POP MUSIC REVIEW : Husker Dude Not Up to Acoustic Show

LONG BEACH — All sorts of rockers are coming unplugged these days andjumping on the acoustic music bandwagon. The problem is that too many of them aren’t just unplugged; they’re unpracticed.

It takes special, hard-to-develop skills to carry off a solo acoustic show. Bob Mould has a praiseworthy career going as a storming electric rocker, including his work with Husker Du, one of the best American bands of the 1980s. But if Mould is serious about going it alone on stage without a band, he has a lot of practicing to do.

The electric rockers who excel in acoustic performance are people like Neil Young and Richard Thompson, who were acoustic folkies before they discovered electricity. They know that a solo show rides on intimacy and nuance, on dynamic contrasts between whispers and surges, and on a juxtaposition of the aggressive and the mild. They also know that, since the guitar is all you’ve got, it helps if you can make it sing.

All that is stuff that Mould, judging from his solo show at Bogart’s on Wednesday night, still has to learn. While it wasn’t a stiff--Mould has too many good songs from his Husker Du days and two subsequent solo albums--the 80-minute concert was disappointing because he did little to rethink and recast his work for an acoustic setting.

Mould came up in a band that made a din and played for slam-dancing punk enthusiasts. In that situation, it pays for a singer to holler. Mould didn’t have to holler at Bogart’s. But he did, anyway, in the same flat, nasal, Midwestern grimace of a voice that he developed for his rock albums. It would have been refreshing to hear Mould experiment with softer dynamics and subtler phrasings than his accustomed mode allows.

As Mould brayed and husked his way through downcast songs, straining his voice to hoarseness early on, the question arose: Why is this man yelling? It made one wish that James Taylor would drop in, tap the big, pasty-faced Mould on the shoulder, and show him that sometimes a quietly melancholy Mudslide Slim plaint is better than a death-rattle rant.

Mould also would have done well to pull back the throttle on his guitar. Switching between a 12-string acoustic guitar and, on a few songs, a lightly amplified Stratocaster with no electronic effects, Mould went for aggressive strumming that he failed to offset with sparser single-note lead lines. On his first solo album, the acoustic-tinged “Workbook,” Mould had managed some smart picking on the instrumental song “Sunspots.” He didn’t play that one at Bogart’s, and he didn’t display any of the adventurous, glistening fretwork that it promised.

Charm--the ability to win an audience and establish intimacy with humorous quips or by showing a storyteller’s gift on song introductions--is another weapon in the solo-acoustic pro’s arsenal. Mould wasn’t afraid to interact with the audience, but his comments were rushed, nervous and inconsequential (unless Mould’s on-the-road dining habits, the subject of his lengthiest communique, strike one as intriguing information).

On such numbers as “Poison Years” and “Brasilia Crossed With Trenton,” Mould’s powerhouse approach clicked. “Brasilia,” with its emphatic waltzing rhythm, was a strange travelogue that sounded more than a little like Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” proving that Mould has a bit of the folkie in him, after all. The Mould roar served a purpose on “Too Far Down,” a wallow from the Husker Du catalogue in which the singer’s shouting came across as a desperate attempt to break out of deep depression by railing against it.

The characters in Vic Chesnutt’s songs tend to have outlooks as bleak as those in Mould’s Angst -ridden menagerie. But Chesnutt, who opened with a 40-minute solo set, mixed in some wry irony as he sang of the letdown and the piteous.

Chesnutt is a short-cropped, sunken-eyed paraplegic from Athens, Ga., whose debut album was produced by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. He offered a rudimentary guitar style and a nasal, broken voice that sounded like a deathbed version of Graham Parker.

But Chesnutt’s take on the pitiful and the self-pitying was devoid of mealy sentiment and phoniness. His stark, but not entirely dark, songs suggest that life really is a piteous enterprise full of hurt. In Chesnutt’s outlook, tenderness and a sense of irony arise to make the hurt bearable.

Those subtleties were lost on most of the audience, which was more interested in jabbering than in listening to what this singular apparition had to say. Chesnutt took it good-naturedly, acting the part of a politely bumbling farmer who didn’t expect much from a bunch of city folk anyway, and wasn’t going to take any of it personally.

One would like to think, though, that the booming bass-note feedback Chesnutt kept apologizing for wasn’t entirely accidental, but a way of showing he could make rude noises too. Apparently, it isn’t just electric rockers like Mould, but their audiences as well, who have something to learn about how to handle a solo acoustic performance.