Spit and Polish Styles : Merle Haggard Has Grit to Spare, but Garth Brooks’ Country Is Level

Garth Brooks, phenomenon, and Merle Haggard, phenomenal musician, brought their acts to Orange County over the weekend.

Brooks’ extravaganza at the Pond of Anaheim was a marvel of zealous showmanship geared to create a transcendent contact high for himself and his fans. Any believable relation to a world apart from that shared cocoon of mutual bliss was incidental.

Haggard’s humble outdoor show Sunday, on the dusty grounds of the Taste of Orange County festival at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, wasn’t designed to escape or transcend everyday life but to capture it honestly and without varnish, song after memorable, authentic song, carried by some of the finest singing and ensemble playing a country music fan can encounter.

As the first show of Brooks’ three-night Pond engagement unfolded Saturday, it became clear that his gift as a performer is to be the sincerest of flatterers. Every plotted move and calculated effect in his two-hour show was designed to please his fans, to bridge the gap between stage and crowd, to flatter with unstinting attention. But for all that calculation and choreography, Brooks never seemed contrived. His devotion to his audience appeared sincere.

Scampering and leaping about his wide open stage in a red-striped shirt, tan slacks and a white cowboy hat, engaging in horseplay with his band--lavishing every close attention to his fans up front and every broad gesture to the ones far away--Brooks was a man immersed in wooing his crowd, not that it needed much wooing.

He seemed to crave the love and to love the courting. It was impossible not to admire the extent of his effort and the full-hearted zest for performing and pleasing that drove it. If everybody went about his or her job with the commitment and enthusiasm Brooks has for his, if every business concern were as fair in its pricing as he is (a Brooks tickets was $18, a small fraction of what similarly hot attractions such as Janet Jackson and the Eagles have charged in Orange County) . . . well, we can’t say what would happen, because it’s unimaginable.

If only Brooks--who has sold about 60 million albums since his debut in 1989, second only to the Beatles in U.S. career sales--were as committed and intense and instinctively attuned to music’s artistic possibilities as he is to its role as entertainment.

His songs are typically catchy but slight; in concert, they mainly were platforms for the real focus, Garth himself. We got Garth the high-octane stage athlete on “Rodeo,” “Papa Loved Mama” and “Ain’t Goin’ Down (Till the Sun Comes Up)” and Garth the philosopher and man of feeling on ballads such as “Unanswered Prayers” and “The River.”

“That Summer,” cookie-cut from an old Bob Seger pattern, was a nice bit of elegiac arena-rock; “The Dance” had a graceful melody and “Unanswered Prayers” a sweet intimacy.

But all of those, and most of the others that Brooks writes or chooses, are forged from stock scenarios and couched in the broadest of generalities. His most feeling-filled songs read like summary paragraphs from self-help books, and his hearty but ordinary singing voice can’t invest slim material with poetry.

He isn’t daring enough to probe life’s disturbing side--something that must be done if songs about pleasures and accomplishments are to have depth and a believable context (the show included “The Thunder Rolls,” ostensibly about domestic violence, but it is a poorly written song, long on inflated portents but devoid of vivid characterization).

Brooks’ concert offered triumph for people who want to share in triumph, connection for those who want to be touched and reassurance for folks who want to feel that things are basically OK. Fine, that includes a large swath of humanity. But anything that didn’t fit this narrow script got glossed over or ignored.

During the encore, solo-acoustic renditions of Seger’s “Night Moves” and Don McLean’s “American Pie” did speak of lost youth and diminished possibilities. But mainly they underlined Brooks’ savvy in coming up with a big-hit ending that could cement an intimate connection with his audience. He may have the power to take an audience anywhere he chooses, but he needs to look at some tapes of vintage U2, Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel concerts to see what can be achieved when a commanding performer is willing to take an audience through the wilderness en route to the promised land.

Just looking at Merle Haggard tells you that you’re going to be taking a trip through some of life’s thickets. It was fitting that the 59-year-old country music hero was performing on a military base Sunday. With his creased, careworn, bearded face, the haunted look that often was in his eyes and the dark coat and hat he wore, Haggard looked like a Civil War commander who has just received news from the front.

