Joe Diffie: Lowbrow Sensation

Country singer Joe Diffie is an entertaining guy who knows how to give an audience exactly what it wants. That’s not hard when you’ve charted a handful of No. 1 country singles in the last decade.

Throughout his early show Monday night at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, the Oklahoma-born Diffie, supported by his five-piece Heartbreak Highway band, didn’t disappoint the faithful. The willing crowd was revved-up, hootin’ and hollerin’ during the party-minded anthems that made up the bulk of the 90-minute show.

But despite all the celebrating and Diffie’s commercial success, he remains an artistic underachiever.

There’s no denying the man’s blessed with a terrific set of pipes. It’s just that Diffie, who relies mainly on songs written by others, has so doggone little to say with most of them.

Diffie showed on a couple of songs from his new album, “A Night to Remember,” that he can be an inspired balladeer.

The title track is a bittersweet tale about coping with the loss of a loved one, which Diffie sang with admirable depth of emotion: “It ain’t easy being strong / When I can’t forget you’re gone.”

Also impressive was the new “You Can’t Go Home,” which perhaps offers a more realistic bookend to Diffie’s warmly nostalgic first hit, “Home.”

Diffie sang the new selection with an ache-filled sense of isolation: “I came looking for a feeling / But the feeling’s gone / You can go back / But you can’t go back home.”

His voice couldn’t, however, elevate the well-intended but simplistic “Ships That Don’t Come In,” with its generic message of struggle and resiliency. Because the lyrics fail to paint a portrait that illuminates its theme with vivid characterizations, the song never draws a listener in.

Diffie spent much of the rest of the set in territory closer to Weird Al and Billy Ray than Merle or Hank. Songs such as “Pickup Man,” “Good Brown Gravy,” ’C-O-U-N-T-R-Y,” “Better Than the Beatles” and “Third Rock From the Sun” typified his reliance on cliches or novelty-type fare.

It seems the 40-year-old Diffie hasn’t felt the need to be much more than the musical equivalent of a comic character actor. In the meantime, he’s fronting what essentially is a well-oiled bar band. He tipped his hand when he told the crowd: “The secret to this whole thing is the louder you are, the better we play.”

At one point Diffie briefly turned over the lead vocals to his Irvine-bred fiddler-guitarist, Dennis Parker, who mockingly sang a snippet of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” Diffie then added his own cheesy, tongue-in-cheek impression of a Willie Nelson tune.

Truth is, Diffie and his bandmates are easily outclassed by those they would poke fun at.

When Diffie does find a good tune--and fully invests himself in it--the results are frequently rewarding. Just why, more often than not, he prefers slumming in low-rent musical neighborhoods remains a mystery.