Less fire adds power for Toby Keith

On Toby Keith’s “Big Throwdown II” tour, the key word is big. Make that BIG.

Big star, big hits, big production and enough pyrotechnic firepower to provide backup for the U.S. troops in Iraq whom Keith so strongly supports.

But thriving on irony as country music so often does, the most moving part of his 90-minute headlining set Saturday at Hyundai Pavilion in Devore came when the show was at its smallest.

About two-thirds of the way in, the hulking Oklahoman stepped away from the elaborate set and his powerhouse 10-member Easy Money band for three stripped-down acoustic songs with his frequent songwriting and USO tour partner Scotty Emerick.

Keith told the sea of onlookers that this is how he generally plays when entertaining American troops, especially those closest to the various fronts in the war in Iraq. They offered songs he described as the soldiers’ favorites, not surprisingly including “The Taliban Song,” a tale of military retribution with a more fleshed-out sense of character than his big post 9/11 hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).”

One new song, about a hapless fellow shut down romantically by his wife after forgetting their anniversary once again, and “Weed With Willie,” his witty chronicle of a chronic hang with Willie Nelson, rounded out the duo portion, in which Keith was at his most relaxed, most intimate and most human.

Those qualities surfaced only fleetingly elsewhere in this country-rock blowout that opened with a five-minute film (and not-so-subliminal Ford commercial) that took a page from the Lucas-Spielberg book in a scenario with an unsuspecting Keith (and his dog) on the fly in his pickup from an ineffectual batch of autograph-seeking space aliens.

That led into the autobiographical title tune from his new “Honkytonk University” album, in which he valiantly appears to be moving away from Hank Williams Jr. as his party-hearty macho man musical role model toward a more multidimensional Waylon Jennings blueprint.

Not surprisingly, given his backlog of hits, Keith opted not to dig deeply into the new collection, though he did include “As Good As I Once Was,” an aging party dude’s self-assessment as humorous as it is brutally honest (“I ain’t as good as I once was / But I’m as good once as I ever was”).

That turn of phrase underscores his deft songwriting touch, something that’s been overshadowed in several of the hits that elevated him to the upper ranks of contemporary country hit-makers.

Especially in view of the more reflective and emotionally nuanced numbers like that (and others from the new album that he didn’t play), the pettiness and egocentrism at the heart of such earlier hits as “How Do You Like Me Now?” and “I Wanna Talk About Me” now seem beneath him.

Perhaps a bit more time hanging out with Willie might give Keith the confidence he needs to fully channel his inner Waylon.

Like Keith, second-billed Lee Ann Womack also has an intriguing new album, “There’s More Where That Came From,” one in which she reconnects with her country roots after the pop-leaning “Something Worth Leaving Behind” that followed her crossover hit “I Hope You Dance” five years ago.

She invoked the spirits of Tammy Wynette (on her recent hit “I May Hate Myself in the Morning”) and Patsy Cline (an over-the-top version of “She’s Got You” that echoed Cline’s lung power but missed her vulnerability).

Womack appeared, however, to struggle with her in-ear monitors to the extent she seemed distracted at times from the performance. Additionally, her endearing Dolly Parton-esque vocals sometimes disappeared in the sound mix, further compromising her ability to connect with the crowd in the vastness of the amphitheater.

Still, Womack’s experience on stages of various size helped her fare better than opening act Shooter Jennings, the offspring of outlaw country couple Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter.

His “Put the O Back in Country” album positions him as an heir to his late father’s maverick spirit more than Waylon’s actual sound, but in the expanse of Hyundai Pavilion, Jennings the younger was unable to put across anything approaching Waylon’s magnetic personality or masterful vocal prowess.

Shooter’s quartet sounds more influenced by Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, though he did play one of his daddy’s Telecasters to open and close his blink-of-an-eye 20-minute set. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “What Would Waylon Do” -- a rhetorical question, no doubt, but one prompting the answer that the last thing his fiercely individualistic pater would have wanted would be for his son to worry about what he, or anyone else, might want.