O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Seldom-Seen Simon Still Charms

SANTA ANA —  “This is the best show I’ve done in 14 years!” Carly Simon declared at the close Friday night of her Galaxy Concert Theatre performance. That statement didn’t venture much, however, since it was also nearly her only performance in as many years. But the 17-song show merited praise by any measure.

Even in Simon’s hit heyday in the early ‘70s, she rarely ventured onto the concert stage, being the victim of one of the music industry’s more legendary cases of stage fright.

At a 1981 Pittsburgh show her jitters, combined with other stresses (the collapse of her marriage to James Taylor and her son’s loss of a kidney), caused her to collapse during a performance. Her only ventures onto the stage since then have been 1987 and 1990 HBO concerts, one taped in front of a handpicked audience of 300 neighbors from Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and the other in a small club.

Friday’s show was the kick-off of a minuscule mini-tour (“You’re seeing one-seventh of the tour,” she announced) that brings her to the House of Blues tonight.

The only question one might have raised about Friday’s performance was: “What stage fright?” The evening could have been a lesson to other performers in assuredness, ease and intimacy.

It probably didn’t hurt that Simon was playing to a roomful of fans who had snatched up all the show’s tickets within hours of going on sale. The capacity crowd likely would have been satisfied seeing Simon eat an artichoke, given the standing ovation they accorded her just for walking onstage.

Wearing a brown pantsuit, Simon--now 49--scarcely appeared to have aged since 1971, when she first hit with “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.” That was one of the few hits she didn’t assay in a set that neatly encapsuled her career and included three numbers from her most recent album, 1994’s “Letters Never Sent.”

There were also a few curveballs, such as her opening number, a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” sung solo before concluding with a light band accompaniment. Even that mustard-laden melody (which she had sung in the soundtrack to Ken Burns’ PBS series on baseball) gave evidence of Simon’s vocal charms, with a voice that still can range from fiery to ennui, making pit stops at tender, sultry and spunky.

Simon’s nine-piece band--including studio aces drummer Rick Marotta and bassist Doug Wimbush--lent her a sympathetic backing, with a studio sheen offset by warmth and improvisation.

“I’d like to introduce my band,” Simon announced at mid-show. “This isn’t just any old band. They’re all people I’ve had sex with.”

She seemed in a similarly playful mood all night, at one point suggesting to the audience, “I might ask you to put your hand up your friend’s jacket and pretend he’s a puppet. It’s amazing the perspective that can give you on a song.”

At another juncture she asked, “Do you bottle water? Do you make chocolate? What do you do in Orange County?”

“Bankruptcy!” shouted back several in the crowd.

The light spirits spilled into the music in places, such as on “De Bat (Fly in Me Face),” in which Simon took a Martha’s Vineyard encounter she’d had with a bat, gave it a calypso rhythm and sent whizzing into Belafonte-land.

Two decades on, her “Anticipation” and “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” still came across as songs of considerable intelligence and insight, none the worse for having been used in commercials to hawk ketchup and pain relievers, a sell-out for which Simon said she appreciated the audience’s forgiveness.

“No Secrets” was less brassy than in its original version, given a soft, human-scaled reading by Simon and a lilting background from the band that segued briefly into “Girl From Ipanema.”

Other hits included “Nobody Does It Better,” “Legend in Your Time,” “You Belong to Me,” “Coming Around Again” and the Oscar-winner “Let the River Run.” “My Romance,” a 1990 album largely of standards, was represented by a tender, sad voicing of Rodgers and Hart’s “He’s Too Good for Me,” with her voice backed only by piano.

From “Letters Never Sent,” which Simon described as a concept album prompted by the truths lurking in the letters we don’t send, she performed the title song, “Halfway Round the World” (a song not entirely aided by its Russian army-like “la la” chorus) and “Touched by the Sun,” a song about a dead friend that Simon dedicated “to all the people who try a little harder in this life.”

Audience calls for a second encore continued long after the house lights came up, but Simon came back onstage only to thank the crowd and beg off, pleading a tired throat.

Fans had to be content with her sole encore, a gutsy version of “You’re So Vain,” made no less heated by the enlistment of two very unlikely Mick Jagger surrogates (one in a suit and tie) from the audience to sing along.