MUSIC: Morrison’s temperance league

   Most performers work down to a crowd, but a select few retain their mystique in spite of — perhaps even because of — making  the crowd work up to them.

  The Hard Rock Hotel hosted Van Morrison Friday night, and has Bob Dylan coming Oct. 18. Both are poets with diminished singing voices, not known for chatting up a crowd — or even saying hello, for that matter — or doling out the crowd-pleasing hits, at least in the exact arrangements preserved on classic rock radio.

  So customer satisfaction within Morrison’s packed house (including some seniors making their first and possibly last trip to the new Joint) probably depended on what you expected going in. All are likely to agree the 90-minute show was  a cloud of dust without an opening act, and that the signs at the bars announcing no alcohol sales once the show commenced did not help the casino industry battle through a recession.

  But Uncle Van might have known what was good for the kiddies, with the temperance enforcing a listening environment for the first hour. There was plenty of room for songs to rise and fall, breaking down to a whisper and building up again on tunes such as “And The Healing Has Begun.” And the crystal sound mix left air for piano, fiddle and flute within the six-piece band’s run at pleasant tunes such as “Foreign Window.”

  Morrison, in his now standard hat and sunglasses, took turns with the saxophone, piano and acoustic guitar. His singing often drifted into the unintelligible, but then snapped into perfect lucidity for “In The Garden.”

  He threw the crowd a bone an hour in with “Moondance,” followed by a jam on the blues standard “Help Me" and his modern standard "Have I Told You Lately?"

  It was all over too soon after a romping “Gloria,” with knowing fans filing out while the more expectant waited, perhaps for a “Brown Eyed Girl” encore that never came. Not what you’d call a party night. But as with Morrison’s recordings, concentration was a virtue rewarded.