POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lindley Keeps on His Toes During New Year’s Kickoff

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  There may have been no better situation for starting the new year off on the right foot than David Lindley’s show at the Coach House on Sunday evening.

The radiant prince of polyester and his four-piece El Rayo X band cheered in the decade with a reggae “Auld Lang Syne” and sundry jubilant dance grooves capable of keeping both feet moving well into the mid-’90s.

Except for New Orleans’ Neville Brothers (who were busy ushering things in at the Palace) Lindley may have no American peer when it comes to mixing diverse world rhythms into an enfolding groove. And as much as they were an insistent call to party, his Afro-Cajun-Caribbean-Bulgarian-Filipino- Arabic-Detroit polyglot pulses conveyed an implicit, and never more timely, message of the common heart within our world’s cultures.

Lindley’s tan suit could easily still have had thrift-shop tags attached, and the muted greens and oranges of his shirt revealed his penchant for synthetic fibers. A garish tiara topped his matted black hair. “It’s very greasy,” he revealed during “Werewolves of London,” “but I get an entire row of an airplane to myself.”

Similarly to his predilection for wino duds and ‘60s drugstore guitars, some of his 15-song set was culled from the budget bin of pop music. But such frayed party rugs as “Wooly Bully” and “Twist and Shout” were spiffed up with chunky world rhythms. Even Merle Haggard’s inveterate country hard-guy anthem “The Lonesome Fugitive” was sent reeling with a reggae beat.

Given the holiday, Lindley’s show was understandably bent toward the “Mr. Dave, party guy” image that was overemphasized on 1988’s Linda Ronstadt-produced “Very Greasy” album. He does have a fine gift for humor, with his Jimmy Stewart impression and character of “Chuck the Whining Rasta” on Bonnie Raitt’s “Leave Home Girl” being something to behold.

But the show also gave sufficient evidence of his status as one of the finest instrumentalists rock has produced. Between his patois whines on the Raitt tune, he crafted an intricate cross-cultured guitar solo that suggested a lost continent somewhere between Persia and Jamaica.

“Quarter of a Man,” Frizz Fuller’s bittersweet ode to the handicapped, featured a lyrical, emotion-filled solo reminiscent of Lindley’s empathetic work behind Jackson Browne. Switching to fiddle on the New Orleans anthem “Let the Good Times Roll,” his sawings could have been bred in the bayous, while the band retained an insistent island backbeat.

Though only bassist Jorge Calderon remains from the original El Rayo X formed early in the last decade, the outfit is as powerful and playful as ever. Ex-Faces and sometime Rolling Stones adjunct Ian McLagan proved a particularly good addition on keyboards, lending a Professor Longhair feel to Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Ain’t It Crazy, to Keep on Rubbin’ at That?”