POP WEEKEND : Kottke Turns On the Grin, Tones Down the Flash

Some guitar virtuosos seem to fancy themselves as Superman. But Leo Kottke, who can make an acoustic guitar ring out with truth and justice, gets more entertaining mileage out of playing Clark Kent.

In the first of his two shows Friday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, Kottke walked on the stage and stepped right into the role of amiable bumbler. He fidgeted with his guitar strap. He started playing a 12-string lick, then switched to a wry, scatterbrained monologue, before stopping himself.

“I’m already mumbling and stumbling,” Kottke apologized to the packed house. “I’ll play instead, and then try to explain my behavior.”

Through the first half of his hourlong set, Kottke interspersed his playing with self-deprecating, absurdist explanations about his sartorial habits, the embarrassment of being caught drooling on his guitar during a long-ago show and his discovery of West African guitar stylings in a Toronto taxi cab.

All this was the Kottke equivalent of mild-mannered ol’ Clark taking pratfalls all over Metropolis to divert attention from the fact that he really is the Man of Steel. The result was instant community with a friendly audience and the quick squelching of any notion that the show might lapse into a chilly exhibition of technique.

As a man of steel strings, Kottke accomplished heroic exploits on some tunes, while others were merely pleasant excursions. He also hit a clinker note or two, which shows that even virtuosos aren’t immune to Kryptonite. Kottke suffered his moment of fallibility with a grin and a quip.

While brief for a musician with as wide a range as Kottke’s, the set was substantial enough to let him show his versatility. There were older numbers, grounded in folk, country and blues, as well as a few jazz-tinged songs drawn from his most recent album, “Regards From Chuck Pink.”

Kottke’s excursion into African music on “Short Wave” was a playful, kinetic highlight that set a bouncingly rhythmic bass pattern against a quicksilver shimmer picked out on the treble strings.

With his low, creaky voice, Kottke is no singing star, but his four vocal numbers were expressive and well chosen. Each one touched on a different emotion. There was irony and disillusionment in his own composition, “Everybody Lies,” and a sense of mystery and wonder in his fervent reading of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.”

Kottke ended, as he began, on a humorous note, encoring with Tom T. Hall’s “Pamela Brown,” a wry country tune full of laugh lines. It was disappointing, though, that Kottke didn’t come back one more time to answer encore calls for his hard-driving, slide guitar masterpiece, “Vaseline Machine Gun.”

Maybe he didn’t want to let on that he really is faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive.