Gavin Rossdale: SFGate – Review

Music review: Gavin Rossdale flies solo
Aidin Vaziri, Chronicle Pop Music Critic

It didn’t take long for Gavin Rossdale to fall back on the Bush catalog at the Fillmore. Three songs into his set Tuesday, he hauled out “Machinehead,” one of the many hits that helped his former band fill amphitheaters just a decade ago.

Now a solo artist better known as Gwen Stefani’s spouse, he’s entertaining far more manageable crowds than either Bush or No Doubt. The venue was maybe half full when the 41-year-old singer took the stage just after 10 p.m. – considerably less so by the time he relinquished it nearly two hours later.

That’s the problem with making rock music with such broad strokes: You either end up selling billions of albums to people who don’t mind your brand of hand-me-down grunge or diving headfirst into an audience that’s far too thin to catch your fall.

But if Rossdale’s ego was feeling as bruised as his noggin, he certainly didn’t show it. The overwrought tunes on his first solo album, “Wanderlust,” released last year, might make Chris Cornell’s mealymouthed cliches sound like arcane ragas, but at the Fillmore, Rossdale delivered them with so much bluster that he probably produced more sweat than the four members of Coldplay combined on any given night.

“There are so many songs I want to play for you – some you know, some you don’t know,” he shrugged at one point. “That’s the way it goes.”

Apart from the heavy-handed ballad “Love Remains the Same,” Rossdale’s solo work has failed to catch on in any significant way.

So curiously unmoving tunes like “Future World” and “Forever May You Run” ultimately served as filler between the big Bush-era singles such as “Everything Zen,” “Chemicals Between Us” and “Glycerine.” Not that Rossdale seemed to mind.

Blowing air kisses, kneeling at the edge of the stage for the quiet moments, helping his drummer thrash his kit (which was dutifully restored for the encore), the singer doesn’t hold his music as sacred as the grand gestures. “I love you,” he announced repeatedly.

So never mind that his acoustic cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” inspired the night’s biggest sing-along. Never mind that he could have easily been the opening act for No Doubt’s huge summer tour, playing for loads more people while snuggling up with his wife every night. Nor that he could have got the old gang together to make a dash for the reunion bucks.

For Rossdale, size truly doesn’t matter.

E-mail Aidin Vaziri at avaziri@sfchronicle.com.