POP MUSIC REVIEW : Stewart-Bromberg Bill Makes for Seriocomedy

On the surface, it seemed incongruous for John Stewart to be sharing a bill with David Bromberg: a folk bard and a blues jester, a Charlton Heston epic followed by a Redd Foxx farce.

But the pairing Thursday night at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano turned out to be complementary. Stewart, with his steadfast seriousness, and Bromberg, with his persistent jive, each turned in incomplete performances. But heard side by side, they provided a rounded evening in which Bromberg served up the laugh lines for Stewart’s declamations.

And although Bromberg--accompanied by Dick Fegy on mandolin, guitar and fiddle--gave the half-full house some fun with his high-energy howling and acoustic picking, it was Stewart’s controlled ardor that made for the more memorable performance.

Stewart’s most recent album, “Punch the Big Guy,” is an overbearing collection of unrelentingly grim songs about inner and global troubles. His 70-minute set was no less serious. With his deep, ever-fervent voice, his craggy face and patriarchal bearing, Stewart sometimes seemed as if he should be holding a pair of stone tablets rather than a semi-acoustic guitar.

But where the album makes you want to shake the big guy by the lapels and urge him to lighten up a little, the live show often found Stewart commanding attention with the urgency of his performance.

Backed by Dave Batti on electric bass, Stewart built drama and tension with guitar playing that was alternately rippling and percussive. The duo’s sound on stage had an immediacy lacking on the more elaborately arranged “Big Guy” album. It helped Stewart’s imagery, which is full of great winds and silent rivers and distant stars, seem grand rather than overblown.

Songs like Stewart’s run a risk of sounding pompous, especially when they are sung in such an oratorical style. The antidote is his sincerity. Stewart was believable on big-emoting songs such as “Gold,” a 1979 jeremiad against the music business, and “Dreamers on the Rise,” a cry of hope amid anguish written in the wake of the Bobby Kennedy assassination.

Only a couple of Stewart’s songs came off sounding labored, notably “Botswana,” which draws trite contrasts between pleasure-chasing Californians and starving Africans.

Still, an audience can take only so many serious declarations in one sitting. Other than a few mild quips, Stewart didn’t make use of between-songs humor, the device that allows such consistently moody folk-rockers as Suzanne Vega to put on shows that seem varied.

Stewart found a partial change of pace with his more tender material. It was a treat to hear “Daydream Believer,” the most popular song he has written, done as a touching ballad rather than a jaunty bit of Monkee-business. The song led off a wonderful encore that also included a strong new number, “Remembering the Sun,” in which the big guy eloquently poses dreams as the best shield against life’s punches.

Bromberg, by contrast, may have overdone the humor in his 80-minute set.

Although it covered a wide range of blues and folk-rooted styles, the show was less varied than all the style-hopping would suggest. Bromberg’s main approach was to bray and holler and put over a song through force of personality.

It made for a good deal of fun, and it got some big rises out of the audience. But even though Bromberg ranged from the fiddle-driven bluegrass treatment of “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” to jump blues on “The Viper” to zany Chuck Berry snatches during “Sharon” to the delta sounds of “Statesboro Blues,” it all was filtered through an unchanging persona.

The only truly earnest song Bromberg attempted, the pretty lament “Summer Wages,” suffered from a mumbly delivery.

Bromberg’s guitar playing was dexterous in each of the genres, but it was not especially distinctive. His most memorable licks were the gimmicky maneuvers featured in “Sharon,” a tale of lust in which he coaxed comically seductive sounds with a slide bar. Sideman Fegy consistently kept the sound full and interesting, and came up with a sharp T-Bone Walker-style jazz-blues guitar solo on “I Refuse to Be Your Fool.”

But the most lasting impression Bromberg left was not as a singer or as a guitarist, but as a put-down artist. It was fine and funny when he was rolling off speedy, absurdist catalogues of invective toward unkind lovers in “Refuse to Be Your Fool” and “Statesboro Blues.” But it wasn’t so funny when he turned back the audience’s song requests with snide rejoinders.

The more Bromberg kept repeating his refusal to take requests, the more it made some in the crowd want to wheedle a favorite tune from him. There are ways to duck unwanted requests without coming off as a wise guy or a prima donna.