-Cosmo tandem had the range and lung-power to muster chorus after high-reaching chorus. The results were sleek, shiny, melodious and utterly vapid. There are no sleek, shiny truths in this life, and sleek, shiny singers strike false notes even when they hit all the right ones.

The band committed the same kind of well-executed offense with its instrumental approach. With help from Delp, Cosmo and Gary Pihl, Scholz unerringly reproduced the soaring, spiraling guitar-harmony passages that are a Boston trademark. That tactic, repeated in virtually every song without variation, soon made for tedious listening.

It’s worth comparing Boston’s instant-harmony guitar concept with that of the Allman Brothers Band, whose two players, Dickey Betts and Warren Haynes, create free and separate lines, each commenting on and contrasting with its counterpart. When the two do connect in unison, it is like a reunion of old friends who have gone their independent ways, then meet again after an eventful separation to renew fond ties. The players create a sense of struggle, searching and tension before finding their ways home to each other, and the effect can be very moving.

Boston’s guitar harmonies, easily achieved, always available, were about as interesting and expressive as a microwaved frozen dinner. The effect was a calculated sense of triumph and grandeur that was utterly unearned, and therefore fatuous.

Scholz switched to organ for several extended but static solos, sounding like a Keith Emerson wanna-be without his model’s performing flair and strong sense of musical architecture.

You can’t have a corporate rock show without a lot of smoke and some empty flash involving mechanical contraptions. Boston came through, after a fashion, with an overhead lighting rig that lowered, wobbled from side to side, then rose to its original position in intended simulation of the band’s rocket ship symbol. “Apollo 13” it wasn’t; in fact, it made one wonder whether the famously inept B-movie sci-fi director, Ed Wood, hadn’t returned from the dead to serve as Boston’s lighting designer.

There soon followed a “Phantom of the Opera” sequence in which a caped Scholz (who otherwise was the lanky antithesis of pomp, looking ready to shoot hoops in his gym shorts, knee brace and basketball jersey) played sonorous nonsense on an elaborately mounted, custom-decorated organ. Out from under the mechanically levitated “Phantom” billowed enough stage fog to satisfy the needs of a DeMille directing God’s appearance as a pillar of smoke.

Boston played 20-odd songs, including a dreadful blues (make that blooze) jam in which the tag-team guitar solos bludgeoned instead of swung. The band drew more or less equally from its four releases, with an opening salvo of “Rock & Roll Band” and “Peace of Mind,” both from the 1976 debut album, serving as the show’s high point.

Early in the show, one could admire Boston’s sharp technique and engaged effort. Soon, however, a succession of treacly power ballads, an endless repetition of stock musical devices and silly attempts at theatrics would redirect any momentarily sympathetic thoughts that a critical Munchkin might have had.

For a while there, it seemed Boston should get some credit for soldiering on gamely even though its time has passed. But having sat through the whole exercise, one is left with only one thing to say about Boston: Ding-dong, time’s up.