POP MUSIC REVIEW : Brown Emulates Stax Soul Style

While it’s fun to carry on about the importance of country music’s respecting and drawing on its roots, it’s also mildly refreshing to find that the ‘60s-soul-influenced music of T. Graham Brown has found a place on the slick surface of the contemporary country charts. There was a time when such a cross-pollination of musical styles was far more common, and it certainly didn’t hurt the vitality of American music.

At the Crazy Horse in Santa Ana on Monday, Brown’s 20-song set didn’t give even the slightest nod of a cowboy hat to country tradition--not that Brown had such a hat; he sported a shiny blue ‘60s soul suit and shades. His fine-grit vocals came straight from Memphis rather than Nashville, and there was nary a country lick heard from his five-piece band.

But while pleasant enough, his performance was also a good emotional distance from the Stax Records soul style he emulates. Brown’s vocals are featured in a recent Taco Bell commercial, and it’s indicative of the depth of his art that he put at least as much feeling into repeating his ode to corporate foodstuffs as he did into singing his own songs.

That prefab passion was sufficient to raise his “Come as You Were” and “Bring a Change” (a “We Are the World”-ish anthem) to a near-Huey Lewis level of undemanding enjoyableness. But his versions of soul-geyser Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Dock of the Bay” had so little fire they could have been safely stored next to gasoline.