Vaughn and the Shadows Resurface with Real Depth

For San Diego rock fans, perhaps the best news of the holiday season is that Robert Vaughn and the Shadows have returned to the local nightclub scene for a series of pre-Christmas gigs at Rio’s in Loma Portal.

A year ago, the Point Loma band was celebrating the release of its debut album on Island Records. “Love and War” defined the group as a lyrically eloquent and musically dynamic voice against such contemporary social ills as apartheid in South Africa, political oppression in Central America, and racial discrimination, poverty and drug addiction in the United States.

The album was a critical success, but a commercial flop, due primarily to a lack of promotion. After a brief national tour, Robert Vaughn and the Shadows severed ties to their label and returned home to San Diego. They promptly retired to the studio for an extended period of soul-searching and songwriting.

The band’s re-emergence last Friday night at Rio’s--they’ll play there again Dec. 9, 10 and 23--was a long time coming, but well worth the wait. Commanding the spotlight was a new and improved model of Robert Vaughn and the Shadows, with fewer frills and more horsepower.

Gone are keyboard men Steve Kocherhans and John Nau. The band is now a leaner, tougher-sounding quartet, with the remaining members--lead singer-guitarist Vaughn, guitarist Anthony Daluz, bassist Doug Boone and drummer Greg LaRocco--playing with more passion and more conviction than ever before.

Gone, too, is Robert Vaughn and the Shadows’ previously narrow Weltanschauung , which was often encumbered by too much pomp and not enough underlying circumstance.

On last year’s “Love and War” album, the band tended to address the problems of the present with nothing more than inspirational rhetoric. The inherent message: We shall overcome--somehow, some way.

But in their new songs, they’re more apt to draw parallels between the problems of the present and the problems of the past, many of which were eventually solved. The message: We shall overcome--by learning from experience.

As Vaughn sings in “1968”: “Sometimes you look back on all these memories/And as a child I watched them making history/And mother, mother, go turn on the TV/I know how you feel about all this war and misery/I looked at the future/It’s not too late/I’ve turned back the clock/It’s 1968.”

Ideally, country-rock should combine the passion of country with the charisma of rock ‘n’ roll. Achieving this ideal isn’t easy. You can’t just weld the two genres together; you must strip each one down to its essentials and then reassemble only the most complementary pieces.

This formula was first developed in 1968 by Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman on the Byrds’ landmark “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” album. It was refined, and eventually perfected, after the two split off in 1969 to form their own band, the Flying Burrito Brothers.

By 1973, however, Parsons was dead and Hillman had put his creativity on hold in favor of an uninspired tryst with Stephen Stills. Ever since, the pristine face of country-rock has been scarred by the trumped-up machismo of Southern groups like the Outlaws and the Marshall Tucker Band and the sanitized pabulum of such West Coast pretenders as the Eagles and Jackson Browne.

Fortunately, the recent emergence of the Desert Rose Band has at long last put country-rock back on the right track--and band leader Hillman, back in the saddle. With the aid of such accomplished musicians as former Linda Ronstadt sideman Herb Pedersen and Buck Owens alumnus Bill Bryson, Hillman has basically taken up where he left off 15 years ago.

Particularly on the group’s latest album, “Running,” Hillman proves himself as adept as ever at pairing the twang of country with the bang of rock ‘n’ roll, the poignancy with the urgency, the three-part harmonies with the four-fourths beat.

The Desert Rose Band will appear Friday night at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa.

LINER NOTES: San Diego roots-rockers the Beat Farmers have reportedly run into some problems with MCA/Curb Records. According to a label source, several of the tracks the group has already completed for its next album, “Poor and Famous,” have been rejected by MCA executives. The LP--the Farmers’ fourth--was originally scheduled to come out sometime in February, the source said, “but at this point, it appears the release date will have to be postponed.”

Bluesman Tom (Cat) Courtney will return to the Texas Teahouse on Thursday night, to the same stage where he was attacked and stabbed Oct. 6. Courtney, 59, has been a Thursday regular at the Teahouse for nearly 16 years . . . Metallica and Queensryche, two of the hottest young heavy-metal bands in the country, will pair up for a concert next Monday night at the San Diego Sports Arena . . . Local blues band the Mighty Penguins will open for John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers on Dec. 29 at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach.