Some Reason for Hope in a Landscape of Schmaltz

CERRITOS —  The trouble with today’s suburbanized twang is that all the farm boys and farm girls who built up country music in the ‘50s through the mid-’70s have been shunted aside (at least when it comes to having a chance on the sales charts), and nobody left in Nashville’s commercial mainstream seems to know much about separating the wheat from the chaff.

The crop quality that Collin Raye presented Wednesday night to an enthusiastic, sold-out house of 1,800 fans in the first show of a two-night engagement at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts was drastically mixed.

The Arkansas native’s 90-minute concert of polished, Eagles-feathered country had some involving moments founded on first-rate songs, but it also contained stuff so schmaltzy, flimsy and devoid of life’s true earthy grit that one could only wonder how a single artistic conscience could choose so haphazardly.

The likely answer is that there is no artistic conscience behind many of the choices made in mainstream Nashville. Raye is a successful product of the system, having notched three platinum albums and a gold since 1991. The machine recognizes that there’s a sizable public for flimsy schmaltz and is ready and willing to cater to it.

On the worst song of the night, the wretched ballad “One Boy, One Girl,” you could almost hear the songwriting machinery grinding under the sonorous chiming of Raye’s capable but indistinctive band.

This treacly concoction seeks to elicit a warm-all-over, cooey-gooey feeling over a brainless fairy tale about “one boy, one girl” who meet on a blind date, fall in perfect love and soon produce a perfect matched set of twins--one boy, one girl. Get it?

The song’s writers neglected to include the faintest hint of conflict, which any sixth-grader should be able to tell you is an essential mainspring of a decent story. And, as any Nashville songsmith worth anything must know, good country music thrives on good stories. For songwriting purposes, happy families are all alike: boring.

“Love, Me,” the career-establishing hit ballad from Raye’s 1991 debut album, was cut from similar cloth and by similar mechanical means. And, as if those ballads weren’t awful enough, Raye offered a puffed-up cover of “Open Arms,” a useless piece of equipment from Journey’s best-forgotten junk heap.

Another quintessential Nashville moment came with the show-opening rocker, “My Kind of Girl.” It found Raye boasting what independent thinkers he and his lady love are, in bridge verses composed almost entirely of cliches that sap the song of artistic independence. It’s a fairly remarkable sequence, in which our lovers not only “march to the beat of a different drum” but also manage to be “peas in a pod, two of a kind.”

Let’s not give up hope of redemption, though. Raye sang a handful of songs, also Nashville song-mill products, that exemplified what good, commercial songwriting can be.

“What If Jesus Comes Back Like That” was a tense, dark anthem that asks the listener to see the divinity in such modern lepers as crack babies and homeless men; hunched over like Atlas under the weight of the world, the jeans-and-flannel-clad Raye seemed to be overplaying it just a bit.

That wasn’t the case with “I Think About You,” the title track from his most recent and (despite some of those miserable, artistically split-personality exceptions) most worthwhile album.

Raye’s high-ranging vocal was clear, intense and fully convincing on this troubled heartland-rock anthem in which a man, by virtue of raising a daughter, comes to understand and fear how threatening and degrading the world can be for women.

With “I Love Being Wrong,” Raye, who relies almost exclusively on outside material, showed he could rock well just for the fun of it, topping the song’s tough, swampy groove with a vocal full of bite and sexy urgency. And not all his ballads were treacle. “Not That Different” and “Love Remains” were fervent songs cognizant of life’s thickets and thorns and lifted by graceful melodies.

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Overall, Raye’s singing was solid but not striking. His Eagle-mania tended toward an R&B-tinged; Glenn Frey on the rockers, and a plaintive Don Henley on the ballads. His voice had husky shadings without being truly gritty and resonant.

Raye also could stretch to high-tenor, Vince Gill territory, but with a pinched tone. His bearing was that of a basic, unpretentious nice guy. His banter included a spontaneous laugh line or two: Praising the Cerritos hall’s praiseworthy art deco-meets-Victorian design, he looked to one of its old-fashioned, banistered balconies and quipped, “You folks [should] realize you’re in the Lincoln booth.”

While Raye’s show was hardly to die for, there were enough quality songs and quality performances in it to hope he can keep the wheat coming and learn to eliminate the chaff. (His announcement that he’s thinking of including that Journey offal on his next album was hardly reassuring.)

Country music badly needs a revolution. Raye is one member of the current Nashville barony who might be worth saving from the career guillotine that is waiting for some very deserving heads. Then again, he might not.