A Surprise Change in the Weather : Golden Smog’s Ambitious Agenda Provides a Welcome Edge to Its Sweet, Low-Key Melancholy

The inter-band jam is a staple of communitarian rock, with pals of similar taste getting together, usually at the end of a show, and having an impromptu go at some mutually agreeable material. If the spirit is right, those moments can be engaging, even when, as often happens, the performances are ragged.

Golden Smog is an inter-band jam with a structured agenda. Its object is to maintain some of that loose, informal spirit while making sure that the singing and playing are more right than ragged. It was right enough, and then some, as the six Midwesterners--most of them lower-magnitude stars of dusty, unpretentious, country-tinged rock--held forth Saturday night at the Coach House.

Golden Smog’s mix-and-match assets include two strong singers, high-and-reedy Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, a fine, soulfully twangy disciple of Gram Parsons. Sidekicks Dan Murphy of Soul Asylum and Kraig Johnson of Run Westy Run won’t win any warbling contests, but their rough-hewn vocal styles were applied in spots where they could work well.

The foursome gave Golden Smog a rich, warm harmony blend, and the collective combined for some full but never cluttered guitar arrangements featuring a mixture of lyricism and wailing on electric guitars, together with acoustic strums and jangling mandolins.

The bass guitar got passed around a lot, with the Jayhawks’ Marc Perlman providing most of the loping underpinning while Noah Levy took a steady, vigorous, keep-it-simple approach on drums.

The mood onstage was comfortably low-key. The boyish-looking Tweedy was the precocious one of the bunch, leading the others on excursions onto tabletops or wandering the club himself to hobnob with the customers.

Early in the set, Golden Smog settled into the warm, easygoing currents of its album, “Down by the Old Mainstream.” It seemed that we were in for an evening of pleasant but not invigorating immersion in the comfortable waters of sweet melancholy, all throaty-toned sobbing on the guitars and gravel-strewn mellifluousness in the singing.

But Golden Smog’s agenda proved to be more ambitious than that. The show gained an instant edge as the band embarked on “Signed D.C.,” the Love classic from 1966 that is one of rock’s first and best depictions of junkie hell. With Johnson singing and Geraldine Fibbers’ fiddler Jessy Greene sawing, the song attained a swirling density and lumbering force.

Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues” gave the band another occasion to pound hard, Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone” was urgent fun, and a zestful run through the Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun?” gave the show a burst of bright, pop energy.

“Easy to Be Hard,” the Three Dog Night hit, was a tad too fraught with Heavy Meaning for this band’s comfort; it would be better left to Bono or somebody like that. A fun, psychedelic reworking of “Spooky,” from the Classics IV, and a roughed-up take on Charlie Rich’s “Most Beautiful Girl” were other outside highlights.

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Two warm, wistful Faces songs, “Glad & Sorry” and “Ooh-La-La,” were right up Golden Smog’s alley; Louris followed the latter with “Until You Came Along,” an instantly likable new song cut from the same mold as Rod Stewart’s “You Wear It Well.” Murphy had a good new one as well, mixing anguish with bitterness as he sang about the pain of growing old and scarred enough to feel jaded.

A folksy acoustic-trio rendition of “Radio King,” about how music can provide comfort and company, provided a fitting summary near the end for a band that’s all about making music in comfortable company.

Opener Phil Cody offered a Bob Dylan-Tom Petty rock troubadour amalgam that was good enough to sustain interest but not nearly distinctive enough to make one want to spend time with Cody’s Interscope Records debut, rather than time with you-name-it from Dylan and Petty.