O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Tori Amos Gets Her House in Order

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Divas may be high-strung and demanding, but they earn the right and the title with the intensity and accomplishment of their music.

Tori Amos claimed the diva’s prerogative to have things her way Friday as she opened a sold-out, two-night stand at the Coach House. Operating under Tori rules instead of the usual house rules, the Coach House was banned from running its bar or offering table service during Amos’ performance.

After one song, Amos decided that the Tori rules weren’t being enforced to her liking.

“I cannot play while the cash register’s ringing. It’s driving me out of my mind,” she said, in a tone of voice that tried to coat irritation with a veneer of taxed pleasantness. “I know the people are counting the money, but you’re not going to have much to count if I can’t play.”

Whatever Tori wants, Tori gets. Actually, club owner Gary Folgner said later, the problem wasn’t the Coach House cash registers (which he said are silent electronic models), but a ringing pay phone--which club staffers promptly unplugged after the edict from the stage.

Crowd noise was one distraction Amos didn’t have to worry about, unless the roar of applause also drives her out of her mind. Her commanding vocal-with-piano solo performance held the house rapt for 90 minutes.

Amos’ concert was an emotional and technical high wire act that flagged only briefly. In the solo setting, a few of her songs tended toward sameness and suffered from a certain diffuseness of structure. Even so, there wasn’t a song Amos played that didn’t provide some sort of emotional haymaker or striking vocal exploit.

Amos’ vocal style was based on a theatrical assemblage of falsetto climbs and arching swan dives that persistently called to mind Kate Bush, the English rock diva who never performs live but nevertheless commands one of pop’s most fanatical followings. But Amos had other resources to offer, going beyond Bush-like delicacy in passages of raw, wordless keening that recalled the wild, elemental approach of Sinead O’Connor’s first album.

It sometimes seemed as if Amos might be on the verge of breaking into a rendition of Joni Mitchell’s sublime ballad, “River”--a connection suggested more by the deeply emotive quality of Amos’ music than by her singing style.

(In fact, Amos’ taste in outside material leaned toward boy-rock, not diva-pop. Besides singing 11 songs from her debut album, “Little Earthquakes,” and one non-album original, Amos played a slowed, feminized version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” that replaced the thrusting beat with something more languid and sultry, offered a truly menacing, dread-filled take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and closed her show with an impassioned, aching reading of “Angie,” the Rolling Stones nugget).

Amos’ singing and piano playing were full of unpredictable cadences and a continual shifting of dynamics. Rather than merely put her powerful voice out for display, Amos tuned it to the sense of her songs. In the opening “Crucify,” for instance, the way she repeatedly stretched the word chains didn’t just signify a commanding exhibition of capacious pipes; it palpably embodied the theme of a song about the struggle to break apart the mind-forged manacles of self-doubt.

Most of Amos’ songs strung together snapshots of emotion-laden moments from a troubled past, forming deeply personal sketches of a woman searching for a missing sense of self, fighting to overcome paralyzing fears, and lashing back against romantic rejections. Songs like “Winter” and “Mother” implied loving support on the home front (Amos’ parents were in the audience), but the motivating principle of Amos’ songs was the precarious, obstacle-strewn drive toward independence and self-acceptance.

She played out those inner dramas like a true diva (albeit a plainly adorned one in jeans and white tank top)--flinging her neck back, tossing her russet hair, staring intensely into inner distances, and swaying at her shoulders in a piano-bench ballet.

There was not much relief from Amos’ psychodrama. “Leather” offered some decadently humorous Liza Minnelli “Cabaret” moves. In the jaunty “Happy Phantom,” set to a bouncy, Randy Newman-style stride piano rhythm, Amos gaily contemplated life as a ghost in a mischievous “Topper”-like hereafter. In Tori’s world, apparently, you’ve got to be dead to have fun. “China,” a sad, pretty account of lovers drifting apart, was Amos’ most conventional song--one that would be well-suited for someone like Judy Collins to sing.

The set also included “Me and a Gun,” Amos’ hushed, a cappella account of being raped. A harrowing subject, conveyed with convincing realism--but Amos also handled it with admirable craft, using telling but understated details, and balancing moments of terror and anguish with a distancing, defense-mechanism sense of irony. Introducing it, she might have been talking about the concert’s overall tenor of emotional purging: by writing the song, she said, “it helped me deal with something. You never deal with anything by pretending it doesn’t exist. So we don’t pretend anymore.”

While Amos’ set brought immersion in searing, painful feelings, opening act E dealt in lighter shades of melancholy.

An unprepossessing little fellow who sat at his piano in specs, funny backward cap and stubbly face, E specialized in hang-dog songs tempered by humor and a sense that life may be sorely testing, but never unlivable, even for a confirmed misfit like himself. The Los Angeles singer’s material didn’t probe deeply, but it didn’t really need to: E has such a marvelously tuned ear that he was able to serve up pop delicacy after pop delicacy during his 45-minute set.

The songs might have been confections, but they weren’t banal, and anyone with a sweet-tooth for Beatles and Beach Boys-style harmony pop could only scarf down helping after helping of that sugar (in case anyone had any doubt as to his key inspiration), E and his two-man backup band paid Beatlemaniac tribute with a cover of “I’m Only Sleeping,” and E used a snippet of “Strawberry Fields Forever” as a suitably melancholy end-note to the show.

On his debut album, “A Man Called (E),” the singer displays a double-threat voice that can rise from a husky mid-range to a clear, aching, Brian Wilson-like high plaint. On stage, E had trouble soaring upward but still was an appealing singer. In any case, guitarist Parthenon Huxley and bassist Chris Solberg did a fine job ensuring that the set didn’t lack for lustrous high harmonies. They also joined E in the easy, slightly cracked humor that spiced the well-received show.

For pure-pop enthusiasts, the E ticket is a good bet for an entertaining ride.