POP MUSIC REVIEW : Spontaneity Missing in R.E.M.’s Concert at Pacific Amphitheatre

For the last couple of years, ever since R.E.M. graduated from cult college band status to “America’s best band” or whatever critics called them for a few weeks when they first hit the big time, it’s been tough to tell just how much the group has pulled a mainstream audience into its musical dreamscape or how much the band itself had been pulled into the waking everyday world.

R.E.M. concerts often have become a tug of war as the band flirts with the conventions and emotional triggers now standard to rock shows, or actively confronts and attempts to defuse those standards. While there seemed a certain hint of arrogance to it, it also was fascinating to see singer Michael Stipe interrupt a show to call the audience “a herd” or chastise the unfurrowed minds that choose to bellow, whistle and hoot through every quiet song.

Such admonishments have now, in their own way, become a convention of R.E.M.’s performance. Indeed, at the group’s show at the Pacific Amphitheatre Wednesday night they were chiefly dispatched by filmed messages projected behind the band, from the tongue-in-cheek “Hello (your city here). Are you ready to rock?” to such pronouncements-from-on-high as “Understand that change begins with the individual.”

Unfortunately, much of R.E.M.’s actual performance Wednesday seemed as pre-programmed and rigid as the filmed messages. While the 27 songs showed that R.E.M.’s music is still a unique, insular thing, much of it was rendered common by a shortage of immediacy and life in Stipe and the band’s delivery. In that regard R.E.M. seemed downright jaded compared to opening act NRBQ, even though that group has been toughing it out on the club circuit since the ‘60s.

Maybe playing nightly to people who do persist in bellowing, whistling and hooting can affect one’s faith in the power of the music one is playing. Whatever the case, the edge was missing from much of R.E.M.’s show.

Limited in its musical range, the group still had always played previously with an engagement and adventurousness that suggested the music could fly in any direction at any time. Though now using with a broader tonal palette--augmenting its guitar drone with former Db Peter Holsapple on keyboards and second guitar, and working congas, dulcimer, accordion, mandolin and amplified chair (used as percussion by Stipe) into the mix--the music often seemed flattened by its lack of spontaneity.

Looking just a bit like Elton John in a suit, cap and sunglasses, Stipe opened with a less-than-rousing “Stand” from last year’s “Green” album, following with scarcely more involved versions of “The One I Love” and “So. Central Rain.” In place of the somnambulant swirl Stipe once moved in, his broad stage gestures and shimmies seemed contrived, and perhaps parodic. A parody was evident in Stipe’s repeated use of rock-critic cliches to introduce songs, beginning several with “This is a song for personal and political activism.”

Things picked up with “Turn You Inside-Out,” the “Green” album’s ode to personal responsibility, which Stipe dedicated to the Exxon Corp. and delivered, Tom Waits-like, through a bullhorn. There were moments when the band’s old drive seemed present: the confrontational/inspirational “These Days” and “I Believe” and clarion-call “Finest Worksong”; the beautifully melodic, rarely performed “Perfect Circle” from the 1983 “Murmur” album; and a passionate “King of Birds,” dealing with change and the passing of generations, dedicated by Stipe to the exiled students of China. But such times were exceptions in the long show. The rhythm section of bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry seemed tight but constrained, while guitarist Peter Buck rarely matched his antic stage leaps with his playing. The net effect: Where the band once tried to pull audiences into its dream, it now seems content merely to relate that dream from a distance.

Whatever R.E.M. may have lacked in abandon this time out, openers NRBQ made up for in spades. While there were no overt lyrics offering “personal and political activism,” the quartet’s music was a free-flying example of individualism and freedom.

The group made no concessions to the fact that this is its first major-venue tour in years, with a new album--the solidly splendid “Wild Weekend”--to plug. Instead of a well-scrubbed set full of new product, the quartet, as usual, careened without a set list into whichever songs struck its collective fancy at the moment.

Wednesday that included the uproarious R&B; of “I’ve Got a Rocket in My Pocket” with guitarist Al Anderson savaging his paisley Telecaster with scouring country-jazz runs. The band forayed into intergalactic jazzman Sun Ra’s territory, whimsically chanting “Rocket No. 9, take off for the planet Venus,” but doing so with wonderfully complex harmonies, underscored by keyboardist Terry Adams’ eccentric genius clavinet eruptions. Then there was an unabashedly romantic ballad “You’re So Beautiful” with a whistled verse, and Anderson howling and burping his way through George Jones’ “White Lightning.”

While NRBQ flailed musical conventions at every turn, it did so with a thorough grounding in those conventions, such that Adams’ percussive dives at his piano nearly always yielded valid Monk-derived chordal abstractions. Even when manhandling his clavinet on the intro to the rocking “Me and the Boys,” shoving the keyboard about the stage while drawing recess-buzzer tones from it, he slyly threw in the opening phrases of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony.