Sharp's TCL Show Far From Dull

Maybe you were a member of the Tulsa City Limits audience Friday night, and maybe you knew what to expect when Kevin Sharp and his band hit the stage.

Then again, maybe you didn't.

I admit to being in the latter category. Like most country-music fans, I knew Sharp from his radio hits - strongly lyrical tunes like, "If You Love Somebody," and "Nobody Knows" - and I knew that he was a cancer survivor who now does a lot for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the Make A Wish Foundation. So I think I must've expected something like a John Berry concert; that is, a pretty straightforward, intense and serious presentation. What I didn't expect was a stage show in which the six-man band got the audience going by performing that now-famous sports anthem, Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2," just prior to Sharp's scrambling out onto the stage like head villain Michael Berryman in "The Hills Have Eyes," wildly starting a frenetic and theatrical show that ended up as a cross between early Garth Brooks and a road-company version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar."

Before it was over, Sharp, mike strapped over his bald head and shirttail hanging almost to his knees, had fired into the audience several times with a big u-shaped bazooka-like gun, sometimes propelling wadded T-shirts over the heads of the dancers, sometimes spraying them with water droplets. He'd chugged bottled water like he was dying of thirst, thrown towels around, danced with bandmates, taken pictures of crowd members. He'd climbed down to a table in front of the stage and engaged in a conversation with a patron that ended with his singing a medley of well-known country hits and imitating their singers - including Sawyer Brown's Mark Miller, complete with the frenetic dancing Miller's known for - ostensibly because he was trying to find out just which country artist it was she'd come to see. He poked a little fun at TCL's Jerry "Showboat" Morgan, and trotted out onto the dance floor to sign autographs while the band played the old Booker T. and the MG's instrumental "Green Onions."

Oh, yeah. And he also sang some pretty good songs.

"Nobody Knows" was one of them, and he did it very near the end, after teasing the crowd with a few bars halfway through. And if you like "Nobody Knows," you would've liked the rest of the songs, virtually all of them from either his first album or his second one. They were, like "Nobody Knows," mostly easy-going, lyrically strong pop music. "She Just Has To Be Mine," for example, was a straight-ahead mid-tempo ballad, and "If She Only Knew," was musically mellow, lyrically intense. So was one he co-wrote called, "It's Still Love," which he performed powerfully as his first encore number, with only his piano player on stage.

Besides the country hit makers medley in the middle, Sharp did no cover tunes, a gutsy move for a guy with only three radio hits. But he pulled it off, and then some, undoubtedly shocking some of the crowd with his unexpected showmanship. The cliché for his presentation would be in-your-face, if that term didn't suggest confrontation. What Sharp did wasn't confrontational - but it was direct and person-to-person, as though he wanted to entertain each audience member individually.

He came pretty close to doing it, too, as evidenced by the crowd at the base of the stage, watching him, that got larger and larger as the night went on.

I don't want to get too philosophical, but I think there was a profound lesson in Kevin Sharp's performance. At one point in his life, a youthful point, he wasn't expected to live, and he's experienced depths of suffering that most of us can't even imagine.

But instead of whining, instead of standing up on stage and acting as though people are obliged to listen to him because of what he's been through, he worked as hard as I've ever seen a performer work to make sure his audience had a good time.

Then again, let's not say, "work." You don't work when you're celebrating, and that's what Kevin Sharp and his band were doing Friday night - celebrating the gift of music, celebrating the gift of fun, celebrating the gift of life.