POP MUSIC REVIEW : John Hiatt Rocks With Passion, Wit for 90 Minutes

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  John Hiatt had it nailed when, after recounting a wild and woolly tromp around Tennessee in “Memphis in the Meantime,” he declared: “I don’t think Ronnie Milsap’s gonna ever record this song.”

The same probably applies to his vast songbook. But until the music industry establishment snaps out of its trend-conscious stupor and grants this singular talent job security for life, his coterie of fans should take the title of his latest album to heart and treasure every one of the “Stolen Moments” of performances like his early set Saturday at the Coach House.

Even on a night when he wasn’t in the best of voice--his falsetto range faded early on but strengthened as the evening progressed--there was hardly an element of his 90-minute show that wasn’t worthy of awestruck praise.

Foremost is how, through his last three albums, Hiatt has demonstrated so resoundingly that there’s rock after 30.

Heck, had someone like Hiatt been around a generation ago, churning out songs about life as an adult that have as much heart, passion and humor as his, maybe Pete Townshend wouldn’t have felt the need to “hope I d-d-d-die before I get old.”

Sure, a lot of over-30 rockers still play just fine, but the ones who also can write rock ‘n’ roll about the post-teen years as convincingly and directly as Hiatt are about as common as 40-year-old Olympic gymnasts.

It’s rare enough to find someone with the perspective Hiatt shows in “Thirty Years of Tears,” a song that pinpoints a wellspring of hurt behind a string of unsuccessful relationships:

Well I’ve cried me a river, I’ve cried me a lake

I’ve cried till the past nearly drowned me

Tears for sad consequences, tears for mistakes

But never these tears that surround me

That’s blues at its darkest, a point where it’s all too easy to fall over the emotional edge into blubbering bathos. As Hiatt acknowledged to a fan who applauded when he announced the title: “Oh, you like to feel sorry for yourself?”

But as one who has survived enough personal tragedy for three or four lifetimes, Hiatt has tapped the even more impressive--even indispensable--trait of not just finding the cause of one’s blues but learning from it and using it for the better.

Continuing the rich, inward exploration that began in earnest with 1987’s touchstone “Bring the Family” album, “Stolen Moments”--the album and the song--deftly uses the sense of humor that has allowed him to emerge from and move beyond such pain:

I used to drink a lot in those days you see

Ya, that’s the way the wind blows

These days the only bar I ever see

Has got lettuce and tomatoes

Where a Bob Dylan seems to reach directly into the subconscious and retrieve whatever conflicting, confusing, inspiring, staggering images he finds, Hiatt is more the Everyman who struggles first to identify, then consciously understand and work through whatever it is that’s been rattling around deep down inside for so long.

With so much lyrical granola to munch on, it would be easy--but short-sighted--to forget about the milk of Hiatt’s melodic inventiveness.

For “Child of the Wild Blue Yonder,” he gets off and running with two thickly bouncing verses, then does a musical spring into the clouds with the first two words of the chorus (“She’s a . . . “) and is into full soar by the time he catches up with the keyword child.

The title song itself has enough melodic ideas to keep any five of the current Top 10 singles out of breath trying to keep pace. But he probably won’t land a hit because, like an astronaut reduced to polishing Coney Island telescopes, he’s vastly overqualified.

The five-man band with him on this tour proved itself as flexible as the Louisiana-based Goners he’s used for the previous few years, though not yet as comfortably integrated as that ensemble had become. Especially gratifying were the slide guitar and dobro colors from Dave Tronzo, and the Band-like overall elegance the group brought to “Thirty Years of Tears.”

A fleeting 20-minute opening set didn’t give the Brothers Figaro, veterans of other bands in the Los Angeles nu-folk scene, much time to get across their gimmicky personas as new Old World musicians.

Looking like the Havalinas’ not-so-long-lost cousins, the foursome (including guest bassist Nigel Harrison from Blondies) offered some attractive-sounding songs from their just-released album, “Gypsy Beat,” which, title notwithstanding, is American folk and pop through and through.