Playful Gentleman Gill Is Proof of the Positive

If someone ever had run Elvis through a cream separator and drained off all the psychic fat, whatever was left would have looked a lot like Vince Gill.

Sunday night at the Pond, the singer from Oklahoma was a living, breathing and singing testament to the virtues of living right: He’s a Southern gentleman, boyishly handsome, playfully sexy and he has one phenomenal voice. If he lacks the out-of-control dark side that was a crucial component of what made Elvis the King, more power to him.

There were times during the two-hour 15-minute performance, in fact, when it seemed as if Gill’s biggest weakness was his lack of weakness. Not only did he trigger goose bumps during the knockout ballads that have placed him at the forefront of contemporary country music, but he brought real electricity to up-tempo songs and sparked everything with superb guitar work. (His dual-drummer-powered band deserves considerable credit for the sparkling musical spirit--and nice guy that he is, Gill had plenty of good things to say about everyone on stage with him.)

Begging the question: What can anyone this perfect have in common with us mere mortals?

It’s true that Gill, like many other contemporary country singers, likes to ac-cen-tuate the positive. His unshakable faith in the power of love to overcome all obstacles, expressed in such hits as “Look at Us” and “I Still Believe in You,” can make it seem as though he somehow has managed to avoid any of those dark nights of the soul when all hope is gone.

But to hear the anguished beauty in his voice is to hear the residue of life’s struggles--Gill simply has emerged the victor. The difference between his positive outlook and the cheap happy endings so common in country these days is that Gill’s songs ultimately reflect hard-won victories. His career-igniting ballad “When I Call Your Name” is the song of a sadder-but-wiser fellow who has lost at love but clearly has learned from his mistakes.

“Never Knew Lonely” is another masterwork of songwriting and singing. The melody begins low in the first verse, builds tension as it repeats, then finds exquisite release in the chorus as Gill’s voice sweeps up an octave to a cry that makes the pain of separation from his loved one searingly palpable.

With a couple of gritty new songs he introduced, he even appears to have found a way to triumph over the stylistic sameness that was beginning to settle into his recordings. “One Dance With You” has a swinging blues groove a la B.B. King, while “Down to New Orleans” echoes the country funk of a Little Feat or a Neville Brothers number. Together, they indicated that Gill is ready to get a little greasier with his music.

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If opener Patty Loveless had been at the helm of the Titanic, it would still be shuttling passengers across the Atlantic. She maintains such an even keel that she often seems positively unflappable--a quality that’s great in brain surgeons, defense lawyers and friends, but not always in country singers.

Her set got off to a particularly inauspicious start with a rendition of Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter” that was even tamer than on her new ‘The Trouble With the Truth” album: Thompson’s careening flight down a treacherous path of romantic betrayal was reduced to a Sunday afternoon pleasure cruise. (Search out Jo-el Sonnier’s kaleidoscopic version from 1987 to hear what a country singer can do with this tune.)

Similarly, with other above-average material from her new album, she negotiated the pleasant middle ground between emotional peaks and valleys. Things got better--but never great--over the course of her 45-minute set, especially with the gospel-inflected opening of “A Handful of Dust” and the unresolved conflict in “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am.”

* Vince Gill and Patty Loveless play tonight at 7:30 at the San Diego Sports Arena, 3500 Sports Arena Blvd., San Diego. (619) 224-4176.