PEDESTRIAN WALKER

You’d think the roadhouse ambiance of the Palomino would provide the perfect setting for the stinging guitar riffs and rough-cut vocals of Oakland bluesman Joe Louis Walker, but such was not the case on Friday night. Walker led his salt ‘n’ pepper trio the Boss Talkers through more than an hour’s worth of blues standards and standard blues, enlivened only by an occasional lightning flash of serpentine git-tar whizzums.

Just because much of the three-quarters full house might have been drawn by the co-billed rockabilly beating Paladins or the hard-rock crushing Little Kings, that’s still no excuse for Walker to simply go through the motions--a ribald story, an in-your- face solo, any unexpected piece of shtick, could’ve won the crowd over. If the 37-year-old Walker, who’s just had his first album issued on Hightone, wants to be seen as a keeper of the true blue flame, he’s going to have burn a little brighter than an autopilot light.