Fans Find Bread’s 1970s Flour Power Is Easy to Digest

A critic had to stifle yawns Friday as Bread delivered its 25th Anniversary World Tour to the Orange County Performing Arts Center. But a pun-dit would have gotten a real rise from pop-nostalgia’s latest manna-festation.

Bread was indeed made of dough in the ‘70s, when 10 treacle-slathered slices of its romantic, soft-pop balladry reached the Top 20 on the singles chart. The singer of all those mellow hits was David Gates. His partner, James Griffin, wrote and sang the other half of the Bread loaf--material with slightly more folk-rock fiber.

Having recently emerged from semi-retirement on his Northern California ranch, Gates was both rusty and creaky. The smooth, soaring voice-like-buttah of such hit oldies as “Make It With You” and “Baby I’m-A Want You” on this night had the consistency of a thin, brittle wafer. Now 57, Gates labored with or shied from the high notes that once were his staple, accepting his loss of vocal leavening good-naturedly. Had they known they would be performing for decades, he remarked, the group would have written songs in easier keys.

Gates sometimes had trouble competing with the band, which comprised Griffin, drummer Mike Botts and keyboard player Larry Knechtel, as well as two adjunct players and a 10-piece string section. He sounded more comfortable on recent songs that accommodated his middle-aged range, including “Mirror, Mirror,” a sweetly reverent, if formulaic, cycle-of-family-life song. And Gates did rally at the end with solid helpings of “Everything I Own” and “If,” the best ballads in Bread’s basket.

Griffin has stayed active, singing in a country band, the Remingtons. His relatively intact voice helped stir memories of the craftsmanship that went into Bread’s music. In its early years, the group stirred some of the same folk- and country-rock batter as such contemporaries as the Hollies, Poco and the Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell team. But even in its heyday, Bread lacked the trenchant voices and imaginative reach to cook up anything except carefully smoothed and powdered doughnuts of pop.

Onstage, sprinkling light humor into song introductions and between-numbers reminiscing, the group got lavish affection from the crowd of about 1,850 (in a hall that holds almost 3,000). Never mind the roughage in the vocal mix; where there’s an ear for nostalgia and corn, Bread apparently remains the staff of life.

Livingston Taylor, the younger brother of James, opened with a musical-comedy routine in which he surprisingly found no spot for his sunny signature hit from 1978, “I Will Be in Love With You.”

Instead, he drew steady laughter under such headings as Songs That Should Never Be Played on the Banjo--starting with “You’re So Vain,” by his former sister-in-law Carly Simon, and ending with “New York, New York” and “Jailhouse Rock.”

The Performing Arts Center missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it failed to pair Bread with the worthy Orange County rock band Water. But the next best thing was Taylor, the very personification of rye.