Crow to Critics: Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Sheryl Crow doesn’t plan to be dining on her namesake any time soon.

On Monday at the Thousand Oaks Civic Plaza, the Los Angeles-based singer practically begged the numerous critics who have lined up to deliver potshots since her big 1994 Grammy Awards wins to give her their best shot. And she laughed at them in the process.

As she finished “Leaving Las Vegas,” one of the hits from the Grammy-winning “Tuesday Night Music Club” album, she tacked on to the tale of aimless souls a sarcastic summary of the accusations that have increased with the release of her new album, “Sheryl Crow.” Her success, some say, is due to musicians and writers whose talents she used on the first album and then tossed away without giving due credit.

“I’ll move to Los Angeles, buy a car and get an agent,” she said, smirking as she placed herself in the role for which others have cast her. “Sleep with all the right people and see if I can get a really good gig.”

And then she threw in the right hook of a punch line:

“Not this time.”

The message was clear--you can take your carping elsewhere, because now it won’t stick. And she backed it up with a convincingly confident performance.

Relaxed, frisky and a bit cocky, Crow built the show around her new material, making a strong case that she doesn’t need her former associates in order to write, produce and perform dynamic music. With Crow leading her six-man band on guitar and keyboards, the churning, blues-based riffs and soaring chorus of “Everyday Is a Winding Road” and the full-bodied soul-rock of “Superstar” actually made such first-album favorites as “Run Baby Run” and the big hit “All I Wanna Do” seem rather plain by comparison. And she didn’t even do the new album’s best song, the infectious “Change.”

She couldn’t dismiss all the complaints, though. Her music remains derivative, a Dylan-Stones-Beatles aura with other ‘60s-’70s rock and soul touches mixed in. And while she’s stepped up on some of the new songs from basic broken love and restless hearts themes to the “X-Files”-esque musings of “Maybe Angels” and the fate of nations in “Redemption Days,” there is still sometimes a lack of ambition and/or finesse in her writing.

But as she says in her current hit, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” And this show--where she seemed to elevate herself through sheer, ornery force of will--made her fans very happy.

Opener Pete Droge, largely unfamiliar to Crow’s fans, won many of them over with his American rock and exceedingly droll songwriting and manner. Backed by his five-piece band, the Sinners, the Seattle-based Droge--a lanky string bean in a pork-pie hat--mixed tales of inertia-bound slackers and layabout good-for-nothings who can’t even get up the energy to get a job in order to save a relationship into a sort of Gen-X/Tom Petty package.

Unfortunately, the inertia somewhat applies to him as well. While the tunes and lyrics were enticing, his manner disarming and the band’s garage/bar-band approach punchy, it seemed as if Droge willingly accepts the limitations in the presentation rather than trying to move into new territories that might have more distinctive results.