His hourlong set (after a zestful opening 20 minutes by his backing band, the Strangers) didn’t sugarcoat or gloss over anything. In “Kern River,” his verses paused to detail the geography and natural grandeur of rural California--seemingly a digression, but actually a telling stroke that drove home how desperately the narrator wants to be precise, how vital it is to him that he get the story right and be understood.

The story he has to tell is about the drowning of his lifelong love. Truth in the details, plus a willingness to address bitter events without flinching, was Haggard’s equation for deep, dignified, eloquent expression in song after song. Even with a bass rumble from a distant festival stage intruding on his ballads, he drew a listener in.

Haggard was a wonderful singer when he emerged from Bakersfield in the early 1960s, able to power a song with firm, clear, direct singing. He remains a wonderful singer today, although one with a much different method. Like a Hall of Fame pitcher who switches from the high, hard one down the middle to the sinkerball on the corner when he is older and his arm is no longer fresh, Haggard today uses the cracks and grainy textures in his voice to expressive advantage. By putting bends and quavers into his deep, resonant chest tones and pinched, wizened highs, he gained a sense of spontaneity and made his tales sound immediate and fully felt.

A new, four-disc retrospective, “Down Every Road,” speaks for Haggard’s standing as a giant among singer-songwriters not just in country music, but measured against all comers. His show was retrospective, as well: classic songs about sudden drownings in rivers and slow drownings in alcohol, about the last yearnings of a condemned convict and the lasting regrets of a son who turns out to be a bad seed despite a loving mother’s best efforts. It was the kind of gritty, wrenching, honest stuff that mainstream country music has developed an allergy to in the ‘90s.

While Haggard was willing to delve into blue moods for extended stretches early in his set, the show was hardly all struggle and woe.

His reach as a songwriter and his roots as a musician are too extensive for him to hold onto one emotional note. He sprinkled the performance with wry, bouncy numbers such as “Rainbow Stew,” which humorously deflates various utopian notions, and he included swing and blues handed down by his beloved Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers (long before tribute records were in fashion, Haggard paid his own homage to both those sources with full-length albums of their material).

He took obvious pleasure in his role as bandleader, playfully counting in numbers with a wave of the hand, nodding for solos and often grinning at the results. Given the tastiness of longtime sidekick Norman Hamlet’s sweet and sprightly steel guitar, or such sly, unpredictable touches as Jimmy Belkins’ laid-back, molasses-like fiddle solo in the middle of a sauntering “Milk Cow Blues,” Haggard had plenty to smile about.

He complemented the nimble playing of Hamlet and lead guitarist Joe Manuel with his own rough-hewn but expressive sallies on guitar. A lyrical Haggard solo during a version of Willie Nelson’s “Valentine” was the perfect capper to the show’s most tender moment.

Playing for an audience of several thousand who may have come as much for the festival’s restaurant booths as for his music, Haggard mined his catalog nuggets, including “Okie From Muskogee,” with which he closed the show in a playful but proud rendition. Left untouched were his two most recent albums, tersely titled “1994” and “1996,” which give strong evidence that he hasn’t lost his inspiration as a songwriter.

While the mainstream flows on nearly oblivious, some of the best country albums of the past two years have been the latest from such now-ignored icons as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Nelson and Haggard. It’s a given that these troupers will keep plugging; with a turn of luck, they may yet regain the mass forum they deserve.

Which is where Brooks could play a role, if he wants to live up to the high-flown sentiments about living adventurously that crop up in some of his songs.

At a small risk of accumulated audience goodwill, Brooks could gain a lot of honor and artistic credibility by looking outside mainstream Nashville sources for material. He could turn to such icons as Haggard, or to the wave of newer writers--Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, John Hiatt, Al Anderson, Dave Alvin, O.C.’s Jann Browne and Chris Gaffney, among many others--who have made progressive country music the most consistently vital artistic sector in ‘90s pop.

Brooks probably won’t ever be eclipsed--too many loyal fans. But he could look awfully stale if progressive country music gets its Nirvana. Or he could look awfully hip by hopping a truly fresh horse and helping mass-market country music’s ride into a new era of artistic challenge and creativity.