Guitarist Continues to Do His Legg Work : Performing: Briton spurns the gimmicks and fashions in musical technique for the broader view. He appears tonight at the Insomniac coffee shop in San Diego.

By JOHN D’AGOSTINO

June 20, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

SAN DIEGO — At this stage of his career, British guitarist Adrian Legg is a man who still needs an introduction.

It’s not that the 43-year-old musician is a neophyte. He’s released four albums, including the American-issued “Guitars and Other Cathedrals” and the current, critically acclaimed “Guitars for Mortals.” He also has performed in the touring bands of country songbird Nanci Griffith and pop chanteuse Tanita Tikaram, and has been featured on the TNN cable network’s “Nashville Now” program.

But, if word of Legg’s talent is spreading, it’s less like wildfire than like the warmth from an electric blanket. In America, he’s not even a household name among guitar cognoscenti. Offstage, he would more likely be mistaken for actor-writer Buck Henry than for a bodacious six-string slinger. His appropriately downscaled “Living Room Tour” of intimate venues brings Legg to the Insomniac coffeehouse downtown tonight and to Los Angeles’ Lingerie on Sunday.

Legg, you see, has chosen the path of most resistance. He plays a judiciously amplified electro-acoustic guitar, and generally has pooh-poohed the carefully coiffed image, high-profile jamming, gimmicky videos and shrewd marketing by which guitar gods are made. Instead, Legg is letting his future ride on that most fickle of assets: musicality.

In recording “Guitar for Mortals,” Legg consciously downplayed considerations of gonzo technique and virtuosity. The result is an album of instrumental vignettes that are captivating in their deceptive simplicity and emotionally appealing without being mawkish.

In a phone call earlier this week from his hotel room in Tulsa, Okla., where he was scheduled to perform, Legg discussed his current subordination of technical flash to the cause of subtlety. It quickly became clear that he is not lacking in strong opinions.

“I had to take an anti-technique stance because of what this obsession with technical perfection is doing to the guitar, especially the electric guitar,” he explained in a pleasant, Londoner’s accent. “Particularly in the rock world, guitar- playing has become so repetitive, so academic and so narcissistic that it’s destroyed itself. I think what’s happening at Berklee (College of Music, in Massachusetts) and the Guitar Institute (of Technology, in Los Angeles) is very destructive.

“I’m a firm believer that incompetence is the mother of originality,” Legg continued. “The guitar always has developed outside the academic world. One after another performer would try things he’d heard and get them slightly wrong, and in the process develop his own character. Now, we have schools teaching everyone to play the same way, and thus producing profoundly boring clones--most of them male--who have driven a lot of women listeners away. I think that’s terrible.”

Legg’s response to what he perceived as the dulling standardization of guitar playing was to further refine the experiments of 1990’s “Guitars and Other Cathedrals.”

“There were more extremes in the music on that album,” he said. “I was all over the place. I took the electro-acoustic guitar as far toward the electric as possible, to see what I could do with that. Then I went back to the straight acoustic, and even some straight nylon (string) work. My approach was more stable by the time I got to ‘Guitar for Mortals,’ which, consequently, is much more coherent.”

Although Legg might have dampered the pyrotechnics on the new release, he wasn’t above employing dexterous tricks that suggest virtuosity held almost painfully in check. Witness his mondo-twang, banjo-breakdown picking on “Coging’s Glory,” and the undulating arpeggios that outline the graceful melody of “Mrs. Jack’s Last Stand” (a tone-bouquet to his daughter’s elderly ballet teacher). On two country-fried tunes, “The Gospel According to O. Henry” and “Chicken Licken’s Last Ride,” Legg twists the guitar’s tuning pegs while bending the strings to achieve an uncanny pedal-steel-guitar effect.

More characteristic of the album, however, is a restraint in which Legg’s articulate fingers never speak over the whispers from his heart and soul. “Guitars for Mortals” is evocative without leaving the gooey residue of sentimentalism that characterizes similar work by lesser players. Sublime mood pieces with give-away titles (“A Candle in Notre Dame,” “Pieta,” “Nanci”) expose nerve endings left vulnerable by design.

“You see, I haven’t abandoned technique altogether, I’ve just consciously stopped hiding behind it,” Legg explained. “For a long time, I relied almost entirely on demonstrations of technical proficiency, until I realized that it takes a lot more courage, and actually is more difficult, to set that aside and deliver a performance that functions emotionally.”

Legg’s first experience with the guitar came when, as a boy, he “nailed various things together and twanged them.” Although he is the right age to have been influenced in his choice of instruments by Beatlemania and the resulting wave of British rock, Legg claims he wasn’t.

“It might be heresy, but I didn’t like the Beatles very much and wasn’t terribly interested in what was happening in England (during the ‘60s). I liked (the British instrumental rock group) the Shadows, who had a wonderful sound. And I remember hearing a Lonnie Mack recording, called ‘Wham,’ that came piling out of the radio and blew my mind. But I didn’t develop as a guitarist then because I didn’t know where I fit in.”

Then, when he was 19, Legg went to Liverpool and accidentally fell in with a country band, not knowing anything about country music. Suddenly, he had a focus.

“I didn’t know it was possible to play that way,” he recalled. “I enjoyed country music’s direct emotionalism; it sends you straight for the handkerchief, which I think is terrific. Of course, the more I listened, the more I realized there was quite a lot of schlock going on in front of the great playing. But a number of country songs offer wonderful cameos--classic story-telling and picture-making. And I found the instrumental part of it very exciting.”

Legg’s eventual disillusionment with England’s country-music scene (“They’re only interested in playing cowboy.”) delivered him to the banks of his own musical Rubicon.

“What you hear now as my personal guitar style evolved from hitting a brick wall in 1978,” he said. “I was doing a lot of (radio) work on the acoustic, while playing electric guitar in country and Irish bands. And I found that the two (types of guitar) worked against each other. When I improved on one, the other became retarded, and this proved very frustrating.”

A year later, Legg got involved with a musical instrument company in England that imported Ovation guitars, and, for the next five years, did research-and-development work for them. Eventually, he found a way of combining certain aspects of electric-guitar technique, flexibility and audibility with the acoustic’s rich harmonic content.

During that period, Legg also worked with the Trace-Elliot company to produce the first amplifier designed specifically for the acoustic guitar and wrote a book, “Customizing Your Electric Guitar,” that has become a technical bible to guitar hounds on both sides of the Atlantic. Achieving that balance between the technical craftsman and the artist is at the core of Legg’s musical philosophy.

“Most musicians have a terrible time reconciling art and craft,” he said. “To them, the idea of being in a cover band, for example, is somehow dishonorable, and they complain if people don’t like what they prefer to play. But, if you’re hired as a craftsman, you have to behave as one, and, if you want to behave as an artist you off and do that somewhere else and maybe people will come and maybe they won’t.

“Musicians can learn a great lesson from (the French sculptor) Rodin,” he continued. “For a long time, Rodin had no money and no recognition at all. At one point he was knocking out angels for the front of a hotel, using the craft aspect of what he did while waiting for the art side to take hold.

“Understanding Rodin is seeing where the two fit together. That’s an important thing for a guitarist to learn, and you can’t learn it by taking guitar lessons. You learn it by studying a broader picture of art, which is something I strive to do all the time.”

Adrian Legg will perform tonight at 10 at the Insomniac, 820 5th Ave . , downtown (above Croce’s sidewalk cafe). Tickets are $8 at the door. (619) 235-9616. He will perform Sunday at the Club Lingerie, 6507 Sunset Blvd. , Los Angeles, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10. (213) 466-8557).