Looking Ahead, Stuck in the Past

It was Manhattan skyscrapers vs. Los Angeles sun .... Uptight New York vs. laid-back California .... Premature gravitas vs. eternal adolescence .... Steely “I Am a Rock” vs. fragile “In My Room.”

Frankly, the introspective isolation of those two ‘60s songs provided the only common ground between Paul Simon and Brian Wilson when the two Rock and Roll Hall of Famers shared the Greek Theatre bill Tuesday, the first of their two nights there.

In his headlining set--largely the same program as his shows at the Wiltern Theatre and on a more compatible bill with Bob Dylan--Simon emphasized the strong material of last year’s “You’re the One” album and his aesthetically similar 1985 landmark “Graceland,” relegating the ‘60s nostalgia to a brief mid-show interlude and two encore selections.

Loose and playful, Simon delivered the colorful and rich streams-of-consciousness of songs both new and old with a raconteur’s flair as his 11-piece band wove intricate, if overly subdued patterns from African rhythms and American folk-rock roots.

Wilson, who last year started touring as a solo artist for the first time after years of struggle with drugs and mental illness, offered little but nostalgia. And though his 10-piece band meticulously and lovingly re-created the glorious arrangements of the classic Beach Boys recordings, that’s all it was--a re-creation of glory-days sounds. To his credit, though, he featured such offbeat choices as the hopeful “You Still Believe in Me” and “Sail On Sailor,” a Beach Boys hit that he neither wrote nor even performed on originally.

Two other ‘60s songs performed Tuesday characterized the essential differences. In “Old Friends,” Simon contemplates being 70 years old sitting on a park bench, and more than three decades after writing it, he still has time to go and a lot of world to explore--an attitude that seems liberating.

Wilson, though, never really addressed a world beyond the end of the adolescence pictured in the domestic-bliss fantasy of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and Tuesday that world confined him.