O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Guitarist Healey Packs Novelty in Intense Show

Jeff Healey is one tremendous guitarist, and he pretty much had to be Thursday night at the Coach House to make up for the 2 1/2 hours that passed before he came on-stage. With that time filled by:

The tail end of the Lakers’ defeat on big-screen TV.

A crunch-bent opening band.

A protracted stage setup, with plenty of hammering and feedback squeals, as the room grew progressively warmer,

Healey had a lot of ill feeling to conquer.

The early evening evidently hadn’t been a picnic for Healey either, as he had been up in Burbank to appear on the “Tonight Show,” only to be bumped for lack of time, and then encountered that bit of permanent sculpture known as Southland freeway traffic. But a dose of snarling, rampant guitar can ease a lot of tensions, and Healey delivered just that, if not too much more.

In a few short months, Healey has gone from an unknown find of the guitar mags to a media figure, rubbing shoulders with Patrick Swayze in “Roadhouse,” touted in this week’s People magazine and generally being hailed as the first post-Lee Atwater guitar hero.

Despite the impediment of being sightless, Healey has developed a boundary-stretching technique of guitar playing that is nearly without precedent (country player Thumbs Carlisle made some moves in the same direction in the ‘50s). Rather than approach the strings by grasping the neck as most guitarists do, Healey rests the instrument on his lap and frets it by pressing his fingers down on the strings from above.

While that may seem impossibly awkward to conventional players, Healey’s 13-song set nearly made it look like everyone else has been doing it wrong. His playing had a tremendous speed and a remarkably controlled hand vibrato, and he made complex rhythm-solo trade-offs and unconventional interval jumps seem effortless.

Healey is also an ideal roadhouse showman, with an intense if undistinguished vocal delivery, a comic demeanor and a full stock of stage antics, including dancing about the stage while playing the guitar with his teeth and behind his back (finding a way of doing both at once may be the next guitar hero hurdle).

But, as with jazz’s finger-tapping Stanley Jordan, it is possible that the novelty of Healey’s staggering technique is taking precedence over what he is actually doing with it. At this point in his career, there just isn’t that much depth behind his blistering attack. Only occasionally did his playing convey the emotion and expressiveness that sets great musicians apart. In that regard, there are any number of blues men with comparatively little facility on their instrument who, nevertheless, can make the instrument sing straight to the heart.

The closest Healey came to that in his set of debut album songs and ‘60s standards was during the John Hiatt ballad “Angel Eyes” and a cover of Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” each of which found him backing off the flash to squeeze lyrical solos from his strings. On the more boisterous side, the Doors’ “Road House Blues” and Dylan’s “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky,” with its “All Along the Watchtower” changes, afforded Healey a chance to burn so hard and fast that subtlety and voice were hardly missed in the onslaught.

Opener Kills for Thrills was one of the most compelling bands this writer has witnessed in some time: It had barely started playing when a great many in the audience felt compelled to stuff fingers and napkin bits in their ears to lessen the deafening, but otherwise harmless, lifeless thrust of the quartet’s leftover meat-and-potatoes rock.

The group does deserve big points, though, for its Spinal Tap-grade between-song pronouncements including, “We apologize for the volume, but you gotta do what you gotta do, you know,” and “This is a song we wrote for brotherhood, and everything in general.” Right on.