O.C. COUNTRY MUSIC REVIEW : Dunn Flawless, but Brooks Hot

ANAHEIM —  In pop music, persuasive feeling beats faultless technique as surely as a full house beats a straight. And in country music, gosh-sakes sincerity, aw-shucks humility and good ol’ boy (or gal) playfulness traditionally go over better than a stage personality founded on dry humor.

Given those two givens, it’s no mystery why the fans at the Celebrity Theatre’s country double bill Saturday night greeted opener Garth Brooks with unbridled warmth but gave only mild applause to headliner Holly Dunn.

Brooks brought a middlin’ voice and a passable band to the proceedings, but his ever humble manner and his ability to sing with convincing feeling about those sentimental favorites--cowboys, barflys and rodeo riders--stood him in good stead during his 70-minute set. The audience couldn’t get enough of him.

Top-billed Holly Dunn was a slender beauty who sang flawlessly. Material culled from her albums was undistinguished but pleasant, and she showed off a wide vocal range and a knack for putting all the usual devices--a choked catch-in-the-voice here, a belt-it-out husk there--in all the right places. She also brought along a masterful band that excelled equally at rockin’ country, bluegrass-tinged traditionalism and honky tonk ballads and shuffles.

But for all of Dunn’s technical excellence, her performance was emotionally cool and distant. Her hourlong set contained few moments when she seemed to be living the songs she was singing, instead of just performing them. Even on a well-executed a cappella gospel song and on Buck Owens’ classic weeper “Cryin’ Time,” Dunn couldn’t summon the passion to bring the moment to life.

A sense of distance also cropped up in Dunn’s interaction with the audience. Most of her quips had a sardonic edge to them. Even a fan’s gift of a huge basket of flowers turned into a straight line for a barbed quip: “I don’t know if I just died, or what.” There is nothing wrong with coming off as a dry ironist on stage--if you’re Suzanne Vega or Lou Reed or a country renegade like Lyle Lovett. But most country audiences eat up open-hearted warmth--and though Dunn hails from San Antonio, she didn’t act like anybody’s sweetheart.

Brooks, on the other hand, was warmly sincere to a fault. At one point, he quoted Lou Gehrig’s “luckiest man alive” speech and Tiny Tim’s “God bless us every one” in the same breath as he thanked his fans for making him one of country’s hottest newcomers. The cowboy-hatted Brooks displayed a puppyish playfulness with his band, and his vocal phrasing drawled and twanged so broadly at times that even a fellow Oklahoman might have found it a wee bit exaggerated. In short, Brooks was unflaggingly down-home.

So was most of his material. A solo reading of the sentimental old West weeper “Cowboy Bill” held the audience rapt, as Brooks made it seem as if he’d known the old codger himself. Ditto for the barfly in the wry new number “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places,” and the burned-out bronco buster in “Much Too Young (to Feel This Damn Old).” Brooks’ thin, shiny voice could have used some burnishing and depth (he sounds like a less-adept George Strait). But Brooks’ songs covered familiar ground with just enough of a fresh twist to raise them out of the routine, and he did a persuasive job of putting them across with a sense of closeness to the people and situations he sang about.

But though Brooks may be good at evoking country music verities, he doesn’t know diddley about picking rock and pop tunes to round out a set. His choices ranged from the too-familiar (Don McLean’s “Vincent”) to the unredeemably obnoxious (Charlie Daniels’ “The South’s Gonna Do It” and Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right”).